What is Sustainability?: A Discourse Analysis of Institutional Definitions of Sustainability

• In Event: The Role of Universities Promoting Sustainable Development: An Analysis of Cross-National Trends and Localization

Proposal

The purpose of this article is to critically analyze and “unpack” the meanings that universities are attaching to the word “sustainability,” to better understand how this emergent mandate is being integrated into higher education. To ground our analysis, we draw on the world society tradition in comparative education to theorize sustainability as a highly legitimated idea and emergent model of good practice that has diffused globally.

Our analysis focuses on how universities define sustainability for themselves and their stakeholders using self-reported definitions from institutional reports submitted to the Sustainability Tracking and Assessment Rating System (STARS). STARS was developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), a not-for-profit organization. As of 2021, the time of data collection, 532 institutions had made their campus reports public, and many have submitted more than one report, permitting comparison over time.

The primary data for this project are institutional definitions of sustainability, which come from the sub-section of STARS reports titled “Coordination and Planning.” For the purposes of this article, we scraped all definitions of sustainability from STARS reports using Python, generating 220 institutional definitions. We then imported these definitions into NVIVO and used emergent inductive coding to identify the many ideas reflected in these institutional definitions of sustainability and examined how these varied.

Our refined coding protocol highlighted many different ideas embedded in institutional definitions of sustainability, including: domains of activity (i.e., social, economic, environmental), explicit values (e.g., social justice, equity); temporal horizons (i.e., present or future-oriented), and levels of action (e.g., campus, community, nation, world). We argue that this diversity of ideas reflects the broad range of ideas being mapped onto this emergent best practice.

Nonetheless, our findings also show that the overwhelming majority of universities adopt one of two widespread globally circulating definitions of sustainability, namely: 1) the “three pillars” definition, which defines sustainability in terms of its social, economic, and environmental impact, which was mentioned by more than half of all institutions, and, 2) the Brundtland Commission’s definition that is defined in the Our Common Future report, which argues sustainability entails weighing current needs with future needs. Roughly, 38% of institutions cite this Brundtland definition. We argue that these two widely circulating definitions offer straightforward and highly-legitimated way for institutions to understand sustainability and yet require little localization to institutional context.

However, a small minority of institutions use different conceptions or metaphors for conceptualizing institutional sustainability, including: “problem solving,” “a way of life,” “a principle” “a continual process of improvement,” and “being a model or leader.” A few institutions define sustainability in light of their institution’s long-standing mandate, such as an Indigenous heritage or a religious worldview. We argue that although these definitions and metaphors are adopted by only a minority of institutions, they demonstrate localization at work in the spread of a new model and also offer powerful new ways of conceptualizing what counts as advancing sustainability.

Authors

• Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto OISE

• Adriana Marroquin, OISE, University of Toronto