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Institutional Sustainability Assessment

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-63951-2_196-1

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I
Institutional Sustainability
Assessment
Katerina Kosta
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Definition
Institutional sustainability assessment in higher
education refers to universities assessing their
sustainability performance across operational
and educational activities.
Introduction
As the countries of the world move toward meet-
ing the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Devel-
opment Goals (SDGs), the importance of higher
education institutions (HEIs) as drivers and
enablers of sustainability has been levelled
up. At the same time, the legally binding Paris
COP21 agreement asks participating countries to
measure and reduce their contribution to global
warming. Consequently, the profile of sustainabil-
ity assessment is rising, while the market of sus-
tainability assessment indicators is expanding.
Within this context, multiple universities use insti-
tutional sustainability assessment (ISA) to evalu-
ate their sustainability performance and measure
progress.
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
W. Leal Filho (ed.), Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63951-2_196-1
In the literature, ISA is perceived as a neces-
sary step for sustainability implementation as it
makes progress operational and facilitates
decision-making (Alghamdi et al. 2017;
Disterheft et al. 2012; Maragakis and van den
Dobbelsteen 2015; Rammel et al. 2016; Ramos
and Pires 2013; Shriberg 2004). Exploring sus-
tainability assessment tools for HEIs on a global
scale, Fischer et al. (2015) claim that there is
reciprocity between assessing and developing a
sustainable university, while Beveridge et al.
(2015) discover strong correlations between
higher education (HE) sustainability assessment
and performance.
The history of higher education (HE) institu-
tional sustainability assessment starts with univer-
sities as public body entities having to conform to
environmental regulations. Since then, interna-
tional initiatives like the UNESCO Decade of Edu-
cation for Sustainable Development (DESD)
(2005–2014) have placed HEIs at the forefront of
delivering sustainability. This made measurement
and evaluation necessary for HEIs that wished to
demonstrate their contribution to the DESD. In
certain contexts, universities are invited to conduct
sustainability assessments as part of quality assur-
ance procedures. Such is the case of the Quality
Assurance Agency (QAA) for higher education in
the UK, which has complemented its audit criteria
with an ESD (Education for Sustainable Develop-
ment) component (QAA 2014).
However, as sustainability assessment was first
taken up by the corporate world (Ramos and Pires
2 Institutional Sustainability Assessment
2013), the majority of sustainability assessment
standards do not include indicators for the educa-
tional aspects of HEIs (Rammel et al. 2016). Yet,
the uniqueness of universities lies in their research
and teaching activity rather than operational per-
formance. Thus, to conduct sustainability assess-
ments, HEIs have two options: to either develop
their own sustainability assessment tools or mod-
ify existing ones. For Rammel et al. (2016), a
simple transfer of corporate ISA tools to the
higher education context would easily face dead
ends. Designing ISA for universities is only a
recent trend with the first higher education sus-
tainability assessment tools appearing in 2010
(Bullock and Wilder 2016). HE-specific sustain-
ability assessment standards are expected to com-
prehensively cover sustainability activity across
the institution. According to the literature, this
activity is usually divided into the five areas of
teaching, research, operations, governance, and
engagement/outreach (Fischer et al. 2015; Kamal
and Asmuss 2013; Yarime and Tanaka 2012).
What follows is a section on different analyti-
cal perspectives to ISA indicators. Next, a small
presentation is made of studies comparing ISA
systems before discussing the quality and validity
of ISAs for higher education. Finally, an attempt is
made to predict the future of HE sustainability
assessments in the era of the Sustainable Devel-
opment Goals (SDGs), digitization and big data.
Analytical Perspectives on ISA
Sustainability assessment standards have been
proliferating worldwide with some authors seeing
the emergence of a new sustainability indicators’
industry (Ramos and Pires 2013). Yet, research on
the comparison and evaluation of indicator frame-
works is limited and inconclusive (Ramos and
Pires 2013). Three studies are presented below
as they provide comprehensive analysis and
well-informed insights into ISA indicators.
In the first study, Alghamdi et al. (2017) iden-
tify three ways in which sustainability assess-
ments materialize; the accounts, narrative, and
indicator-based assessments. Accounts assess-
ments convert raw data into monetized units,
covering highly important yet limited aspects of
sustainability. Narrative assessments are familiar
and flexible, yet their choice of topics is
unsystematic, limiting transparency and reducing
their usefulness in decision-making. Finally,
indicator-based assessments codify, measure,
and thus facilitate the communication of sustain-
ability to various stakeholders. The authors con-
sider indicator-based ISAs as the most systematic
and comparable (Alghamdi et al. 2017).
In the second study, Ramos and Pires (2013)
conceptualize sustainability assessment indicators
into two opposing groups. The first group consists
of technocratic or expert-oriented indicators
which are perceived as drawing on a robust meth-
