Sustainable Development Goals-Related Disclosures: University of Minho's Webpage and Sustainability Reports

Introduction

Public entities, such as Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), cannot remain apart to the reflection on Sustainable Development (SD) since they play an important role in the students’ formation and transfer of knowledge of future professionals/ future citizens, who will have to democratically promote human rights and the common good. The HEIs should consider sustainability as a mechanism that, in addition to seeking academic success, should give significant contributions to the community within its area of influence, region, and country in general. This implies promoting sustainability as a strategic model in the mission, vision, and objective of the HEIs, carrying out activities of social commitment.

In 2015 the United Nations (UN) approved the 2030 Agenda, defining 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs were designed to be universal and capable of being applied to all countries (Neary & Osborne, 2018), placing education at the heart of the strategy to promote SD (Annan-Diab & Molinari, 2017). In fact, the SDG4 - Quality education, goal 4.7. intends that, by 2030, all students acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to promote SD, inclusively, among others, through education for SD. Within the 2030 Agenda, educational responses are key to the vision of the SDGs. Education is both a goal in itself, and a means for attaining all the other SDGs.

The 2030 Agenda represents an opportunity for the improvement of higher education institutions’ (HEIs) management, the relationship with stakeholders and the community, and the articulation and consolidation of education policies with the SDGs.

HEIs can and must provide an holistic approach to the 2030 Agenda and contribute to its progress, since the SDGs are a key aspect of their social responsibility (Vilalta et al., 2018). For that purpose, HEIs can use the following steps to start and deepen their engagement with the SDGs: (i) Map what they are already doing; (ii) Build internal capacity and ownership of the SDGs; (iii) Identify priorities, opportunities and gaps; (iv) Integrate, implement and embed the SDGs within HEIs strategies, policies and plans, and (v) Monitor, evaluate and communicate (report) their actions on the SDGs (SDSN, 2017).

Reporting can play an important role by informing the stakeholders who are attentive to the acts practiced by HEIs, analysing if they have sustainable behaviours. In order to do this, the dissemination of information about SD allows us to understand the concerns and strategies that guide decision making, contributing to the image they intend to pass on to the community in which they are inserted. Over the last few decades, reporting frameworks/guidelines have been developed to help assess and manage the current state of an organization's sustainability and communicate it to stakeholders. The guidelines/standards developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) are singled out as the world's foremost internationally recognized and globally accepted sustainability reporting framework (KPMG, 2015). However, the GRI guidelines do not consider the specificities of HEIs, neither have a specific guidance on SDGs’ disclosures. Reporting is a means of communicating the progress of HEI actions in support of the UN Agenda 2030 SDGs.

In SDGs Reporting, empirical research is scarce and mainly focused on the private sector (Schramade, 2017; Rosati & Faria, 2019a-b; Fonseca & Carvalho, 2019; Monteiro et al., 2020). Concerning the higher education, as far as we know, previous research on SDGs reporting approach is limited.Thus, this study represents a contribution to the existing literature and bridges the gap about the lack of empirical research on SDGs reporting.