Leveraging Sustainability Reporting in Higher Education Institutions—A Multidimensional Research Agenda

Abstract

Sustainability has become increasingly important to research and practice. In order to determine impacts, identify improvement potential and to disclose efforts towards sustainability, an organization needs appropriate reporting. Thus, sustainability reporting has become a topic of broader interest, for example, to assess own situations, enable benchmarking, communicate own efforts and improve trust. Although sustainability reporting is a complex issue, only limited research and guidelines for higher education institutions (HEI) are available. Accordingly, negative impacts occur such as regarding the standardization and, thus, the comparability of reports. This article describes and demonstrates how different approaches from research related to reporting (information systems research in particular) and sustainability can be transferred to the field of sustainability reporting in HEIs to leverage the applicability of such reports. As a result, classifications of existing indicators and methodical approaches are provided, which are based on the analysis of a campus management system and different reporting standards as well as reporting knowledge in general. These classifications indicate that financial aspects are often focused and environmental issues are neglected. Moreover, the findings emphasize the importance of further multidimensional research on different topics such as (re-)development of specific indicators for HEIs, (re-)design of campus management systems and extension of current reporting standards. Therfore, a research agenda-with 18 agenda items-that synthesizes the presented directions is proposed. This agenda can be used to position further research or to derive new and innovative research questions.

Integration, implementation and reporting outlooks of sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs): index and case base validation

“…In the final phase, the results recorded and discussed by the content of the categories (Elo et al, 2014). Many previous studies similar in nature applied the same methodology (Ceulemans et al, 2015;Schoormann et al, 2017;Zahid et al, 2016). Applying the qualitative content analysis procedure, the data was collected from the concerned university's main websites, embedded website links, university internal operational documents, and departmental initiatives which could be directly linked to ESD.…”

“…In doing so, HEIs have developed and used numerous tools to integrate, implement and report their sustainability-related practices and activities (Alghamdi et al, 2017;Schoormann et al, 2017). Some of these tools include the Sustainability Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) which addresses curriculum, research, operations, faculty development, public and student engagement, and administration dimensions of HEIs for evaluating their sustainability.…”

Strategies to Increase Sustainability Awareness in Higher Education: Experiences from Abu Dhabi Women’s College

“…Over the past few decades, many organizations have responded to the call to minimize landfill use by increasing awareness of the issues, including Higher Education Institutions (HEI). HEIs have a unique opportunity to effect change in achieving environmental sustainability not only on college campuses, but also within their respective communities [3,4]. Researchers recognize the value of promoting sustainability and recycling at universities, and the literature is replete with studies examining sustainability approaches at institutions of higher learning.…”

Campus sustainability in the Australian higher education sector: divergence and convergence in planning, reporting and tactics

“…Although higher education (HEI) has a responsibility to teach future generations about sustainability (Schoormann et al , 2017; Tilbury, 2004), it seems that Education for Sustainability “is not yet widely practised in university classrooms across disciplines” (Christie et al , 2015, p. 405; and see Sherren, 2006). Further, sustainability as a graduate attribute is not common (Lee et al , 2013), change agents within HEIs are impeded in promoting sustainability (Higgins and Thomas, 2016) and attitudes towards sustainability among academics and students show varying degrees of commitment (Emanuel and Adams, 2011; Melles, 2019).…”