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Higher Education Institutions as Pivotal Change Agents for Environmental Sustainability: A Case Study of FAZON
Abstract
Universities serve as hubs for the creation and dissemination of knowledge – through educating future leaders, fostering scientific research and encouraging development – they pose perfect vessels for sustainable change. These institutions frequently participate in outreach activities, environmental projects, and partnerships to actively interact with their local communities, all the while arranging events, workshops, and campaigns with the aim of increasing awareness about environmental concerns and advocating for sustainable lifestyles. Universities can set an example by adopting sustainable practices on their premises. A “perfect” sustainable university is an educational institution that trains students to become global citizens equipped to address pressing societal concerns and contribute to sustainable development. Precisely for these reasons, the aim of this paper was to investigate implementation of sustainable practices at the University of Belgrade–Faculty of Organizational Sciences. For the purpose of the paper, the authors conducted a survey among faculty and staff members during the academic 2022/2023 year. The results of the survey were analysed using SPSS 24 software package.
... The relationship between lecturers' sustainable behaviour and environmental sustainability lies in their ability to bridge theory and practice, thereby driving systemic changes within and beyond academic institutions (Swaim et al., 2020). University lecturers play a critical role in promoting sustainability by serving as role models for students, shaping their attitudes toward environmental responsibility through teaching and research (Radaković et al., 2024). Besides that, They can also implement sustainable practices within their institutions, such as reducing resource consumption and promoting green initiatives (Khan & Terason, 2021). ...
Sustainability behavior in universities is increasingly recognized as a vital component of fostering environmental consciousness among university members, particularly academic staff. These elements not only enhance university member's commitment to sustainable practices but also foster a supportive environment for green initiatives. While individual psychological factors like resilience and self-efficacy are crucial, many studies neglect how these traits interact with external factors. Thus, the objective of this study is to examine the influence of transformational leadership on sustainable behaviour practice, with a focus on how resilience and self-efficacy as mediators in this relationship. The respondents are academic staffs from Guangdong Province, representing key participants in implementing and experiencing campus sustainability practices. Using a sample of 241 academic staff from universities in Guangdong, the sample size was carefully determined with G*Power for adequate statistical power and selected through a convenience sampling method. The data was analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) with SmartPLS 4, a powerful tool for evaluating complex relationships between variables. The results show that while transformational leadership plays a key role in fostering positive attitudes toward sustainability behaviour, it doesn't directly translate into more active engagement in sustainable practices. In additional, the study reveals that resilience and self-efficacy act as important mediators in the relationship between transformational leadership and sustainability behaviour. Transformational leadership helps build these qualities, and in turn, it drives individuals to engage more deeply in sustainable actions. This suggests that leadership can inspire positive thinking, but it's the inner strength and confidence of individuals that truly make a difference in turning those attitudes into real, sustainable behaviour. This research provides critical insights for academic leaders and policymakers aiming to promote and enhance sustainable behaviour practices within academic institutions, offering a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms and leadership that drive sustainability behaviour.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand how higher education institutions (HEIs) educate future leaders with social impact contributing to the sustainable development goals (SDGs). HEIs have an interest in developing leaders with social impact, but there is a lack of knowledge on the best teaching and learning strategies to engage students with social action aimed at the SDGs. This paper fills this gap by addressing the question of how HEIs can shape the sustainability mindsets of future leaders with social impact contributing to the SDGs.
Design/methodology/approach
This research used a mixed method research design, including a quantitative survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews of UK students involved in HEIs experiential learning programmes, focused on social impact and entrepreneurial action, developed in partnership with the organisation Enactus.
Findings
This research highlighted the importance of experiential learning, as it develops the knowledge, values and competency underpinning the sustainability mindset of future leaders contributing to the SDGs, in particular their emotional intelligence.
Originality/value
This research shows that HEIs can educate future leaders with social impact contributing to the SDGs, through real-world experiential learning that develops their sustainability mindset; in terms of aligning the curriculum to the SDGs, more focus on the systems perspective of the sustainability mindset framework is needed.
