Future sustainability scenarios for universities: moving beyond the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development

As achievements of the completed United Nations Decade (2005–2014) of Education for Sustainable Development are contemplated globally, along with potential steps forward for the future, Member States have urged that this decade continue after 2014 through “The Future We Want”; the outcome document of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. More recently, commitments to furthering the advancement of sustainable development through education have also been re-enforced in the recently adopted post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. This study systematically analyzed the implications of sustainable development trends and future directions universities might take under a potential second decade (2015–2024). For this purpose, a model for generating “trend-based scenarios” is proposed, based upon a combination of various futures studies methods. Results suggest that the advancement of sustainability through societal collaboration and various functions such as education, research and outreach will increasingly constitute a core mission for universities. Projecting this trend out into the following decade, the authors frame possible future orientations through three unique scenarios; namely, a socially-, environmentally- and economically-oriented university. Pursuit of sustainable development through each of these would see unique and fundamental changes. These would affect the principle university mission, focus areas, emphasized disciplines, view of Education for Sustainable Development, core external partners, projects and outputs with external stakeholders, geographical focus, and main functions involved. The authors then examine how one or more of these scenarios might be actualized through various external and internal policy and incentive measures. The depiction of these three scenarios, along with potential measures to guide universities to either of these, provides scholars, university leaders and government policy makers with some conceptual and practical instruments to consider strategically how any of these futures might be realized

Towards Realising SDGs in the University of Helsinki

Peer reviewe

Digital Education, Information and Communication Technology, and Education for Sustainable Development

With reference to the various United Nations programmes, especially the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and, in particular, Goal 4, which aims to ensure inclusive and quality education for all and to promote lifelong learning for life, “Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)” aims to meet the present and future challenges of our societies. This challenge can only be met through a renewed education in response to profound pedagogical and organizational changes based on a transformation of approaches and methods thanks to the contribution of digital technology. These transformations are particularly important when it comes to sustainable development education in which digital technology, in its various forms, represents both a powerful, but also complex, lever action. Indeed, the theme “digital education, information and communication technology (ICT), and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)” is part of a three-pronged approach because it involves both teaching sustainable development, mobilizing digital technologies, including ICT, and changing teacher and learner behaviours based on an innovative and interactive pedagogy. Changes in behaviour or mentality specific to ESD must be adapted to progress the implementation of digital resources to develop a structuring and integrative framework to address issues of education, communication, and learning to bring the policy institutions of knowledge and its diffusion to the use of technologies at all levels. This book chapter presents these concepts and provides a few recommendations for their effective implementation

Between good intentions and enthusiastic professors: the missing middle of university social innovation structures in the Quadruple Helix

This chapter considers the role of universities in stimulating social innovation, and in particular the issue that despite possessing substantive knowledge that might be useful for stimulating social innovation, universities to date have not been widely engaged in social innovation activities in the context of quadruple helix developmental models. We explain this in terms of the institutional logics of engaged universities, in which entrepreneurial logics have emerged in recent decades, that frame the desirable forms of university-society engagement in terms of the economic benefits they bring. We ask whether institutional logics could explain this resistance of universities to social innovation. Drawing on two case studies of universities sincerely committed to supporting social innovation, we chart the effects of institutional logics on university supported social innovation. We observe that there is a “missing middle” between enthusiastic managers and engaged professors, in which four factors serve to undermine social innovation activities becoming strategically important to HEIs. We conclude by noting that this missing middle also serves to segment the operation of quadruple helix relationships, thereby undermining university contributions to societal development more generally.This paper draws on work supported by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie action grant agreement No. 722295, the RUNIN Project. This work was also financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project PTDC/EGE-OGE/31635/2017