Universities as spaces for contesting and reconceptualizing sustainability

• In Event: Reconceptualizing the higher education-sustainable development nexus

Proposal

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in particular have become a common framework around which higher education institutions (HEIs) both map their activities and actively align their work. Sustainability has become an apparently consensual idea around which to gather the diverse actors and functions of the institution, and provide a public justification of its existence (Chankseliani and McCowan 2021; McCowan 2019).

Yet despite this apparent consensus, there is a lack of clarity both as regards the notion itself and the ways in which higher education can engage with it. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of the notion and its relationship with HEIs, leading to a framework for both understanding and shaping future engagements. It distinguishes between three forms of engagement: projective – the fostering of sustainability in the outside society through teaching, research and community engagement; expressive – integration of sustainability principles into the functioning of the institution; and constructive – critical engagement with the concept of sustainable development itself.

In the first of these modes, sustainable development is something that HEIs help to bring into being, most commonly through teaching their students to be sustainable. This provision is sometimes integrated into existing courses, and conceptualised as a modification of professional training (i.e. the formation of sustainable engineers (Mitchell et al. 2021]), or involves the creation of new courses. Yet we can also see educational institutions in a different way, in having a real existence and value in themselves, in the here and now. This idea can be understood as the expressive as opposed to the projective function of education. Much of the attention in this area has been focused on the carbon emissions stemming from international student mobility (see the analysis carried out by Shields 2019), and to a lesser extent staff mobility for conferences and fieldwork (e.g. Bjørkdahl et al. 2022).

However, might then point to another function of HEIs that is to generate new ideas about what is to be projected or expressed. For this we can employ the term ‘constructive’. The notion of sustainable development is in fact a ‘shell’ concept, with its substantive meanings varying dramatically in moral and political terms. The apparent win-win between the goals of environmental protection and societal development masks possibilities for continuing global injustices, making the constructive role of universities crucial in interrogating the concept.

Importantly then, the role of higher education in relation to sustainability is not only a one of impact, but also of critique and reconstruction of the ideas underpinning it. In this process, we can see an important regaining of protagonism for the institution. In remaining committed to sustained enquiry and deep reflection, in dialogue with action, and in the context of epistemic pluralism and diversity of ideas, higher education can lead a critical interrogation of the notion of sustainable development, and its re-imagination, setting in motion a positive societal contagion that may give us a chance of finding a way out of the current ecological crisis.

Author

• Tristan McCowan, University College London