Abstract
Strategic Plans (SPs) and Sustainability Reports (SRs) represent institutional communication tools implemented by universities to demonstrate their adoption of sustainability and sustainable development goals (SDGs of Agenda 2030) as drivers in their strategic planning processes. These tools make the adopted strategies and operations visible and easily understandable to stakeholders, highlighting the university’s commitment to a new balance between business, environment, and the social sphere. Moving from this premise, with the aim to evaluate the degree of transposition of sustainability and sustainable development principles into the Italian university system, we propose an exploratory research on universities’ institutional declarations, in the form of the SRs and SPs available on their web sites. To this aim, we conducted a content analysis aiming at a preliminary phase of text coding, based on a set of analytical categories—pillars—namely Education and Learning, Research, Operations and Governance, and External Leadership. The work has allowed us to identify: an interesting extent to which the sustainability principles have been transposed into the Italian university system, with particular regard to the third category of Operations and Governance (36% of coded segments in SRs and 32% of coded segments in SPs); a considerable awareness of universities of their key role played on the sociopolitical and economic levels for the diffusion of the Agenda 2030 within civil society.
Highlights
In recent decades, political and socioeconomic actors have recognized sustainability and sustainable development (SD) as one of the greatest and most promising challenges of the twenty-first century [1,2,3,4]
The analysis of Sustainability Reports (SRs) allows us to detect the areas of interest in which the greatest number of initiatives have been undertaken, while examining the SPs allows us to point out the approaches that universities want to adopt and the areas of interest in which they intend to invest resources
Keywords relating to sustainability in a broad sense contributed to define the three conditions chosen for the identification of the investigated sample
Summary
Political and socioeconomic actors have recognized sustainability and sustainable development (SD) as one of the greatest and most promising challenges of the twenty-first century [1,2,3,4]. With reference to the second aspect, in recent decades universities in Italy and abroad have taken a path of change in which their traditional core activities of training and research find in the long-term vision increasing inspiration in the logic of SD [20]; this is even more so when coordinated with the recent ‘Third Mission’ processes, aimed at enhancing the ability to produce public engagement, value for companies, institutions, and professionals knowledgeable about the territory [21,22] In this way, these organizations act to create dialogues and spaces for collaboration with different social actors, promoting several themes without being swayed by specific interests. We give the findings of our analysis and main conclusions, including the limitations of the study and future development of the research
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