Guest editorial

Abstract

The university as an arena for sustainability transition The year 1968 was a momentous year of spontaneous rebellion around the world. Throughout that year, a wave of protests by environmental, civil rights, anti-war and proequality movements swept the world (Kurlansky, 2005). A disproportionally large number of these protests was organised or supported by university students (Werenskjold, 2010), culminating in, e.g. the "May event" in France or the "Tlatelolco massacre" in Mexico. Environmental movements, civil rights movements, anti-capitalist and anti-communist movements, and other emancipatory movements that are concerned with what we now call sustainable development, can trace their origins or rallying point to 1968 (Klimke and Scharloth, 2008). Paradoxically, this revolt may have destabilised progressive politics while unifying conservatives, paving the way for the current global neoliberal clamp-down (Ferhat, 2019;Harvey, 2007;Hilton, 2016).Half a century after this spontaneous explosion of global awareness of societal problems, the need for sustainability is more urgent than ever. Consequently, the social and societal role of higher education (HE) in sustainability transitions has been a growing theme in research. These transitions can both entail the involvement of external stakeholders in the university, through transdisciplinary approaches (Tejedor et al., 2018), as well as using the own organisation as a living laboratory for sustainability transition processes (Leal Filho et al., 2019). Meanwhile global sustainability issues have turned out to be "super wicked problems" (Levin et al., 2012), as the distinction between "facts of life" and "problems to be solved" or between acceptable and unacceptable solutions is rooted in deep-grained ideological divides (Hopwood et al., 2005). While the role of universities in sustainability transitions is being discussed in the literature (Cortese, 2003;Leal Filho, 2011) the implementation of these transition in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is painfully slow (Lozano et al., 2015).HE traditionally covers four realms of activity, being education, research, campus operations and management and community engagement (Bessant et al., 2015). To guide the integration of sustainability in these realms and to explain Sustainable Higher Education (SHE) additional dimensions are identified by various authors (