odology and are expected to directly feed into
policy-making by virtue of their scientific validity.
The aim is to measure sustainable development in
a way that challenges its uncertainty and complex-
ity. The second group comprises participatory or
citizen-oriented indicators which are seen as a tool
for community empowerment and collectively
inspired actions. Questions of who participates,
who decides, and for whom are indicators mean-
ingful are central and actively pursued (Ramos
and Pires 2013). The two groups overlap signifi-
cantly in the case of university ISAs, where a
combination of technocratic and participatory
indicators is usually encountered.
In the third study, Disterheft et al. (2012) iden-
tify two approaches to implementing ISA at uni-
versities: the top-down and bottom-up (Table 1).
The top-down approach involves a limited amount
of participants from the institution’s management
level, it is less time-consuming and focuses on
meeting regulatory compliance. On the other
hand, the bottom-up approach is more time
demanding and human resource intensive as it
adopts grassroots processes that focus on aware-
ness creation and empowerment. It is claimed that
bottom-up approaches to ISA implementation are
more impactful and closely aligned with the edu-
cational role of universities.
While universities may adopt any of the above
approaches to ISA, the definition of sustainability
espoused by each institution determines the indi-
cators and criteria selected. Different definitions
are adopted by different sustainability assessment
Institutional Sustainability Assessment
Institutional Sustainability Assessment,
Table 1 Analytical perspectives to SA indicators
(studies listed alphabetically)
Approaches to sustainability assessment
Alghamdi Accounts Narrative Indicator-
et al. based
(2017)
Disterheft Top-down Bottom-up
et al.
(2012)
Ramos and Technocratic/ Participatory/
Pires expert- citizen-
(2013) oriented oriented
standards. For instance, in the corporate world, the
“triple bottom line” (TBL) model of sustainability
is usually adopted which consists of environmen-
tal, social, and financial indicators. The TBL has
been criticized as it allows organizations to
cherry-pick elements from any of the three aspects
without consistency (Milne and Gray 2013), with
the indicators sometimes treated as a set of
disaggregated criteria (Pope et al. 2017) and the
three categories not always compatible with one
another (Milne and Gray 2013). The criticism
levelled against the TBL gains new ground with
the release of the 2017 GRI Sustainability
Reporting standards, which are divided into
three separate modules following the TBL cate-
gorization. As the update clarifies, the idea is that
organizations can select and use only those indi-
cators they consider relevant from any of the three
categories (GRI 2017). While the TBL still dom-
inates ISA in the corporate world, in the HE
sector, the dominant approach to ISA is a whole
institution one, in line with Action Area 2 of the
UNESCO Global Action Programme which calls
for whole institution approaches to sustainability
(UNESCO 2017). Whole institution in this con-
text means covering the five areas of teaching,
research, operations, governance, and engage-
ment/outreach (Fischer et al. 2015; Kamal and
Asmuss 2013; Yarime and Tanaka 2012).
The following section explores studies that have
compared sustainability assessments specifically
designed for higher education institutions (HEIs).
It also identifies which of the studies have used the
GRI as a framework for comparison and whether
the university sustainability assessments explored
3
reflect the threefold categorization of environment,
society, and economy in their sets of indicators.
Comparisons of Different ISAs
Sustainability assessments specific to higher edu-
cation institutions (HEIs) have been analyzed by a
relatively small amount of studies (Ceulemans
et al. 2015; Karatzoglou 2013; Ramos and Pires
2013). Of these, eight are presented in Table 2
highlighting the comparison framework adopted
by each.
Two of the studies adopt a “strengths and
weaknesses” comparison framework (Gómez
et al. 2015; Shriberg 2004) with the main disad-
vantage of this approach being that very little is
known about the type or number of indicators
used by each assessment.
The study of Bullock and Wilder (2016) uses
the GRI as a comparison framework adjusted for
HE through the addition of an ESD supplement.
Looking at the university sustainability assess-
ments explored by the eight studies, it appears
that the financial aspect is not eminently present
with only a fraction of the assessments including
indicators measuring financial sustainability.
Thus, mapping sustainability assessments against
the GRI may not be particularly suitable from a
materiality point of view, as the GRI is based on
the triple bottom line and asks HEIs to report their
environmental, social and financial performance.
The remaining five studies compare sustainabil-
ity assessment tools against the fivefold conceptu-
alization for sustainability in HE, which consists of
education (or teaching), research, operations, gov-
ernance, and engagement (or outreach). Fischer
et al. (2015) omit the governance section claiming
that it is reflected in the other four categories, while
the LiFE framework used by Kosta and Waheed
(2017) incorporates research in the category of
education. Instead of deductively mapping indica-
tors against a preset framework, Alghamdi et al.
(2017) innovate adopting an inductive approach
which allows categories to emerge from the aggre-
gated indicators of all tools.
The comparison frameworks used by the eight
studies hope to illustrate the difference between
4 Institutional Sustainability Assessment

