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One of the rapidly growing bodies of literature on sustainability in higher education focuses on the competencies students should master to bring about the necessary transformation toward a sustainable future. Given the influential nature of this particular scholarship on curricula and programs, this study aims to assess its trajectory based on bibliometric analyses.

More specifically, authors conducted coauthorship, direct citations of articles and journals and bibliographic coupling analyses to identify the scholars and publications that have shaped the subfield of higher education sustainability competency research.

Findings show that despite the growth in higher education sustainability competency scholarship, this important subfield in higher education for sustainable development (HESD) has been a relatively narrow one. Contributing scholars, coauthor publications mainly with each other, cite each other and draw from a shared pool of research primarily by individuals from the Global North.

Scholars seeking to advance sustainability competency scholarship are encouraged to engage with individuals who can bring more diverse perspective on the knowledge, skills and mindsets higher education students need to master, to ensure that they can transform their communities toward a sustainable future in just ways. Integrating environmental/social justice, traditional knowledge and decolonizing perspectives from academics and sustainability leaders from minoritized groups and the Global South have the potential to result in important, new contributions.

Although prior scholars have examined HESD, including higher education sustainability education through bibliometric analysis, none have focused on assessing the higher education sustainability competency literature specifically. Given the influence this particular body of scholarship has already had, and will increasingly have, on preparing students for leading a just transition toward sustainability, this finding of this subfield’s limited diversity is important to highlight and address moving forward.

Many studies have developed the corporate sustainability topic. The United Nations has implemented the 2030 Agenda and has brought “quality education” and “industry, innovation, and infrastructure” as two of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The educational processes in higher education can be focused on adding brand value and social value, and they can be promoting the social inclusion. In this sense, the purpose of this study is to answer some questions related to the corporate sustainability practices under the 2030 Agenda lenses in the Latin American higher educational scenario. After the literature review analysis, a conceptual framework was developed.

This exploratory research study proposes an educational conceptual framework, improving the corporate sustainability under the 2030 Agenda lenses. A literature review was developed, involving the seven variables: “Latin America,” “higher education,” corporate social responsibility,” “personal social responsibility,” “corporate sustainability,” “governance” and “sustainability.” A matrix was developed with 25 variable combinations, connecting the seven variables. Three questions have been proposed and answered: “How much research has been developed in the Latin American higher education?” “How can the corporate social sustainability be applied in higher education?” and “Which perspectives can be considered?”

The results of the literature review are presented through the number of papers found with the analysis of the year of publication and the conceptual background. A total of 524 papers were found. Of these studies, 49 addressed the Latin American panorama, 33 had a general approach and 16 promoted interactions between Latin American and European countries, as well as between regions and continents. Six topics emerged from the literature analysis: digital inclusion, internationalization, innovation, research, servitization and social inclusion. These topics are connected in the “discussion” section, and the educational conceptual framework shows the corporative perspectives on sustainability in higher education.

This research study presents “A conceptual framework for the corporate sustainability higher education in Latin America” and it brings some discussion topics: digital inclusion, internationalization, innovation, research, servitization and social inclusion. These topics were identified through the literature analysis, and they were applied in the conceptual framework to improve the quality of education. The implications of this study are connected with the conceptual framework to promote the discussion topics. The implications involved the public and private governance spheres, third sector, as well as the professors, students and other stakeholders of higher educational institutions. These implications can represent an agent of positive change in the Latin American scenario.

Sustainability in higher education has drawn the attention of various scholars. However, to date, very few studies have examined the human side of green employee behaviour towards sustainability. Thus, to address this gap, this study aims to analyse the effect of green authentic leadership towards sustainability in higher education, with the intervening impact of green internal branding and green training.

The study examined the data collected from faculty and their immediate heads from private higher education institutions. Tests for reliability, validity and internal consistency of measures followed by exploratory factor analysis were conducted for each measure. The hypotheses were tested through hierarchical regression analysis while confirmatory factor analysis was done to test the fit of the model.

The results supported the fit of the proposed model and showed positive and significant effect of green authentic leadership on the sustainability in higher education. Further, green internal branding had a mediating effect between green authentic leadership and sustainability and green training showed a significant moderating role between green authentic leadership and sustainability relationship.

The study contributes to ongoing research in the field of green employee behaviour, green HRM practices and sustainability in higher education. Further, the study provides practical implications to enable higher education institution to work towards sustenance effectively.

The explosion of social media use such as Facebook among higher education students is deemed to have great potential in widely disseminating environmental sustainability awareness. The paper aims to capture, summarise, synthesise and comment on the role of social media to garner interest of students and staff on environmental sustainability issues.

Systematic literature review technique is adopted, and three selected online databases were searched for relevant papers for review. Specific data were extracted from each paper, and the discussion section was based on the developed research questions.

