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 an orientation of higher education in the post Rio+20 process: How is the game changing?

The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess the implications of sustainable development for the future orientation of higher education, especially after the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio + 20). A qualitative trend analysis is being used for this purpose, in the context of which three macro trends are combined: (1) higher education that has been developed via five periods; (2) sustainable development that has evolved through three stages; and (3) the nexus between sustainable development and higher education which has strengthened through three phases. The simultaneous analysis of the macro trends regarding their possible interactive effects (through an expert panel discussion) demonstrates that higher education and universities under the influence of sustainable development elements are entering into a new era in which the function of “higher education for sustainable development” could be interpreted as the seeds of a newly emerging mission for universities. In this regard, it is expected that the concept of “sustainable university” is likely to become more common to meet the emerging mission. Consistent with the Rio + 20 outcomes, the authors analyzed the concept of “sustainable university” and identified the fact that it is practically divided into three interrelated and complementary categories, namely social-, environmental-, and economic-oriented university in pursuit of actualizing sustainable development