Abstract
Since 2015, society and businesses have been urged to implement procedures that would help to achieve the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. Higher education institutions want to become drivers of modern change and to contribute to achieving those targets agreed upon in Paris. Universities are encouraged to provide the required knowledge to the future employees and leaders, and also to act as an example of a sustainable organisation. And this means not just to talk about the required challenges and changes, not just to teach sustainability courses, but to implement the sustainability in its full range into HEI´s own procedures. That would provide a holistic approach. The aim of the chapter is to create a model that would enable to see the whole picture and help HEIs find their way to a more holistic approach to tackling sustainability issues at universities.
TopBackground: Insufficient Implementation Of The Sustainability Concept
German higher education institutions have been dealing with sustainability issues for decades. A major impetus for the development of the sustainable development (SD) strategy in Germany has been the UNESCO programme “Education for Sustainable Development” (ESD, or, in German, BNE; UNESCO, n.d.) coordinated by the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) since 2015. ESD is an education that enables people to think and act in ways that are fit for the future (Leal, 2017). Moreover, this program is aimed not only at universities, but also at secondary schools, grammar schools, and even kindergarten education, which also represents a holistic approach.
Currently, a few dozen German universities are implementing the Environmental Management System (EMS) following EMAS or ISO 14001. (Basen, 2018). In addition to their operational environmental relevance, EMSs are increasingly gaining strategic importance for decisions and processes within the sustainable functioning of universities. However, environmental issues are just one part of sustainability.
While the picture in Saxony so far indicates that the topic of SD is only developing, throughout Germany several very active players can be found, such as the Universities of Hamburg, Duisburg-Essen, Greifswald, Free University Berlin or Leuphana University, which presented extensive reports on SD activities in 2020. Also noteworthy is the existing HOCHN initiative, sponsored by the Ministry of Education since 2016, which started as a project at the University of Hamburg and is joined by 210 partners from 113 German universities (Basen, 2018). The initiative aims to create a nationwide university network to implement the SD goals and to find answers to questions of management, teaching, research, operations, and transfer and a common understanding of sustainability and transformation in the university network. Thus, almost one-third of all German universities have been integrated into the HOCHN network. In addition, the network newsletter reaches about 375 subscribers from German universities. (Basen, 2018).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Six-Stage-Model: a framework for a holistic and step-by-step implementation of sustainability issues into activities of higher education institutions that enables to consider all topics through six main fields of activities including products, processes, people, partnerships, premises and the planet.
Sustainable Teaching: using creative methodologies and innovative instruments to conduct lessons in a way that enables students to be an active part of the lesson, to contribute to the content and to the process of teaching, and to become a designer of the learning process and in this way consolidate learning success by acquiring knowledge and training skills.
Sustainable Research: Designing a research process taking into account possible consequences and influences on the achievement of the sustainable development goals.
Higher Education Institutions: Full Universities, Universities of Applied Sciences or special kinds of educational facilities like Universities of Art, Film and Music, private as well as public universities that aim to educate young people and to prepare them for future employment.
Lean Management: organising activities of an institution in such a way that no waste occurs, whether in personnel deployment, finances or not well-thought-out purchasing,
External Stakeholders of HEIs: Institutions, organisations and private people directly or indirectly affected by the activities of HEIs, like Ministries that run and supervise HEIs, companies that are cooperating with HEIs or are potential employers of graduates, but also all other possible entities and neighbourhoods.
Green Campus: one of the fields to pay attention to on the way to a sustainable university including not only planting trees but also dealing with energy, water consumption, waste reduction, mobility issues and using innovative tools to minimise the negative impact on the environment through direct activities on the university campus.
Internal Stakeholders of HEIs: people working for higher education institutions, like lecturers, professors, scientific and administrative staff, but also students–direct customers of HEIs.
Holistic Sustainability: Considering sustainability in its entire broad, that is, taking into account all SDGs, all actors in a process, including external and internal stakeholders, all processes and steps in the organisation’s activities.
Culture of Embracement: a holistic approach that helps not to see certain aspects in competition with each other, but to perceive them as components of a whole, which do not exclude, but complete, complement and support each other.