The Role of Strategic Change Management in Enhancing Academic Institutions’ Sustainability

Abstract

This study aims to highlight how strategic change management enhances the sustainability of academic institutions. Thus, the study explores sustainability in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (VUCA), primarily focusing on academic institutions in Namibia through the lens of strategic change management. The central question the study attempts to answer is how strategic change management can be employed to achieve sustainability in academic institutions. Academic institutions must be sustainable as it enables the graduates produced to be competitive at their workplaces and enables them to be employable not only for the local industry but internationally. A qualitative approach through action research design was adopted to explore the role of strategic change management on the sustainability of academic institutions through a reflexive thematic analysis using ATLAS.ti. The participants employed in this study consisted of five (5) managerial personnel, eleven (11) lecturers/professors, and eight (8) postgraduate and undergraduate students, totalling 24 participants for data collection through the use of open-ended questionnaires. The study examines how various academic stakeholders view sustainability integration in their educational programs and strategies to implement the desired change. Methodologically, this study can be described as explorative and interpretative, which reflects on sustainability in academic institutions by paying closer attention to strategic change management to address the challenges and effective management of change, which in most cases is inevitable. The study found that sustainability in academic institutions can be achieved by recalibrating a strategic plan through all stakeholder participation. The students should be at the core of sustainability initiatives, and an inclusive change approach should be adopted, this enables appropriate change management initiatives to be employed for enhancing sustainability in academic institutions. The pedagogical approach advanced in this paper addresses how strategic change management can be used to achieve sustainability in academic institutions. Hence, the findings indicate that a strategic plan fosters interaction with all associated stakeholders and inspires the combining efforts of stakeholders toward achieving a sustainable academic institution.