fostering sustainability in higher education

sustainability

Chapter 1: Sustainability, Higher Education, and Human Behavior

Sustainability Defined

First, sustainability is about taking the long view, or as they say “playing the long game”—a concept that immediately immerses us in psychological territory. We humans are biologically and evolutionarily wired to focus on what is right in front of us and respond to immediate danger, which makes long-term thinking and planning somewhat challenging. Yet, it is imperative that we focus on the long term. (Page 2)

Second, sustainability is an integrated, multidimensional understanding of our future. When we talk about sustainability, it includes social, planetary, and economic flourishing—all of them … together. … it is critical to note that everything we do and have is completely dependent on a healthy planet and that economies do not work without healthy people (Page 2)

Third, sustainability includes a healthy society in which everyone flourishes, not just people with privilege. Sustainability, therefore, highlights a need to focus on diversity, inclusion, and justice. (Page 2)

The Role of Individuals Within Systems

Individual action is simply no match for the massive and damaging infrastructure underlying energy, transportation, and agriculture. We build oil pipelines, then ask people to conserve energy. We design car-centric roads, then expect people to walk and bike along them. We subsidize global, monoculture crops, then ask individuals to eat local and organic at a higher personal financial cost. Changing behavior is hard even in supportive circumstances; it is especially difficult when working against giant systems that render more sustainable actions costly, dangerous, or impossible.

In addition to physical perils, working against large systems is also cognitively punishing. Behaving in ecologically compatible ways within unsustainable systems requires conscious intentions and deliberate actions, both of which use extensive cognitive resources. (Page 4)

The Role of Higher Education

HEI = higher education institution

• HEIs train our future workforce and thought leaders
• HEIs are supposed to be models of being at the cutting edge of knowledge - time to make that true on the sustainability front with systemic support as opposed to grassroots efforts
• Tenure can make faculty resistant to change
• Mix of top-down leadership and decentralized autonomy makes collaboration challenging and expectations murky
• HEIs are in a competitive market → this makes investing in sustainability efforts challenging

HEIs can foster low-cost sustainable behavior—actions that are convenient or inexpensive like recycling—by providing the foundational information that affects knowledge, awareness, attitudes, values, and norms.

But how is this information conveyed? Classrooms? Workshops?

HEIs can also provide the processes that are most likely to influence high-cost behaviors like attending extensive training programs or redefining jobs or encouraging job crafting among employees—where employees are encouraged to modify aspects of their jobs to align with their personal goals and values. For example, faculty can autonomously allocate their “service” workload, which they could transform into an opportunity to engage in university sustainability committees.

This is exactly what I’m using my sabbatical for!

In order to transform HEIs into sustainable institutions, we need to understand organizational behavior—the reciprocal impacts of organizations and humans. There are many organizational levers, such as job design, leadership, and organizational development processes that can transform individual behavior within the larger institution.

Chapter 2: Organizational Culture

What is Organizational Culture?

Organizational culture is a system of shared meaning, developed within a group, that guides people’s thoughts and behaviors. It includes the values, beliefs, and assumptions that underlie “the way we do things around here.”

Sustainability, for instance, is fundamentally about responsibility, which is not often an explicit academic value. It may also feel counter to values like productivity. In an HEI, for example, investing in sustainability-related change may appear to divert limited resources from key priorities such as student recruitment and retention. If commitment to investing in a more sustainable future appears to conflict with an organization’s long-standing values, people may react with hesitance or skepticism. Working out how values coincide is essential to moving forward successfully.

When an individual’s values don’t align with the organizations, the individual may experience dissonance or resistance.

This suggests that diversifying the reasons why one’s organization is pursuing sustainability (e.g., it makes financial sense in the long run and it appeals to the upcoming demographic of students) can positively engage people who do not yet hold sustainability values.

One locus of action is in shifting the formal and informal rules by which an organization runs:

• Formal rules: policies, procedures, systems, codes of conduct, incentives, programs, and practices
• Informal rules (social norms):

Cultural artifacts are things that surround us (spaces, stories, practices) that embody our culture. Examples:

• Curriculum
• Narratives, stories told around campus

In HEI environments where top-down organization and individual autonomy mix, it is natural for subcultures to arise. Two prominent subcultures among employees are staff and faculty.