Purpose
This paper aims to analyze the link between universities and business incubators (BIs) and to determine how students, scientific researchers and entrepreneurs can benefit from this linkage. It creates an environment in which everyone can help the other to put their new ideas, special skills and abilities into new businesses. In other words, the traditional universities’ role has changed and entrepreneurial universities are now needed to redirect new knowledge for economic development through BIs.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts an analytical descriptive methodology approach to describe the basic features of the data by using the descriptive research design. This research is based on examining a model provided by the author concerning boosting the entrepreneurial aspects and outcomes through university business incubators (UBIs) based on wide theoretical and empirical case studies. Also, the functional structural approach is used to investigate the relationship between two variables as UBIs are considered a new unit that has functions and structures to create an added value to universities and the society as a whole.
Findings
The educational system should create a favorable environment that enables young people to develop their mindset from employees to employers, and to prepare them to improve skills and knowledge to create jobs. UBI is the recent aspect of the BI evolution where the research outcomes are linked with the industry and development. This relationship between these entities will provide success to its stakeholders.
Social implications
Many incubators around the world are supported by universities. Others are making initiatives to link up with universities and higher education institutions to get the revenues and returns from its academic nature. Lately, university incubators became a type of incubator evolution and more supportive for entrepreneurs than other types of incubators.
Originality/value
The contribution of this study is to explain how UBIs succeeded to tie the results of scientific research with economy and development through entrepreneurial activities to accelerate and realize entrepreneurship strategies.
Purpose
Universities can do more to deliver against the sustainable development goals (SDGs), working with faculty, staff and students, as well as their wider stakeholder community and alumni body. They play a critical role in helping shape new ways for the world, educating global citizens and delivering knowledge and innovation into society. Universities can be engines of societal transformation. Using a multiple case study approach, this study aims to explore different ways of strategizing sustainability toward delivering the SDGs are explored in a university setting with an example from the UK, Bulgaria (Europe) and USA.
Design/methodology/approach
The first case is a public UK university that adopted enterprise and sustainability as its academic mission to secure differentiation in a disrupted and increasingly marketized global higher education sector; this became a source of inspiration for change in regional businesses and the local community. The second case is a business sector-led sustainability-driven transformation working with a private university in Bulgaria to catalyze economic regeneration and social innovation. Finally, a case from the office for sustainability in a major US research university is given to show how its engagement program connected faculty and students in sustainability projects within the institution and with external partners.
Findings
Each case is in effect a “living lab,” positioning sustainability as an intentional and aspirational strategy with sustainable development and the SDG framework a means to that end. Leadership at all levels, and by students, was key to success in acting with a shared purpose. Partnerships within and with universities can help accelerate delivery of the SDGs, enabling higher education to make a fuller contribution to sustaining the economic, environmental, cultural and intellectual well-being of our global communities.
Originality/value
The role of universities as the engine of transformational sustainability toward delivering the SDGs has been explored by way of three case studies that highlight different means toward that end. The collegiate nature of the higher education sector, with its shared governance models and different constituencies and performance drivers, means that sustainability at a strategic level must be led with leaders at all levels acting with purpose. The “living lab” model can become a part of transformative institutional change that draws on both top-down and bottom-up strategies in pursuit of sustainable development.
Having in mind that the growing body of research and case studies have predefined environmental education and its objectives in non-traditional education that rely on relevant modern teaching models such as project-based learning, this paper will focus on the scientific research of organized academic environmental activities in a climate-change oriented project in order to achieve learning objectives of higher environmental and climate change knowledge of students. This is particularly important considering the importance of climate change issues as the integral part of the present day student body, as well as a part of their social and personal lives. For the purpose of our research we surveyed the students of the University of Belgrade - Faculty of Organizational Science, the Republic of Serbia, who participated in this project not only regarding their attitudes referred to gaining environmental and climate change knowledge in this particular way, but also on their achievement levels in faculty environmental studies program. An analysis of the results was carried out using the SPSS 24 software package. Based on the obtained results we concluded that students were significantly motivated to improve their environmental and climate change knowledge, as well as that they showed greater motivation and willingness to participate again in similar environmental activities.
