How to Repurpose the University: A Resilience Lens on Sustainability Governance

Abstract

Universities have an important role in moving society towards a more sustainable
future. However, this will require us to repurpose universities, reorienting and refocusing
the different university domains (education, research, campus, and outreach) towards
sustainability. The governance structures and processes used to embed sustainability
into the activities and operations of the institution are critical to achieving the required
transformation. Our current university systems which are seen as contributing to
socio-ecological system unsustainability are resilient to change due to slow variables
such as organisational and sector-wide prevailing paradigms and culture. Therefore,
to repurpose a university requires us to destabilise our prevailing system, crossing a
threshold into a new stable system of a ‘sustainable university’ across all its domains.
This paper utilises an adaptation of Biggs et al. (2012) resilience principles for the
governance of social-ecological systems to provide a framework to consider aspects
of university governance for sustainability that can be utilised to repurpose universities
towards sustainability, and destabilize unsustainable elements of the system. This
paper draws out examples relating to sustainability governance within universities with
regards to the four principles of (i) managing diversity and redundancy, (ii) managing
connectivity, (iii) managing slow variables and feedbacks, and (iv) encouraging learning
and experimentation within the context of complex adaptive systems. In this article,
we have shown that using resilience in a non-normative way is possible (to decrease
resilience of an unsustainable system), and that it can also be valuable to help understand
how to shift organisational governance towards a particular end-state (in this case,
university governance that advances sustainability). This paper provides an example
of how to operationalise resilience principles of relevance to the resilience literature as
well as providing a practical framework to guide higher education institution governance
for sustainability.