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Maturation
The maturation process of process
incorporating sustainability
in universities
Luis Vargas 441
Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Received 29 January 2019
Claudia Mac-Lean Revised 5 March 2019
Accepted 12 March 2019
Vice-rectory of Academic Affairs, Universidad de Magallanes,
Punta Arenas, Chile, and
Jean Huge
Systems Ecology and Resource Management Unit,
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium

Abstract
Purpose – In the past few decades, sustainability in higher education has become ever more prevalent,
although the diversity in pace of adoption and the wide range of interpretations and practices is huge. The
purpose of this study is to present recent research on organizational change processes in universities.
Design/methodology/approach – The methodological approach applied corresponds to the social issue
maturation framework, to identify, describe and assess patterns of change across higher education
institutions. The maturation of sustainability in universities can be divided into four stages: emergence,
popularization, formalization and maturity.
Findings – The findings indicate that sustainability processes often begin as ad hoc processes which grow
and mature over time as a range of different actors join in. However, sustainability in universities is
increasingly connected with sustainability in the private sector and with other public actors. Moreover, there
is a growing acknowledgement of the interactions between society, industry and academia.
Originality/value – The value of the paper is to provide a critical assessment of the potential of living lab
projects initiated in Belgium (Brussels) and Chile (Santiago de Chile) to anchor sustainability firmly both in
the functioning of the university and in the interactions with the neighborhood. The authors reflect on the
requirements and the implementation of these initiatives as a strong indication of mature sustainability
integration in, and by way of, universities.
Keywords Sustainable development, Universities, Education, Higher education,
Sustainability in university campuses
Paper type Case study

Introduction: Sustainability and university campuses

Sustainability is defined as an equilibrium among ecological, social and economic
dimensions in human life. Over the past years, sustainability initiatives have flourished in
many organizations worldwide, including in higher education institutions (HEIs) (Lozano
et al., 2013; Lozano et al., 2014).
International Journal of
Sustainability in Higher Education
Vol. 20 No. 3, 2019
L. Vargas wishes to thank the Complex Engineering Systems Institute, ISCI (Project CONICYT: pp. 441-451
FB0816). J. Hugé wishes to thank the VLIR-UOS Global Minds Post-doctoral Program of the Vrije © Emerald Publishing Limited
1467-6370
Universiteit Brussel and the KLIMOS-ACROPOLIS Program, supported by VLIR-UOS and ARES. DOI 10.1108/IJSHE-01-2019-0043
IJSHE A deeper look into the concept of sustainability gives rise to a multitude of
20,3 interpretations, ranging from status quo to reformist and radical agendas (Hopwood et al.,
2005). This “constructive ambiguity” (Robinson, 2004) allows sustainability to be translated
in a range of context-specific actions adapted to the needs and possibilities of a diverse set of
institutions and stakeholders (Sylvestre et al., 2014).
In this paper, we use the conceptualization of Griggs et al. (2013) as a basis for discussion:
442 sustainability (or sustainable development) is “development that meets the needs of the
present while safeguarding Earth's life-support system, on which the welfare of current and
future generations depends”.
The question now is to better understand how do these sustainability concepts connect
and are reflected in sustainability in university campus. In other words, how do HEIs
embrace, interpret and operate the notion of sustainable development in their teaching,
research, operations and outreach. Our approach to accomplish this has been to characterize
the maturation process of two HEIs in terms of sustainability incorporation. In this manner,
the contribution to the literature of the present paper mainly refers to providing additional
empirical evidence in regards to the way sustainability operates and grows in HEIs, and
most importantly to applying the social issue maturation framework to that evidence. At the
same time, the limitations of the study mainly refer to the fact that only two HEIs have been
incorporated in the study so far and that the sustainability transformational processes have
solely been analyzed through the lens of the social issue maturation framework.
Sustainability initiatives began in 2012 at Ghent University (UGent), one of the
universities of the study, and in 2005 at The Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
(FCFM for its acronym in Spanish) of the University of Chile, the second institution included.
Thus, a historical review of the sustainability processes in the time frame 2005-2017 is used
in the present work. Overall, gathering and analyzing the data and information in both
institutions took around 6 months to be completed.
HEIs, students and researchers have a critical role to play in fostering and shaping a
sustainable future (Khalili et al., 2015; Stephens et al., 2008), (Waas et al., 2011). It is essential
to identify critical success factors, triggers, tipping points and high-impact actions (Hugé
et al., 2018). Within the higher education landscape, schools, faculties and departments have
a special role to play in contributing to the much-needed “transition to sustainability”
(Loorbach, 2007) by fostering the combination of both deep technical knowledge and a
breadth in non-technical skills (Nesbit, 2015).
Segalas et al. (2010) focuses on the skills and understanding to deal with technology as
such, but also with the societal aspects of technologies. This implies that the whole teaching,
research, management and outreach strategy of engineering faculties needs to be at least
informed by sustainability or even guided by it. Engineering schools are often pioneers in
integrating sustainability, e.g. in their teaching (Watson et al., 2013). Although HEIs should
be innovative organizations which foster change, they tend to be conservative and resist
change as they are built on paradigms such as disciplinary specialization and on the
repetition of what is already known (Ferrer-Balas et al., 2010).
Nevertheless, many HEIs have also embraced the call for sustainability actions as a
trigger for change and re-invention, acknowledging that they should strengthen their own
organization identity (Ferrer-Balas et al., 2010; Hugé et al., 2016).
While the process of integrating sustainability into higher education usually entails a
focus on at least one of the four pillars – teaching, campus management, research, societal
outreach (Hoover and Harder, 2015) – the conceptualization and implementation of
sustainability change processes in various HEIs is particularly diverse. This study aims to
analyze the organizational change processes toward sustainability of two schools in Maturation
different contexts: Belgium and Chile. process
Scholars have often analyzed the processes of organizational change toward
sustainability in HEIs by performing descriptive single case studies (Sylvestre et al., 2014;
Watson et al., 2013). Building on Corcoran’s et al. (2004) criticism of possibly reductionist
case studies, we apply a theoretical framework to situate and interpret the cases in our
study. We apply the so-called social issue maturation framework as developed by McGrail
et al. (2013), to study the growth of sustainability awareness and ownership within and
443
among two schools.
Consequently, the use of a methodological tool is considered to provide significant
improvement to this study, as a proper framework is utilized allowing to move beyond the
case study logic and facilitating to come up with a more robust analysis of the maturation
processes of the HEIs involved. And by doing so, extending existing knowledge on the topic.
In this context, living laboratories merge academics and campus facilities to provide
students with real-world skills and, for the institution, a strategy to meet its sustainability
goals. In this way, HEIs redesign campuses in greener ways to use them as hands-on
learning opportunities for students (Trencher et al., 2015; Evans et al., 2015).
Resistance and drivers to sustainability incorporation processes at universities have
been studied by Lozano (2006); Hoover and Harder (2015); Verhulst and Lambrechts (2015)
and Arroyo (2015). Communication, open-mindedness and inter-disciplinary collaboration
are identified as key drivers. Some of these studies explicitly acknowledge the role of
“human” factors in change processes (Hoover and Harder, 2015). Certain aspects that can
facilitate change which have been previously mentioned, are found in the Belgium and Chile
experiences, utilized as a way to move forward in their sustainability processes. This study
aims at contributing to the systematic assessment and the contextualization of
organizational change processes toward sustainability. The specific objectives are:
 to characterize sustainability change processes applied to two HEIs;
 to characterize university campuses as living labs and their interactions among
relevant actors; and
 to systematically describe the organizational change processes by adopting a social
maturation lens to look at sustainability.