Higher education needs to fully leverage the ubiquity of social media to extend how environmental sustainability is viewed by the students and staff. Sustainability practices conducted at the university level such as recycling, reduction of electricity and water consumptions and paper reduction in classroom and used to engage students on environmental matters. For staff, social media can be leveraged as to convey the university policy and assist in their quest to become full-fledged green universities.

Some of the limitations of this research include the lack of keyword search using synonyms or related terms equivalent to the term “awareness”, lack of forward and backward searches, and the papers were searched until end of 2013 only. Future research needs to take advantage of the current limitations to investigate this topic and be empirically supported by theories using quantitative, qualitative or mixed-method-based research. Future studies could also develop relevant frameworks to propose an effective use of social media for creating environmental sustainability awareness in higher education.

Propagations of environmental sustainability awareness in higher education would be more effective with the use of social media.

In principle, the increase of environmental awareness level would increase the students’ good behavioural conduct on environmental sustainability.

While the broad topic of environmental sustainability in higher education is widely discussed, the role of social media in shaping environmental sustainability awareness is still under researched. This situation provides a significant potential for exploration by sustainability researchers to craft their investigation on the effective role of social media in creating environmental awareness in higher education.

The goal of this paper is to enhance consideration for the potential for institutions of higher education throughout the world, in different cultures and contexts, to be change agents for sustainability. As society faces unprecedented and increasingly urgent challenges associated with accelerating environmental change, resource scarcity, increasing inequality and injustice, as well as rapid technological change, new opportunities for higher education are emerging.

The paper builds on the emerging literature on transition management and identifies five critical issues to be considered in assessing the potential for higher education as a change agent in any particular region or place. To demonstrate the value of these critical issues, exemplary challenges and opportunities in different contexts are provided.

The five critical issues include regional‐specific dominant sustainability challenges, financing structure and independence, institutional organization, the extent of democratic processes, and communication and interaction with society.

Given that the challenges and opportunities for higher education as a change agent are context‐specific, identifying, synthesizing, and integrating common themes is a valuable and unique contribution.

Numerous policy announcements and articles have been produced over the past 20 years calling for higher education institutions to give greater focus to social, cultural, economic and environmental sustainability in their curriculum, research, engagement activities and operations. However, there has been much less attention given to establishing how to ensure these desired developments are successfully initiated, implemented and sustained. It is to these key areas of effective change management, leadership, support and governance for embedding sustainability into the core activities of higher education institutions through transformation that this special issue of Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ) gives focus. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper brings together a consolidated analysis of the existing empirical literature on effective change management and leadership in higher education transformation with particular focus on the results of a recent international empirical study of 188 experienced leaders of sustainability in universities in Australia, the UK, the European Mainland, North America and South Africa.

The paper brings together the case for action in the sector, identifies an integrating framework for addressing sustainable development in the university curriculum, research, engagement activities and operations consistently, comprehensively through a whole institutional approach and identifies the key challenges and lessons on effective change management and leadership for sustainability transformation initiatives in universities and colleges.

Higher education institutions often give more attention to discussing what should change in their provision than to ensuring that desired transformations are actually put into practice effectively, sustainably and with positive impact. This paper and the articles which follow seek to address this gap.

This study aims to explore the current Green practices implemented in Malaysia higher education institutions toward sustainability attainment by developing a multi-disciplinary comprehensive policy framework to further extend the collaboration among sustainability practitioners in providing integrated data on Green indicators linked to economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability in higher education institutions.

Primary data which comprises of sustainability archival documents from sixteen universities in Malaysia was used to explore the extent of Green practice for sustainability. In addition, this study also used secondary data from existing literature on sustainable development in Malaysia higher education institutional context.

Findings from the examined 16 universities and prior sustainability studies in Malaysia universities suggest that higher education institutions in Malaysia are presently implementing Green practices in their university campuses toward attaining sustainability.

Qualitative data is only collected from higher education institutions in Malaysia. Hence, findings from this study cannot be generalized to universities in other countries.

This study provides insights toward infusing Green campus paradigms from a technological perspective to facilitate the exchange of information between sustainability practitioners to produce innovative solutions for addressing sustainability challenges.

This research developed a policy framework that provides trans-disciplinary approach to be adopted by higher education institutions in Malaysia and further beyond toward attaining sustainability. Socially, this study provides Green indicators that act as a reference manual and road map toward sustainable development in higher education institutions.

