Green campus initiatives as projects: can creating conducive internal university project environment a key to success?

Graduate School of Business LeadershipGreen campus initiatives are becoming integral part of modern day's university systems. However, their management remains slow, cumbersome and limited scope process. Review of related literature suggests that the effective and efficient management of these initiatives require incorporation of project management (PM) principles and thus the need to establish a framework to manage green campus initiatives as projects. Hence the existence of sub-processes likes initiation, continuous coordination, control and ending of green projects. These green campus initiatives (projects) should be part of university strategic management system. In the light of this background, an attempt is made in this paper to describe how to apply project management framework within the University system. The central argument in this paper is about Universities moving away from traditional approaches in embracing green initiatives to establishing a formal process where a sequence of tasks is developed with clear defined objectives and a defined start and end event. It is further argued that the success of any green campus project depends on performing PM professionally. The paper provides an initial framework for implementation of green campus project in contemporary higher education institutions

Culture in sustainable infrastructure

The high failure rate of infrastructures around the world is alarming, most especially when such failures constrain economic growth and development. In most cases, existing institutions or strategies designed to maintain and reproduce effective infrastructures in areas that lack them have been mostly unsuccessful, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. A carefully conducted survey covering the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria confirms the low-level stability, supply, quality and maintenance of infrastructure and its services. Using the severity index in matrix order model developed in this study, major factors responsible for unsustainable infrastructure delivery and failures are identified. The paper further argues that these major factors are interrelated rather than being peculiar to Nigeria or sub-Saharan Africa. Suffice it to say that the effects of these problems are widespread and of global impact. However, what cuts across all the major factors responsible for unsustainable infrastructure delivery and high failure rates are gross institutional lapses. In view of the fact that sustainable infrastructure is essential for sustainable development, this paper emphasises the uniqueness of the recipients' cultures and values alongside the integration of indigenous communities and infrastructure users: from conceptualisation to delivery within the framework for institutional building and sustainable infrastructure provision