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Over the past few decades, universities have been recognized as ideal leaders for the development of policies and innovative solutions required to support the transition to sustainable societies. As a major stakeholder group, students play a significant role in moving this agenda forward; however, their actions remain understudied in the sustainability in higher education (SHE) literature.

In response, this systematic literature review was conducted to determine what research has been done on student-led action for SHE.

Findings demonstrate that while students are an understudied stakeholder group, there is a growing focus in the SHE literature on their contributions. The results suggest that students are working to increase the uptake of SHE through multi-stakeholder collaborations, collective action and interdisciplinarity. This review identifies a lack of engagement with intersectionality (interrelated environmental and social issues) and highlights the need to redirect future SHE research, calling for increased comparative research studies and research syntheses to provide greater depth to our understanding of student-led initiatives.

This literature review is limited by the smaller sample size of articles; however, conclusions can nonetheless be drawn from these results to guide future scholarship. Implications exist for theoretical contributions to social movement theories and theories of organizational change for SHE.

This research provides insight into student-led action for SHE and how their efforts might better be supported to encourage the increased integration of SHE.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive list of student‐led, campus‐based climate change initiatives, and offers details on many specific cases. The paper also documents the roles students have played and considers the larger youth engagement implications. Many of these initiatives can be replicated elsewhere, thereby providing a starting point for students wanting to begin an initiative or providing ideas for other campus stakeholders wanting to engage students in initiatives.

Campus reports were collected by the Sierra Youth Coalition from 65 Canadian Universities and Colleges. This qualitative information was coded for student‐led climate‐related initiatives, and for the roles students played in those initiatives. The patterns were identified and clustered, and are presented in this paper.

Students were found to be successfully leading eight different types of campus climate change‐related initiatives, both with the support of other campus stakeholders and without this support. Students were also found to be able to successfully take on a variety of types of leadership roles in these initiatives. Youth engagement ranged from socialization to influence to power, depending on the type of initiative.

A limitation of this research is that only 65 of the approximately 227 colleges and universities in Canada participated. Also, it is possible that some schools may not have reported all student‐led initiatives, or all the student roles. In addition, the data were limited to the 2007/2008 academic year, so is limited to the initiatives which occurred in that year.

This paper presents different types of student‐led climate change initiatives, the roles students have played in these initiatives, and the implications for youth engagement in creating climate change solutions. It contributes to the climate change, the campus sustainability, and the social movements literatures.

A student-led department greening competition brought significant change to certain departments at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary. The purpose of the paper is to help sustainability groups at other tertiary education institutions to organize similar competitions.

First, the approach and methodology of the competition are explained in detail. Second, results of the competition in the first three years are summarized. Third, opportunities for improvement are discussed. Fourth, potentials and limitations are reviewed. Finally, the most important success criteria are listed.

Eight weeks of assisted learning and two audit-based assessments are appropriate to facilitate the greening process of departments. To successfully organize a competition, a reliable team with a core group of at least five to six experienced members is needed. Maximal effectiveness can only be achieved if local environmental leaders at departments are activated.

If local environmental leaders act as internal project managers, environmental practices can change significantly. Improvements can affect material and energy use, transportation behavior and external outreach activities.

The project description shows a structure for how to engage in greening departments. A consistent rubric was applied across multiple departments over a span of three years, which allows for drawing general conclusions. Insights can facilitate similarly effective projects elsewhere.

Higher education institutions (HEI) play a critical role in developing student leaders equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to mobilize societal changes that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for. To broaden this understanding, this study aimed to engage with student leaders of a grassroots, student-led initiative at the University of Calgary, the Sustainable Development Goals Alliance (SDGA), to better understand the experience of students who took on leadership roles in organizing SDG engagement activities.

A qualitative thematic analysis was used to understand the experiences of 12 student leaders involved in SDG programming. Semi-structured interviews asked participants to reflect on their key learnings, skills development and overall student’s experiences of leaders involved in SDG programming. Thematic analysis was applied to determine emerging themes.

Analyses showed that taking a leadership role in the SDGA empowered students to deepen their engagement with the SDGs and overcome barriers such as lack of knowledge and feelings of powerlessness. Secondary findings showed that community-building, flexibility and a sense of ownership were key strengths of the program and contributed toward student leaders’ feelings of hopefulness, self-confidence and inspiration.

This work offers a window into the experiences of student leaders who have worked to advance SDG engagement within their institution. Our findings suggest that student-led initiatives represent untapped potential for HEIs to prioritize and support to help deliver on their SDG implementation and engagement efforts. As HEIs offer a vital space for innovation, policy and capacity building towards implementation of the SDGs, this work demonstrates how student leadership can yield grassroots influence on HEI commitments and responses to the needs of students.

This paper aims to explore a single-institution case study of partnership working between students, the University and Students’ Union, through four student-led sustainability projects. The paper analyses the role and value of these partnerships and provides advice for other institutions on effective partnership working between these stakeholders.

A single case study of partnership working with multiple embedded units of analysis (four projects) is presented based on reflections of practitioners involved in the projects who have different roles within the University and Students’ Union.

The longevity and effectiveness of student-led projects, and disciplinary-breadth of students engaged, can be enhanced by greater collaboration with, and integration into, University and Students’ Union systems. Partnership working between different stakeholders is key to overcoming challenges and the success of student-led projects, helped by key staff “enablers”. These projects provide myriad learning opportunities for developing change agency skills, even where projects are relatively short-lived and could be seen as failures in terms of longevity.