Much official environmental education policy in the UK and elsewhere makes scant reference to nature as such, and the issue of our underlying attitude towards it is rarely addressed. For the most part such policy is pre-occupied with the issue of meeting 'sustainably' what are taken to be present and future human needs. This paper considers several issues posed by this anthropocentric approach and explores the view that environmental education - indeed any education - worthy of the name needs to bring a range of searching questions concerning nature to the attention of learners, and to encourage them to develop their own on-going responses to those questions. It is argued that our present environmental predicament not only provides an exciting opportunity to re-focus education on the issue of human relationship to nature, but also requires the exploration of this issue for its long-term resolution. Extensive implications for the curriculum and the culture of the school are raised.
STEM education initiatives currently pervade the global landscape of educational reform. Unfortunately, the rush to adopt STEM reforms in North American schools and develop students for competitive 21 st century knowledge economies has encouraged an uncritical embrace of underlying STEM narratives and purposes, thus foreclosing critical discussion, alternative models, and new perspectives on doing science education differently. Here, we unpack narratives and practices informing STEM education that induct learning actors into ‘anticipatory regimes’ that advance neoliberal ends and technocapitalist ideologies. We argue first that STEM narratives of progress, competition, and innovation increasingly obscure the urgent ecological, ethical and social justice conditions students confront daily. Ironically, this prepares them for a future rendered unsustainable by scientific and technological orthodoxy. We then draw upon critical sustainability studies (CSS) to articulate new axiological orientations that reposition science and technology learning. Lastly, we describe and illustrate an approach aligned with these critical principles – production pedagogy – whose theories and practices re-vision science and technology education. These strategies will situate students in agentive roles now, in this present, using real-world tools in authentic sociotechnical contexts. They can then confront their own capacities and limitations to engage in personally relevant ways, as producers, with techno-scientific knowledge.
This book offers a concise, accessible guide to the key concepts and applications in Otto Scharmer's classic Theory U. Scharmer argues that our capacity to pay attention coshapes the world. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of that interior condition from which our attention and actions originate. Scharmer calls this lack of awareness our blind spot. He illuminates the blind spot in leadership today and offers hands-on methods to help change makers overcome it through the process, principles, and practices of Theory U. And he outlines a framework for updating the "operating systems" of our educational institutions, our economies, and our democracies. This book enables leaders and organizations in all industries and sectors to shift awareness, connect with the highest future possibilities, and strengthen the capacity to co-shape the future.
China has promoted green campuses for decades. To better explore the current extent of pro-environmental awareness and behaviors of types of stakeholders (student, faculty members, and administrators) on campus, this study investigated the relationship between pro-environmental awareness and pro-environmental behaviors along with the influences of motivators, barriers, and culture (face (reputation) and group pressure). A questionnaire survey was conducted with a sample of the three types of stakeholders at Tianjin University, one of the largest academic institutions and the earliest to implement green campus development initiatives in China. Structural equation modeling tested a causal model of awareness, behaviors, and other explanatory variables. The results found that pro-environmental behaviors were more likely than awareness and the respondents engaged in private more than in public pro-environmental behaviors. Chinese social and cultural factors influenced pro-environmental behavior, particularly among the administrators, which informs our understanding of the reasons for the awareness-behavior gap. China's universities focus on eco-technology and energy management rather than on dissemination and publicity. The results suggest that advancing a pro-environmental cultural atmosphere and a consistent sustainability policy might significantly foster pro-environmental behaviors on university campuses.
Determination of consciousness level of high school students on the environmental training and solid wastes topics
- M Mert
Environmental Sustainability and Univeristy: A Case Study "FAZON
- J A Radaković
- N Milenković
- A Đoković
- K Poparić
- T Milonjić