Many higher education institutions (HEIs) have started to incorporate sustainable
development (SD) into their system. A variety of sustainability assessment tools (SATs) have been
developed to support HEIs to systematically measure, audit, benchmark, and communicate SD efforts.
In recent years, stakeholders have increasingly asked HEIs to demonstrate their impacts on SD. These
impacts are the direct and indirect effects an HEI has outside of its organizational boundaries on
society, the natural environment, and the economy. This study analyzes to what extent SATs are
capable of measuring the impacts that HEIs have on SD. A mixed-method approach, using descriptive
statistics and an inductive content analysis, was used to examine 1134 indicators for sustainability
assessment derived from 19 SATs explicitly designed for application by HEIs. The findings reveal that
SATs largely neglect the impacts HEIs have outside their organizational boundaries. SATs primarily
use proxy indicators based on internally available data to assess impacts and thus tend to focus on
themes concerning the natural environment and the contribution to the local economy. Updating
existing SATs and developing new ones may enable HEIs to fully realize their potential to contribute
to SD.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6765 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Findler, Florian, Schönherr, Norma, Lozano, Rodrigo, Stacherl, Barbara |
| Publisher | MDPI AG |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | https://www.mdpi.com/, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/Higher_Education_Institutions, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6765/ |
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