How to Become Green: Participation in Higher Education Sustainability Rankings

• In Event: Contextualising and reframing sustainability in higher education

Proposal

Sustainability is recognized as one of the most pressing challenges facing societies around the world. In response, many higher education institutions are integrating sustainability and sustainable development into their mandates, operations, and curricula through new initiatives and practices. One practice is known as sustainability tracking, also called sustainability benchmarking, sustainability assessments, sustainability reporting, and green ranking. Sustainability tracking purports to offer concrete ways for colleges and universities to assess how their curriculum, research, and operations align with rigorous external standards (Urbanski and Leal Filho 2015; Lozano 2011; Ragazzi and Ghidini 2017a; Kosta 2019).

Sustainability tracking involves using a standardized, external tool to assess an organization’s performance on several pre-defined indicators or metrics related to different aspects of sustainability, including governance, educational programs, and campus operations. Sustainability tracking has grown in popularity and a variety of different benchmarking tools have emerged. Among the most well-known sustainability tracking tools are: STARS was developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), a not-for-profit organization based in the United States. In addition to sustainability tracking, several sustainability rankings have also emerged. Unlike benchmarks, rankings put universities into numerical order and no university can have the same ‘rank’ as another. Some of the most well-known sustainability rankings are: UI Greenmetric (developed by University of Indonesia), Times Higher Education and QS Sustainability rankings.

Sustainability rankings have proliferated in number over the past few years and their power has increased in higher education. Universities’ positioning on various rankings or metrics is increasingly being incorporated into branding and recruitment efforts. However, to date, most research on sustainability development and tracking in higher education focuses on institutions in the Global North (Yanez et al. 2019). This is even though lower- and middle-income countries in the Global South are disproportionately experiencing the effects of climate change and environmental degradation (Islam and Winkel 2017) and many have innovative models for sustainability (Ragazzi and Ghidini 2017b).

This paper examines who participates in which sustainability rankings. Currently, almost 3,000 universities worldwide participate in at least one sustainability ranking or tracking out of the more than 18,000 universities worldwide. Data for the analysis comes from the public lists of all universities participating in each ranking. Participation data is merged with institutional characteristics, including size, founding date, and performance on quality rankings, among others, and national characteristics, including world region and GDP per capita. A series of logistic regression models is performed to what characteristics are associated with participation in which rankings. The focus of the analysis is on which sustainability rankings are more inclusive of universities from around the world. Preliminary findings show that universities’ participation differs across world region, with UI Greenmetric more likely to include universities from lower and middle-income countries and STARS being highly concentrated in North America.

In concluding, the paper discusses implications of the proliferation of sustainability rankings in that they could constitute academic hierarchy – including the idea that only well-resourced universities in North America and Europe have truly integrated sustainability throughout their organizations.

Author

• Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto OISE