Sustainability is likely to manifest differently in each subculture. This is valuable on one hand since unique interpretations can optimize functionality for each subgroup. Tech departments might focus on energy savings, while social sciences focus on environmental justice. On the other hand, varying subcultures can cause friction if norms are significantly different or if the culture as a whole ends up reflecting the subculture with the most resources and power rather than being a truly shared culture.

Sustainable cultures are important to nurture because it encourages people who would otherwise not participate to do so.

Creating a Sustainability Culture in HEIs

Some strategies are effective:

• Signaling values
  • Written declarations and commitments
  • Mission and vision statements (at classroom, departmental, institutional levels)
• Human resource management (HRM) practices
  • HRM professionals translate mission, vision, and goals into the personnel policies, practices, and structures that drive employee behavior
  • HRM professionals determine how jobs are defined, who is hired, how people are trained, and what efforts are rewarded

Chapter 3: Sustainability as a Shared Competency

Supporting sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs), therefore, requires understanding employees, the scope of possible sustainable behavior they may undertake, and how this may vary with the unique responsibilities and skillset of any individual job.

What specific in-role and extra-role actions can we advise different campus constituents to take?

Chapter 4: Finding and Hiring Sustainability Talent

One huge opportunity to change culture is to bring in new people (faculty, staff, administration AND students) who are committed to and/or skilled at sustainability.

• What concepts/ideas from this chapter have you thinking differently?
• Who are the folks creating job descriptions at your institutions (HR, faculty & staff, departments, administrators)? Do they understand enough about and are they committed to sustainability to integrate sustainability into this work? Do they see how their work to bring in new people is connected to a sustainability culture?
  • On the faculty side, individual departments have control on the hiring process, and while many departments might design the process to be equitable, additional sustainability considerations likely only get woven into the process for the Environmental Studies department.
• Where does your institution recruit to find people who can bring sustainability into their jobs? 
• What strategies has your school used to identify who has sustainability KSAOs (knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics)?
• Are there relationships you have, or alliances you could build, with people who have influence on crafting job descriptions?

When faculty candidates come to campus, offer the opportunity for the candidates to meet employees who work on sustainability Track traffic on Sustainability website to understand how candidates and employees use sustainability information How can sustainability insert itself into the hiring process? Can we get the ear of whoever manages training for interviews? Maybe our human resources dept?

Chapter 5: Developing Current Talent

Training areas related to sustainability

• Awareness: increase awareness of institutional efforts and the why behind them
• Attitudes:
  • Positive attitudes towards sustainability behaviors can be enhanced with training
  • Negative attitudes might not go away with training, but can be surfaced to think about actively through training
  • Table 5.1 lists several attitudes and examples of training interventions. Two examples I found compelling ⭐️:
    • Consistency: “Involve faculty and staff in discussions on how sustainability connects with what they care about. Ask faculty to create a class activity that links sustainability concepts with ‘Big Ideas’ in their field.”
    • Intrinsic motivation: “Show how sustainability can be fun and fulfilling; create a sense of belonging, autonomy, and competence. Create a community by inviting faculty, staff, and students to contribute to the creation of a rooftop garden. This also creates a sense of purpose if the produce is donated to students in need”
• Literacy: developing understanding of our social and environmental realities

  Rather than using valuable training time to go in depth on specific environmental problems that quickly become obsolete (such as current CO2 levels), employees should learn some basic ecological principles: system interdependence, limits to regeneration, circularity, the importance of diversity for resilience, and a focus on upstream solutions

  • Table 5.2 lists activities for teaching each ecological theme ⭐️

Who needs training?

• People who are already sustainably-oriented might not benefit from training but would benefit from encouragement or invitation to broaden their impact
• Understand who is not open to training

Another critical opportunity to shift culture is equipping current institutional members with KSAOs to address their work sustainably.

• What concepts/ideas from this chapter have you thinking differently?
• From a culture perspective, orientation helps people understand “how we do things around here,” highlighting the most important values & norms. Has sustainability been built into faculty, staff, AND student orientations?
• What pre-existing professional development opportunities have/could you plug sustainability into?
• Given your institution’s values, what model(s) of sustainability literacy make the most sense to engage people at your institution in order to build a shared sustainability competency?
• Can you think of opportunities to bring some sustainability into one of your institution’s orientation programs (for staff, faculty, and/or students)

How do we get people toward confident competence? This is the largest source of impact in training