Sustainability Assessment Tools in Higher Education Institutions

Identifying and overcoming obstacles to the implementation of sustainable development at universities

“…Sibbel's (2009, p. 75) claim that it is important to consider the practicality of developing programs of study which can actually prepare graduates with the necessary knowledge and values, a capacity for critical thinking and the motivation to deal with the multitude of diverse problems associated with non-sustainable states is now more pertinent than ever. In the context of SDGs, HEIs must be able to create knowledge and effectively transfer it to society Stough et al 2017) and, at the same time, prepare students for their role in society (Disterheft et al 2013). …”

“…Combining academic and campus operations to promote and demonstrate the principles and technologies of SD provides a very valuable learning opportunity for SD (Wright and Wilton 2012). This is a very relevant issue in the context of HEIs contributing to the implementation of SDGs and their alignment with the scope and aims of sustainability science (Disterheft et al 2013).…”

Assessing the sustainability content of the Nigerian engineering curriculum

“…In a related work, undertook a content analysis of the civil engineering curriculum at Georgia Institute of Technology and discovered that the integration of sustainability was biased towards the environmental dimension.. The findings substantiate the existence of a disproportionate spread of sustainability in the curriculum (Byrne et al, 2010;Segalas et al, 2010;Sinnott and Thomas, 2012;Shields et al, 2014;Sivapalan, 2015). Overall, Watson found a strong evidence of sustainability in the civil engineering curriculum.…”

“…Eleven themes featured in the ARISE instrument including vision and mission, policy, education, research, and service to society. Others are operations/planet, operations/people, operations/prosperity, students, professional field, and culture (Caeiro et al, 2013). These subjects are based on the international guideline for social responsibility of organisations, ISO 26000.…”

“…This implies that result accuracies are contingent on the credibility of the course information available and that unpublished course information cannot be captured. Nonetheless, the assessment tool has proved quite useful in sustainability education research in a growing number of HEIs including all universities in Wales and two universities in England (Caeiro et al, 2013). An important strength of the STAUNCH tool is its focus on the sustainability content of a curriculum to ascertain the extent to which sustainability themes are addressed.…”