Assessing the Impacts of Higher Education Institutions on Sustainable Development—An Analysis of Tools and Indicators

Abstract

Many higher education institutions (HEIs) have started to incorporate sustainable development (SD) into their system. A variety of sustainability assessment tools (SATs) have been developed to support HEIs to systematically measure, audit, benchmark, and communicate SD efforts. In recent years, stakeholders have increasingly asked HEIs to demonstrate their impacts on SD. These impacts are the direct and indirect effects an HEI has outside of its organizational boundaries on society, the natural environment, and the economy. This study analyzes to what extent SATs are capable of measuring the impacts that HEIs have on SD. A mixed-method approach, using descriptive statistics and an inductive content analysis, was used to examine 1134 indicators for sustainability assessment derived from 19 SATs explicitly designed for application by HEIs. The findings reveal that SATs largely neglect the impacts HEIs have outside their organizational boundaries. SATs primarily use proxy indicators based on internally available data to assess impacts and thus tend to focus on themes concerning the natural environment and the contribution to the local economy. Updating existing SATs and developing new ones may enable HEIs to fully realize their potential to contribute to SD.

Sustainability Assessment and Benchmarking in Higher Education Institutions—A Critical Reflection

“…Much work has been done on the development of tools to assess sustainability specifically in HEIs, showing the importance of the theme. Several articles have reviewed these tools from different perspectives (e.g., [7,9,14,16,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]). However, it is observed that in these various reviews, the systematization is not homogeneous, noting a lack of common designations and objectives and including tools that do not have as main objective the assessment of the implementation of ESD or are not per se an assessment tool.…”

“…(i) assess only one of the dimensions of implementing sustainability in HEIs such as Campus operations (e.g., Campus Sustainability Assessment Framework-CSAF, [20]; National Wildlife Federation's State of the Campus, [34]) or Curricula (e.g., Sustainability Tool For Assessing Universities' Curricula Holistically, STAUNCH, [11]); (ii) evaluate only one pillar of sustainability, namely Environmental (e.g., Campus Ecology, [35], Environmental Performance Survey, [34]); (iii) only serve as manuals or supportive conceptual models (e.g., Greening Campuses, [36]); (iv) assess only the level of literacy and knowledge of population sustainability (e.g., SULITEST, [37]); (v) adapt by an Institution but based on other existing metrics (e.g., UNI-Metrics-Value Metrics and Policies for a Sustainable University Campus, [31]); (vi) specific to a type of HEI (e.g., Business School Impact System BSIS, see Reference [14]); (vii) serve only as guidelines for supporting communication of performance for sustainability but are not themselves an assessment tool. This is the case of the guidelines developed by the International Campus Sustainability Network and Global University Leader Forum [38], two international networks that suggest the organization of sustainability reports for HEIs, based on GRI indicators and the Sustainability Tracking tool, Assessment & Rating System-STARS [38].…”

“…Each tool was then characterized (see Table 1). According to several authors, the overall implementation of these tools is still low and its development is still at an early stage [14,28,32].…”

“…The various tools for assessing the sustainability of HEIs are mostly based on indicators, using graphs or final rankings to communicate the results. Indicator-based tools have the advantage of being potentially more transparent, consistent and comparable, thus useful for monitoring and decision support [14,18], although support for decision making is not yet fully demonstrated [65].…”

“…So, in recent years, an increasing number of institutions have begun the adjustment and restructuring of education, research, campus operations and community outreach towards sustainability [8,11,12]. However, deep and full integration of sustainable development at all of dimensions and community of HEIs is still lacking [13,14].…”