This analysis is based solely on practitioner reflections, with limited direct quantification or qualitative data on the projects’ impacts on the students themselves.

This paper draws together the experiences and reflections of four practitioners with different roles within the University and Students’ Union across four different projects and provides advice to generate student-led sustainability projects which have longevity and impact for wider student populations and future generations of cohorts.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the significance of student‐led initiatives in PhD development.

A case study is presented utilizing Kolb's model of learning from experience to identify with student‐led research training within the PhD process.

The experiential role of the student in the development of their personal doctoral training and the resultant social interactions thereof, remain as important as the more structured supervisor‐student relationship and other forms of doctoral training within the PhD research process.

This paper contributes new insights into the process of how PhD students can become more empowered by the process of “doing” a PhD, rather than being confined to their own specific discipline, whilst offering future recommendations for students embarking upon PhD research.

This paper reflects on the Sustainability Research Symposium (SRS), a long-term student-led initiative (seven years) at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, that seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among students and researchers by using the sustainability sciences as a bridge concept. The purpose of this study is to explore the effectiveness of the SRS in fostering sustainability literacy.

Past participants of the SRS were invited to complete a survey to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of the symposia from a participants’ perspective. A mix of descriptive statistics and axial and thematic coding were used to analyze survey responses (n = 56). This study links theory and practice to explore the outcomes of symposia as tools for students to engage with sustainability research in university campuses.

Survey findings indicated that participants are from multiple disciplinary backgrounds and that they are often interested in sustainability research without being identified as sustainability researchers. Overall, the survey findings suggested that student-organized symposia can be effective mechanisms to enhance exposure to interdisciplinary research and to integrate sustainability sciences outside the classroom.

Despite being a one-day event, the survey findings suggest that symposia can offer an “initiation” toward interdisciplinary dialogue and around sustainability research that can have lasting impacts beyond the time frame of the event.

Although research symposia are widespread in university campuses, there is little published information on the effectiveness of student-organized symposia as vectors for sustainability literacy. This original contribution presents a case study of the effectiveness of an annual symposium at one Canadian university, organized by students from the Faculties of Science, Arts and Management.

This study aims to explore the contribution of Enactus sustainability initiatives to youth empowerment and community development, thus analysing how South African higher education institutions can increase student involvement in Enactus projects across all faculties.

Using a systematic literature review approach, the authors searched the Web of Science database for 47 relevant studies, which were found and filtered using the search parameters, and then 33 articles that are strictly relevant to the main topic were chosen as the final corpus.

The authors found that Enactus facilitates community progress through transformative innovations and students gain valuable skills that increase their employability regardless of their field of study.

The focus of this study is confined to scholarly evidence acquired from peer-reviewed journals, hence empirical studies could be conducted by using literature from books, theses, bulletins, government white papers and gazettes.

These findings highlight several merits of Enactus skill-based training such as learning-by-doing, learning from failures and learning from entrepreneurs.

The study findings offer compelling evidence that student transformational innovations could facilitate sustainable development within communities.

Despite the crucial contribution of Enactus projects to nation-building worldwide, literature on this phenomenon in the context of South Africa is limited.

This study aims to identify a sustainable university’s key features. It is an essential step in tracing the topics discussed in the context of a sustainable university and their evolution in the scientific discourse.

This paper relies on a systematic literature review (SLR) conducted using two scholarly databases: Emerald and Scopus. The timeframe selected by the authors for reviewing the available sources spans from 2001 to 2021.

The analysis distinguished seven sustainable university categories, each revealing critical features of sustainable higher education. Each of these categories represents an intriguing area for in-depth analysis. The SLR reveals gaps requiring further scientific exploration.

The performed literature review was determined by the choice of entries (keywords) to identify the scientific papers in the selected databases. Moreover, as the authors aimed to focus on peer-reviewed sources, this SLR did not include books and doctoral dissertations dealing with the studied issues.

The results of the analysis can be used practically by both researchers and practitioners in the field of sustainable development (SD). Identified scientific gaps become a potential research field, and practitioners interested in the transition toward SD may contribute by accompanying universities in this journey. Collaboration and networking with business stakeholders are critical vectors for spreading the idea of SD.

Society’s growing concern for climate change requires accurate and specific actions from institutions. As entities educating future generations, universities have a unique role in transforming toward SD. The findings allow us to get acquainted with the existing main activities undertaken by higher education institutions in this field and understand the importance of this topic for researchers.

SLR is a cornerstone of research synthesis and helps integrate scientific evidence from qualitative and quantitative published studies. Conducted research presents knowledge about university sustainability and can help scientists find research gaps.

The dynamics of organizational change related to environmental sustainability on university campuses are examined in this article. Whereas case studies of campus sustainability efforts tend to classify leadership as either “top‐down” or “bottom‐up”, this classification neglects consideration of the leadership roles of the institutional “middle” – namely the faculty and staff.

The authors draw from research conducted on sustainability initiatives at the University of Guelph combined with a review of faculty and staff‐led initiatives at universities across Canada and the USA, as well as literature on best practices involving campus sustainability. Using concepts developed in business and leadership literature, faculty and staff are shown to be universities' equivalent to social “intrapreneurs”, i.e. those who work for social and environmental good from within large organizations.

Faculty and staff members are found to be critical leaders in efforts to achieve lasting progress towards campus sustainability, and conventional portrayals of campus sustainability initiatives often obscure this. Greater attention to the potential of faculty and staff leadership and how to effectively support their efforts is needed.

In the paper, a case is made for emphasizing faculty and staff leadership in campus sustainability efforts and several successful strategies for overcoming barriers are presented.