Institutionalizing Higher Education for Sustainability: Findings from a Cross-national Analysis

• In Event: A Comparative Perspective of Internationalization and University Mission

Proposal

Introduction
Sustainability and sustainable development are among the most pressing global challenges at present. As such, universities have started to demonstrate their commitments to sustainability and sustainable development by incorporating sustainability in their missions and visions (Bedoya-Dorado et al., 2022) and by reporting their practices in sustainability (Ceulemans et al., 2015). Current research focuses on how universities should be engaging in sustainability and sustainable development, or why universities engage in this new organizational priority (Buckner & Zhang, 2024). Yet, there is a lack of understanding of how universities have managed to practice sustainability as a new organizational priority given competing demand for resources in higher education. This paper aims to explore what mechanisms have facilitated the institutionalization of sustainability among universities that are early adopters of the sustainability priority. Findings from this research will have important implications for policies and practices that aim to foster greater support for higher education to engage in sustainability and sustainable development.
Theoretical Framework
This study is based on the premise that sustainability and sustainable development are emerging but rapidly diffusing mandates among higher education institutions worldwide. There remain debates about the extent to which the external environment and internal conditions enable the institutionalization of a new mandate in organizational fields. Externally, DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) classic work pointed out three mechanisms that facilitate the isomorphism of organizational practices: coercive, mimetic, and normative. The coercive mechanism refers to the informal and formal pressures from an organization’s external environment—such as government mandates, funding conditions, and legal requirements—that organizations must comply with. The mimetic mechanism refers to the phenomenon that organizations imitate others, especially when they face uncertainty. The normative mechanism refers to the phenomenon that organizations adopt similar practices due to norms within the field that arise from professionalization or legitimization within broader society.
External mechanisms may have better explanatory power for the symbolic adoption of sustainability (e.g. articulating sustainability as a priority on university websites), but not necessarily for substantive changes (e.g. dedicating resources to engage in sustainability). This is especially true because universities are complex and slow-changing organizations with diverse stakeholder interests, where symbolic adoption might be more realistic than substantive changes. To help explain substantive changes, this study draws on the concept of institutional entrepreneurs (Battilana et al., 2009). Institutional entrepreneurs are actors within organizations who serve as agents of change to introduce new ideas, practices, norms, or rules within organizations.
Ultimately, this study theorizes that institutional entrepreneurs within universities take advantage of the legitimacy of sustainability enabled by a variety of external mechanisms (coercive, mimetic, and normative) to justify institutionalizing sustainability as a new organizational priority in higher education. Thus, the combination of internal and external factors is crucial in determining the institutionalization of sustainability and sustainable development among early-adopter universities.
Data and Methods
This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with sustainability professionals in 109 universities from 45 countries worldwide. We selected early-adopter universities that have made formal commitments to sustainability via participation in global sustainability rankings or assessments (GreenMetric, Times Impact Ranking, QS Sustainability Ranking, and STARS). In the interviews, we probed participants about their universities’ understandings and practices in sustainability. In the analysis stage, we coded for a range of ideas, including discussions of internal and external stakeholders related to universities’ work on sustainability and the history of their sustainability work. We then analyzed excerpts coded with various internal and external stakeholders and the history of sustainability work to understand how the universities have institutionalized sustainability as an organizational priority.
Findings
We find that, externally, coercive and normative mechanisms are primarily driving the institutionalization of sustainability in universities. In Europe, North America, and Oceania, it is common to have legal and regulatory frameworks that require universities to report their carbon emissions, which is a main sustainability practice among these universities. In East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Sub-Saharan Africa, the coercive mechanism manifests in national policies supporting the SDG agenda, sometimes with explicit budget incentives but not legal requirements. In some cases, universities are required to participate in sustainability-related global rankings to receive government funding. In addition to coercive mechanisms, findings suggest a variety of external stakeholders are engaged in and supportive of sustainability, which creates a favorable normative environment to legitimize universities’ sustainability initiatives. These external stakeholders include university networks, external local communities, industry, international actors, and private actors.
While coercive and normative mechanisms have created an environment where sustainability is a legitimate practice, findings suggest that one common challenge is the lack of awareness among universities’ internal community and the difficulty of changing culture. We find that a collective of institutional entrepreneurs, composed of institutional leaders, students, and faculty, are dedicated to promoting sustainability at their institutions, which helped address the challenge of resistance to change. The most common actors are individuals who hold leadership roles at the universities, a social position that can effect institutional change through articulating a vision, establishing offices, and securing funding. Students and faculty also serve as part of the collective institutional entrepreneurship that helped to push the universities to support sustainability.
Findings suggest that institutional entrepreneurs often mobilize external influences to help institutionalize and implement sustainability in their institutions. For example, institutional entrepreneurs utilize rankings to argue for the reputational and strategic benefits of engaging in sustainability to enhance internal buy-in. In sum, a collective institutional entrepreneurship, largely composed of institutional leaders, students, and faculty, draw on coercive and normative mechanisms that have already legitimized sustainability in society to institutionalize sustainability to a high degree within their universities, in the face of lack of awareness and resistance to change.
Conclusion
In summary, findings from this study support the idea that institutional entrepreneurs within universities take advantage of the legitimacy of sustainability enabled by a variety of external mechanisms to justify institutionalizing a new organizational priority in higher education. This finding contributes to the literature by documenting what mechanisms facilitate institutional change.

Authors

• You Zhang, OISE, University of Toronto

• Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto OISE