What Sustainability? Higher Education Institutions’ Pathways to Reach the Agenda 2030 Goals

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have the mandate of promoting sustainability through addressing the Agenda 2030. However, how this is being understood and framed in both discourse and practice by HEIs remains an underexplored issue. This article interrogates the concept of sustainability embraced by ten key HEIs networks at global and regional levels while identifying and discussing the main pathways for action displayed. We rely on HEIs networks' data from available online documents related to the Agenda 2030. "Greening" is the dominant sustainability discourse among the global and many regional HEIs networks, that is, the one that refers to the links between people, planet and profit. Two other discourses are minor and regional, "resilience" and "alternative". The "alternative" discourse is the only one entailing a critical approach to the Agenda 2030 goals. All networks promote changes in HEIs organizational culture to embed sustainability values in strategic planning, academic and managerial work. Yet there is a need for further engagement with society to readdress HEIs societal role. Deep and critical reflection of the worldviews, contradictions and tensions in the discourses and practices proposed by HEIs networks at global and regional scales is also needed to build common pathways toward sustainability.

Alliances of Change Pushing Organizational Transformation Towards Sustainability across 13 Universities

“…The reported and observed effects (increase in changes towards SD) support the assumption that the Alliance and similar networks strengthen institutional change agents by making SD a relevant topic at the university and by enabling the learning from others of how to initiate, accelerate, and mainstream change. These findings are in line with Ruiz-Mallen and Heras [47] who emphasize that these type of (university) networks influence the sustainability discourse as well as practice at universities. Accordingly, our results reveal a correlation between the foundation of the Alliance, the CCCA, and the start of the UniNEtZ project and the number of SD-related changes at the member universities (see also Section 4.2.2).…”

“…On the other hand, they also have the potential to exclude people or groups and therewith influence who has access to power in the change process [26]. Based on their international study, Ruiz-Mallen and Heras [47] point out that university networks influence the sustainability discourse as well as practice at universities. In our analysis of external factors, we focus on incentives or pressures from government/funding organizations on the one hand and other universities and networks.…”

Tensions in the Sustainability of Higher Education—The Case of Finnish Universities

“…The scholarly discussion regarding sustainable development and related organizational changes has been active and more refined in the field of business and management studies [9], compared to the field of higher education research. Although sustainability and sustainable development of universities has become a popular topic, less attention has been given to deep analyses of the economic and social dimensions of sustainability [16], and there are yet no appropriate frameworks for conceptualizing universities' organizational tensions regarding sustainable development. This paper has applied a prominent analytical framework on corporate sustainability by Hahn et al [11] to the higher education context, and approved the usefulness of the framework in analyzing the tensions relating to Finnish universities' social and economic sustainability as well as strategies to be used to cope with these tensions.…”

“…In Finland, the Universities Act law reform professionalized university management from 2009 onward, and tensions arose from, for example, the increased distance between the university community and management [22] and the structural development measures incentivized by public funding [46] (pp. [15][16][17]. Although universities gained more budgetary freedom, the Ministry of Education remained in the steering position of the university system [42].…”

COVID-19 and the Promotion of Digital Competences in Education

“…The concept of sustainability has gone through several stages [31,44,45] and encompasses the economic, social and environmental dimensions [46,47,48,49]. In a sustainable society, citizens are expected to develop eight key competences, detailed in Table 1.…”