As the United Nation Decade of Education for Sustainable Development draws to a close, there are growing calls for a critical reappraisal of the state of sustainability in Higher Education. The emerging literature suggests that despite modest gains in some areas, Higher Education’s overall engagement with the principles of sustainability has been both piecemeal and accommodatory leading many to ask: what is blocking this transformation? The questions that guided this research were: how do academics conceptualize 1) sustainability, 2) sustainable universities, and 3) the role they see for the university in envisioning a sustainable future. The purpose was to better understand what a culturally sensitive vision of organizational change for sustainability at the university could resemble and to offer insight into how to negotiate cultural or values-based barriers to change. This thesis discusses how culturing a perspective of critical ‘sustainabilities,’ based in pluralism and critical openness, as a vision of change for sustainability at the university is likely to be more aligned with academic culture while concomitantly helping to foster the development of diverse and transformative notions of sustainability.

Increasingly, universities are being tasked with leading the way to a sustainable future. Yet little is known about how Canadian university presidents conceptualize sustainable development and the role of the university in this endeavor. With studies demonstrating that it is important for university stakeholders to share common understandings of sustainability, and that administrators are especially instrumental in the pursuit of a sustainable university, these stakeholders’ perspectives and values around the concept of sustainability in higher education are significant. This study, which included in-depth interviews with 26 Canadian university presidents, revealed that presidents have substantially high levels of eco-literacy surrounding the concept of sustainable development and understand sustainability in higher education in measures relevant to their jurisdiction. Barriers were primarily financial, although cost-savings through energy reduction was also noted as a benefit, along with it being “the right thing to do” and worthwhile because of its perceived significance to students. The piece ends with recommendations for practitioners of sustainability, policy makers, researchers and university administrators.

Society is facing a crisis of un-sustainability. The sector of higher education is well poised to support transition to a sustainable society. This thesis assesses the efforts of the Campus Sustainability Movement (CSM) in the US and Canada relative to a Strategic Sustainable Development Framework. Key findings indicate that the CSM is utilizing tools and engaging in a variety of actions towards sustainability. However, it is largely failing to use systems thinking to understand the complex interrelationships of its actions. Most efforts lack a strategy, and when strategy is present, it follows more from barriers than from a long-term goal. Current efforts mostly focus on environmental sustainability. The authors present a backcasting from principles of sustainability approach as one means to improve the strategy of the CSM. They also propose a vision for higher education that incorporates sustainability principles and fundamental human needs in an attempt to bring some concreteness to both the environmental and social aspects of sustainability in higher education.

Sustainability is a global issue, whilst the extant sustainability research is largely inclined towards the global north. China as one of most prominent emerging countries, itsimportance in sustainability research has been emphasized by many scholars. As one small step towards fulfilling the quest, this research explores how Chinese universitystudents perceive sustainability as a concept and sustainability related issues. The qualitative research method is being adopted in this research, to complement the few quantitative research done in China. In order to enable comparison and further analysis between respondents, also to simplify the societal structure complex, students’ perceptionon individual, organizational, national and international level are explored. Being inspiredby an ongoing project in Finland, one extra topic regarding the bottom-up approach insustainability initiatives is further included in the research. Research findings indicates: 1) student’s perception on sustainability as a concept is biased towards environmental aspect, with moderate awareness on economic and social sustainability; 2) The awareness regarding sustainability in higher education is found to be low among students, while they all perceive the sustainability performances of universities as good; 3) Students are largely skeptical about corporation’s sustainability performances,while they all hold high expectations for corporation’s role in improving sustainability performances of the society at large; 4) An universal optimistic stance is being observed among students, perceiving the sustainability performances of China as a country is good. Likewise, a univocal endorsement for China to help undeveloped countries to improve their sustainability performances, is being identified; 5) The awareness of achievements that have been made worldwide is low among students, with the most known one as the Paris Agreement, while very few only briefly heard of the SDGs. 6) Majority students perceivethe bottom-up approach should be considered in China, to work as complement of the traditional dominating top-down approach.The institutional logic perspective is chosen as the theoretical framework to understand why students perceive sustainability and related issues the way they do. It has been presented to account for both homogeneity and heterogeneity observed in research findings, with the formal caused by domination of the state logic, and the latter caused by the competition between the market logic, the community logic and the dominating statelogic. These findings advanced our understanding in this field, and could be deemed as contributions of this research.

Construction is an investment intensive industry which has been notoriouslyknown to be cost and time ineffective. Further, the construction industry isknown to be the world’s largest resource utilizer and the largest polluter.Hence sustainability in construction is necessary.Since Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) are one of the most importantstakeholders in construction, this research aims to determine the sustainabilityaspects taught in Swedish construction programmes. On comparing the aimsand outcomes of all construction courses to the United Nations SustainableDevelopment Goals (SDGs), this research found that Swedish constructioneducation programmes lack political and social sustainability in theirconstruction curricula. Further, this research investigates the challenges toimparting sustainability education due to present research andpedagogical/teaching methods. Data to investigate the results was collectedthrough interviews with programme directors from various SwedishUniversities.The findings of this research show a connection between practical application,research and traditional education. Further, the factors affecting research andpedagogy are also inter-related and convoluted. A large cause and effectnetwork arising due to the interplay of the factors is addressed in thediscussions section. This thesis finds that sustainable development inconstruction requires development of sustainability evaluation methods as wellas combined efforts from various stakeholders and professions.