A novel multi-disciplinary comprehensive policy framework is developed grounded on identified Green indicators integrated to provide information on how sustainability practitioners can implement Green practices paradigms across universities. Furthermore, the Green indicators can be used as metrics to provide data for Green practice measurement and monitoring in higher education institutions.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of financial sustainability indicators of higher education on foreign direct investment (FDI) using empirical evidence from 26 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The basic criterion for determining the financial sustainability of higher education institutions included indicators of income generated by higher education institutions being greater than the operational costs. However, this requires financial sustainability, which depends on financial self-sufficiency without seeking external financial assistance. This situation is affected by investment attractiveness.

Three quantitative proxies were used in this study to explain the financial sustainability indicators in higher education institutions of OECD countries: financial expenditures proxy measured by current tertiary education expenditure (CE); efficiency proxy measured by university-life expectancy (ULE) and endogenous growth proxy measured by gross enrolment tertiary ratio (GETR) to show the effect on FDI. Also, this study used six control variables considered an important part of experimental design and refers to contributing factors that were eliminated to clarify the independent variable and a dependent variable nexus. The quantitative data was collected from World Development Indicators (WDI). This study applied a STATA version using panel data techniques for over 15 years from 2001 to 2015 and also used fixed effect (FE) and random effect (RE) estimations to address problems of heterogeneity. To mitigate the endogeneity problem, the generalized method of moments (GMM) was also used.

The results of this study were derived from the adoption of financial models applied in higher education institutions to test the financial sustainability indicators. Based on the RE and FE results, a one per cent increase in the current tertiary education expenditure caused about 0.19 and 0.18 per cent increase in FDI in the OECD economies. This positive and significant impact was higher when considering the problem of endogeneity by applying the GMM estimations. FDI grew by about 0.22 per cent when the CE increased by one percent. Meanwhile, there was a significant and negative relationship between FDI and the GETR variable for the FE results but this previous relationship was insignificant for RE estimations. The FDI in OECD economies decreased by about 0.0006 per cent when the GETR increased by 1 per cent. This negative effect became larger when applying the GMM estimations. Finally, the ULE results showed there was a positive and insignificant relationship between ULE and FDI for all estimators.

The management and analysis of the financial health indicators is necessary to evaluate educational activities but is not sufficient to achieve financial sustainability, which extends beyond the indicators of financial health to encompass factors such as student achievements; research and scientific output; community engagement; productive capacity; quality inputs; risk and infrastructure; and systems.

This study is considered one of the few existing studies examining the ways in which to achieve financial sustainability in higher education institutions using quantitative financial methods. Specifically, this study adopted Pecking order theory in its analysis of the financial sustainability indicators to clarify whether the financial sustainability indicators of higher education institutions lead to an improvement in the attractiveness of foreign investment in OECD countries in the long run. The findings contribute to the necessity of adopting internal financing sources in accordance with the Pecking Order theory to help achieve financial sustainability growth.

This study aims to focus on the following research question: Which institutional characteristics are associated with sustainability reporting by UK higher education institutions?

To answer the aforementioned research question, this study uses logistic regression.

The results show that 17 per cent of the UK higher education institutions report on their sustainability (July 2014). In line with legitimacy and stakeholder theory, logistic regressions provide evidence that the larger the size of the institution, the higher the probability of reporting. By contrast, high public funding decreases this probability.

The findings show characteristics of higher education institutions that support or hamper sustainability reporting. Overall, the findings imply a lack of institutionalisation of sustainability reporting among higher education institutions.

Although a lot of research has been done on corporate sustainability reporting, only a small number of studies have addressed the issues of sustainability reporting of higher education institutions. This study covers all sustainability reports disclosed among the 160 UK higher education institutions. It is the first study that investigates characteristics of higher education institutions that disclose a sustainability report.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and encapsulate the enablers that can facilitate education for sustainable development in higher education (HE). The study also aims to understand the interdependence between the enablers.

The study adopts the total interpretive structural modelling approach to comprehend the interaction and transitivity between the enablers. Cross-impact multiplication matrix analysis was applied to rank the enablers and classify them on the basis of the driving and dependence power into dependent, autonomous, independent and linkage enablers.

An extensive literature review and expert opinion helped in identifying 10 enablers that can promote sustainability in higher education. The structural model revealed government policies, media, accreditation/sustainability audit, sustainability leadership and institutional commitment as the crucial enablers that can drive sustainability and activate the enablers with high dependence and low driving power.

The results of this study will assist the policymakers and management of universities and colleges in understanding important factors that can facilitate sustainability in higher education. Universities and colleges to incorporate sustainability in their system need to transform not only the core higher education activities of learning and teaching, research and engagement, also the way the colleges operate its culture, governance, structure and how it supports the staff and students.

So far, research on sustainability in higher education has looked into each factor in isolation. This research provides a comprehensive view of the factors and has attempted to establish a multidirectional interplay between factors facilitating sustainability in higher education (SHE).