Institutional Sustainability Assessment, Table 2 Studies that compare HE ISA standards (listed alphabetically)
Number of ISA tools
Study compared Comparison framework
Alghamdi et al. (2017) 12 Emergent framework created from aggregating all tools’
indicators
Bullock and Wilder 9 GRI – HE
(2016)
Fischer et al. (2015) 12 Education
Research
Operations
(Community) engagement
Gómez et al. (2015) 8 Strengths – weaknesses
Kosta and Waheed 19 Education
(2017) Governance
Operations
Engagement
Kamal and Asmuss 4 Education
(2013) Research
Governance
Operations
Engagement
Shriberg (2004) 10 Strengths – weaknesses
Yarime and Tanaka 16 Education
(2012) Research
Governance
Operations
Outreach

corporate ISA which is based on the TBL model
and higher education ISA which is based on the
fivefold whole institution model, in line with the
UNESCO guidelines (2017).
It might be of interest to observe the consensus
reached by the majority of the studies on the
Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating
System (STARS) as one of the most comprehen-
sive and complete assessments for higher educa-
tion institutions (Alghamdi et al. 2017; Bullock
and Wilder 2016; Kosta and Waheed 2017; Kamal
and Asmuss 2013; Yarime and Tanaka 2012).
STARS has been specifically designed for HE by
the American Association of Sustainability in
Higher Education through a collaborative multi-
stakeholder approach (STARS 2016). Reasons
cited for the selection of STARS are the system-
atic and comprehensive coverage of sustainability
performance across the institution, the ease and
clarity of score calculations and the inclusion of
innovation indicators, which cover sustainability
activity not foreseen by the tool’s indicators.
Issues with ISA Quality
Issues with the quality of ISAs have been identi-
fied by Bullock and Wielder (2016) who
conducted a comparative analysis of normalized
ratings given to each university by nine different
sustainability assessments. Certain universities
receive high ratings in one assessment but low in
others. Thus, concern is expressed over the valid-
ity of these evaluations, given the dissonance in
the results. Since comparison data are unavailable
or difficult to obtain, the authors suggest using
proxies for ISA quality like construct validity
based on the comprehensiveness and relevance
of indicators. As most of these assessments rely
on self-reported information, process validity is
also highlighted as a proxy for quality evidenced
by well documented and transparent data collec-
tion methods. Table 3 presents issues with ISA
quality as identified by the eight studies followed
by recommendations for improvement for
improvement.
Institutional Sustainability Assessment 5

