ABSTRACT
Universities play a crucial role in promoting sustainability principles and should contribute to a paradigm shift towards a more sustainable society. They are essential drivers of education for sustainable development (ESD) and constitute fundamental vehicles to explore, test, develop and communicate conditions for transformative change (Disterheft et al. 2013;Leal Filho 2012). But before universities can really promote and drive sustainable development (SD), their sustainability activities must extend a still prevailing narrow perception of sustainability, limited to environmental issues or the simple integration of sustainability topics into existing curricula (Wals 2014; Leal Filho 2009). In order to incorporate SD into the daily life of universities, sustainability has to become mainstream and cannot be implemented as a simple ‘add-on’. This mainstreaming or institutionalising is only achieved, when the idea of SD is accepted and integrated into a universities’ culture and its day-to-day operations (Lozano 2006a). In short, SD must become an integrative and structural element of all aspects of higher education institutions (HEI) (Tilbury 2011). Without a whole-institution approach that aims at real change and a holistic integration of SD, university are caught in a crossfire of greenwashing, reductionist models and the increasing demand to produce knowledge and students simply for an economy based on unchallenged economic growth. Even this necessary mainstreaming process is still difficult to identify on a broader scale (Wals
2014), there are the first signs of a paradigm shift and several small milestones of change became visible during the last decade. Among others, the recent debate of integrating SD into exiting approaches of quality management at HEI is one of these milestones, which have the potential to deliver deep change into the very core of higher education (Fadeeva et al. 2014; Mader 2014). On the contrary to the general perception of quality management at HEI as a tool for ranking systems, compliance or marketing, quality assurance can be a fundamental tool for transitions, and as such should be seen as crucial for sustainability at our universities. Especially newer quality assurance approaches such as the quality culture model and its related shift towards more development-oriented and value-based aspects (Vettori 2012) exhibit promising linkages to ESD and sustainability at HEI. Herein, the process of mainstreaming SD could be
enhanced by bridging the quality culture concept with ESD and reframe sustainability principles as part of a university’s overall quality goals and procedures (Vettori and Rammel 2014). This strategy would not only help ESD processes at university to become structurally anchored, it would also provide the institutional quality assurance system with a constructive orientation beyond the generation of static performance data and evaluation cycles. Besides different priorities and perspectives of linking SD with the quality management system of HEI, all approaches exhibit one crucial benefit for mainstreaming SD: if they succeed, sustainability would be embedded in the structural and institutional setting of the university management and development. This means, SD is not seen any longer as an additional cost or perceived as one among many different competing issues, projects and initiatives. Complimentary to recent developments around quality assurance and ESD, sustainability
assessment in HEI can be seen as another milestone for enhancing the mainstreaming process of SD. Recently, an increasing body of literature emphasises sustainability assessment as strong support for implementing sustainability in HEI (Zwickle et al. 2014; Cairo et al. 2013; Remington-Doucette et al. 2013). For the challenge to incorporate sustainability in the management and continuous improvement of the university, assessing the performance and achievements is seen as one essential aspect of ‘sustainable universities’. Subsequently, there are a growing number of assessment tools for sustainability in HEI, ranging
from environmental driven approaches, assessing sustainability within the curricula to more integrative and holistic approaches (Cairo et al. 2013;Remington-Doucette et al. 2013;Lozano 2011). Among them,there are many promising and effective approaches,which provide potentially useful insights for different audiences and address important challenges of a ‘sustainable university’. Nevertheless, the majority of existing assessment tools in HEI still apply a narrow focus on particular aspects of sustainable development and are often locked into the shortfalls of pure economic numbers or a predominant accentuation on issues of eco-efficiency (Cairo et al. 2013; Lozano 2006b; Shriberg 2002). Therefore, while stressing the need for an integrative and dynamic assessment, we want to address existing conceptual gaps of sustainability assessment at HEI.Hereby,we aim at clarifying two basic questions:‘what do we want to assess?’ and ‘how do we assess?’ These questions might seem to be trivial or even superfluous, but we argue, that many universities have transferred or modified existing sustainability assessment approaches without asking themselves these questions in relation to the specific demands of sustainable higher education, before. We start this chapter by addressing the first question of ‘what do we want to assess?’. This ques-
tion is deeply linked with the ongoing debate about how we define sustainability or sustainability principles at universities. The sustainability approach adopted by a HEI determines, to a large extent, the process, direction and outcomes of any sustainability assessment. Following the recent debate on the fundamentals of a ‘sustainable university’, we argue in this section that sustainability at HEI reflects a transformative learning process rather than a concrete final state.Consequently,we must look out for guiding principles that help us to assess the quality of this process. Building on this, we suggest to orientate the assessment process at core principles of SD and ESD, which are expressed in key documents of the United Nations and several international treaties on higher education. The section that follows deals with the question ‘how do we assess?’ SD at HEI. Here, we argue that a principal weakness of many sustainability assessment models at universities is their clear prioritisation of predefined performance improvement and the related top-down, expert driven assessment, where the focus is more on outputs and states than on processes and change. As we deal with contextdependent educational institutions that must transform themselves to be transformative, universities are facing an internal dynamics, which is characterised by renewal, testing, errors and open outcomes. Consequently, sustainability assessment at HEI must focus more on
supporting this internal learning process rather than aiming at simple measurements of fixed performance indicators. The next section tries to answer both questions by providing a list of conceptual corner stones and attributes of assessing sustainability at HEI. The chapter finishes with some concluding remarks about sustainability assessment at HEI and related conflicts.
