Walking the Dead: The Systemic Premises Explaining Missed Opportunity for Sustainability Initiatives in Canadian Higher Education Organizations

Abstract

This paper reveals the “systemic” nature of the chronic missed opportunities for wide spread, meaningful, multistakeholder sustainability initiatives at Canadian Colleges and Universities. Prima Facia views of the opportunity for Higher Education (HE) organizations to engage in large scale collaborations with community and Industry elude the majority of Canadian HE organizations as if by design. This paper examines the structure of Canadian HE organizations and the systemic processes that mandate the impediment of large-scale multistakeholder involvement in Sustainability initiatives. While the majority of Canadian HE organizations have managed to place a priority on Sustainability in curriculum, on-campus initiatives, new building construction and certain community outreach programs, the analysis produced in this paper demonstrates that both internal objectives, rewards and perspectives and the “environmental coupling” of the organizations provide a “systemic” self-limiting structure to more than superficial sustainability initiatives. The research, in illustrating the dynamics at play responsible for the “why not”, provides the reader with data analysis valuable in the assessment of situations where the “how to” and the “why” of sustainability initiatives are to be pursued. The practitioner pursuing initiation of large scale sustainability initiatives will benefit from an initial understanding of the potential road blocks and thus produce a strategy influenced by this prerequisite information.