Institutional Sustainability Assessment, Table 3 Issues identified with ISA quality and suggestions for improve-
ment (studies listed alphabetically)
Suggested improvements on ISA
Study Problems with ISA quality quality
Alghamdi Conflicting perspectives on evaluating ISAs ISAs should be calculable and
et al. (2017) comparable
Bullock and Lack of transparent methodology for gathering and The methodology of ISAs should be
Wilder reporting SA data reproducible and well-justified
(2016)
Fischer et al. Dominance of operational and eco-efficiency aspects, Scholars should collaboratively set
(2015) marginalization of educational aspects standards for the evaluation of HE ISAs
Gómez et al. Selection of indicators reflects subjective value judgements Rationale should be provided behind
(2015) on what is worth measuring the weighing applied to each indicator
Kosta and Underrepresentation of sustainability research by the HEIs should select ISAs that move
Waheed majority of HE ISAs beyond the operational aspects
(2017)
Kamal and Comparison of SAs is difficult as each has been designed The definition of sustainability should
Asmuss with a specific goal in mind, assessing different aspects of be clarified before a ISA is selected
(2013) sustainability
Shriberg Debate on whether a global ISA standard would be A global ISA should be sensitive to
(2004) beneficial to HEIs different cultural and regional contexts
Yarime and Educational aspects underrepresented in HE sustainability A methodology should be established
Tanaka assessments to assess sustainability research and
(2012) curriculum

The Future of ISA education providers including environmental

While multiple universities use assessment and
reporting standards like the GRI or STARS,
these were developed long before the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted. Thus,
sustainability assessments designed for the HEIs
of the future might need to incorporate the struc-
ture of the SDGs in their indicator sets. This
process has already started at a national level
with countries mapping their performance against
the Sustainable Development Goals.
Another interrelated development that is pro-
jected to shape the future of ISA is big data. Big
data refers to voluminous amount of structured or
semi-structured data that has the potential to be
mined for information. Accessing such readily
available information may address the current dif-
ficulty of obtaining data on sustainability metrics.
On a sectoral level, an example of how big data
can transform ISA comes from the UK People and
Planet University League initiative. A big part of
this HE sustainability assessment draws on data
from HESA, the Higher Education Statistics
Agency. HESA curates data for all UK higher
information, like water consumption, carbon
emissions, or the existence of an ISA certification
like ISO 14001 or EMAS (HESA 2017). This way
the originally manual collection of sustainability
assessment data is levelled up and this is predicted
to accelerate and transform ISA.
Conclusion
The plurality and diversity of HE sustainability
assessments is accompanied by a need for practi-
tioners to critically evaluate the sustainability def-
initions they buy into when adopting a specific
ISA tool. The sustainability assessment standards
of today will shape sustainability in higher educa-
tion in the future, as apart from performance
improving they are also agenda-setting mecha-
nisms, which define what a sustainable university
should be like (Fischer et al. 2015).
A contested issue emerging from the use of
multiple, diverse ISAs is whether a global HE
sustainability assessment system would be useful
(Shriberg 2004), especially given the profound
6 Institutional Sustainability Assessment
influence of global university rankings on univer-
sity strategies (Stolz et al. 2010). Scholars hesitate
to make recommendations on which ISAs would
be best fit for the HE sector. By doing so, they
miss the opportunity to determine which ISAs will
eventually dominate the sustainability assessment
landscape in HE (Maragakis and van den
Dobbelsteen 2015). This may allow popular yet
potentially ineffective methods to dominate uni-
versity sustainability assessment of evaluating
sustainability at universities. After exploring var-
ious approaches to ISAs, this entry concludes that
universities might benefit from using ISAs
designed specifically for the sector and its unique
material aspects.
Cross-References
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