Coordination, Contestation, and Contextualization: Universities’ Diverse Perspectives on the Sustainable Development Goals

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

Proposal

In 2015, member states of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and in 2024, we are now more than halfway through this development agenda (United Nations General Assembly, 2015). The SDGs have become an important legitimizing external framework for educational institutions around the world, including universities. Research in the field of higher education for sustainable development consistently finds that universities are integrating ideas of sustainability and sustainable development into their mandates, operations, and curricula (Chankseliani & McCowan, 2021; Findler et al., 2018; Lozano et al., 2013; Mula et al., 2017).

At the same time, they have been deeply criticized. To name a few critiques, the SDGs’ goals and targets are determined primarily by nation-states and through the United Nations as a unified global agenda. They make little space for alternative worldviews or approaches development, are overly broad, with hundreds of targets and indicators, and lack a clear prioritization of climate-related crisis (Boni et al., 2016; Struckmann, 2018).

Until now, most academic research on sustainability in higher education focuses on institutions in the Global North (Ceulemans et al., 2015; Hallinger & Chatpinyakoop, 2019; Veiga Ávila et al., 2018; Wu & Shen, 2016). This is despite the fact that lower- and middle-income countries in the Global South are disproportionately experiencing the effects of climate change and environmental degradation(Islam & Winkel, 2017). In response, there have been calls to include pluralistic views of the world and more diverse ways of knowing when framing sustainability efforts in higher education (Binagwaho et al., 2022).

The purpose of this paper is to examine how universities around the world and specifically those outside of North America and Europe, interpret the SDGs and integrate the mandate into their activities and operations. It draws from 28 semi-structured online interviews with university leaders from diverse countries, such as Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Venezuela, India, China, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Palestine. The data analysis included deductive and inductive methods and were coded in ATLAS.ti.

Findings indicate that on one hand, the SDG agenda have provided a framework for action – many universities have found the SDGs “useful,” and argue that it has served as a way to coordinate actions across their institutions. Meanwhile, other universities find the SDGs to be problematic. For example, some respondents argued that areas of the SDGs are irrelevant to their work. Others argued they have always been doing the work of the SDGs, in their own communities, without necessarily calling it or needing to map it onto the SDGs.

Ultimately, we show through the interviews how the global agenda of the SDGs has been contextualized in different parts of the world. Universities in the Global South demonstrate many innovative ways of responding to pressing issues of sustainability that are specific to their geographical and sociocultural contexts.

We argue that as we look towards what comes “After 2030,” the field of higher education for sustainable development can learn from the diversity of perspectives and approaches in the Global South, which have historically been under-examined.

Authors

• Ma. Guadalupe Sanchez-Sandoval, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

• Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto OISE

• Adriana Marroquin, University of Toronto