Implementation of Sustainability in Higher Education. From declarations to praxis, or viceversa?

For centuries, universities have been at the forefront of creating and breaking paradigms, and educating the future decision-makers, entrepreneurs, and leaders. In the last years there have been a number of universities engaging with Sustainable Development, yet Education for Sustainable Development has not fully permeated all disciplines, scholars, and university leaders, or throughout the curricula. At the Stockholm Conference in 1972 education was formally recognised on an international level to play an important role in fostering environmental protection and conservation. Since then many academic declarations, charters and partnerships were developed that were designed to foster environmental education, sustainable development, and education for sustainable development. Since 1987 there has been a large increase in such initiatives. The declarations, charters and partnerships were designed to provide guidelines or frameworks for higher education institutions to better embed sustainability into their system. In spite of a number of initiatives and an increasing number of universities engaging with sustainable development, universities have remained quite traditional. The initiatives (such as declarations, charters, partnerships and conferences) developed to foster SD can provide a framework or guidelines on how to better embed sustainability into the university system. The different initiatives discussed emphasise that universities have a moral obligation to work towards sustainable societies, focusing on environmental degradation, threats to society, and sustainable production and consumption for this and future generations. This research presents the results from a survey exploring whether universities have signed any of the available initiatives and to what extent they have been implemented sustainable development into their systems.status: publishe