We aim at providing a qualitative comparative analysis that complements the existing body
of knowledge on sustainability in higher education.

The social issue maturation framework

In this section, a brief theoretical background of evolutionary processes toward
sustainability in universities is presented.
Social issue maturation refers to growing awareness and ownership of a particular issue
by an organization, institution and/or community (McGrail et al., 2013). We apply that
framework to analyze the information collected on the maturation of sustainability within
the studied HEIs (Hugé et al., 2018). In the early phase, sustainability as a social issue is still
“immature”: it is a niche concern, related dialogues and knowledge is still emerging. Once
the issue has “matured”, new expectations have become embedded in the institution, and the
improved sense of ownership of sustainability leads to more action (Hill et al., 2013; McGrail
et al., 2013). This does not mean that all behaviors and norms will suddenly change, as the
process of social issue maturation is incremental and depends on the context. The social
issue maturation framework provides a structuration of observable phases that can be
IJSHE plotted over time and is suitable for the analysis of sustainability maturation in particular
20,3 (McGrail et al., 2013). The key stages involve the following phases: Phase 1: emergence;
Phase 2: popularization; Phase 3: formalization into a governance framework; and Phase 4:
maturity, reflected in normative changes (i.e. uptake of sustainability as a norm).

Experiences in Belgium
444 UGent is one of the largest Belgian universities (41,000 students, 9,000 staff members and
117 research units spread over 17 faculties). Since 2012, a group of frontrunners consisting
of professors and students has initiated a bottom-up process to foster sustainability at the
university. This process has been strongly supported by the university's Environmental
Coordination Unit and by its Centre for Sustainable Development. Ultimately, the process
has been actively supported by the main governing bodies too. This initiative, known as
‘“Transition UGent” (or the UGent Transition Initiative) (Sustainability Exchange, 2015) is
now a think tank as well as an open network, and it has produced two “Memorandums” (in
March 2013 and October 2014). At the moment, Transition UGent engages over 250
academics, students and people from the university management in suggesting objectives
and actions for the sustainability policy of UGent (Hugé et al., 2016).
The transition approach presents societal transformation as the interplay between
different levels: the landscape level describes the exogenous drivers (e.g. climate change,
globalization), the regime describes the dominant state of the socio-technical system (e.g. the
energy system, which consists of several dimensions: science, culture, policy, industry,
markets and technology) and the niches, which are innovative spaces and initiatives that
can trigger changes at the regime (Geels, 2002). According to this multi-level perspective, the
momentum for a transition grows under a combination of increasing landscape pressures,
internal regime contradictions and the development of promising niches. To effectively start
making UGent more sustainable, the transition management approach was used. This
approach suggests creating forums (or “arenas”) of frontrunners that develop a system
analysis and a future visions and set up transition paths with experiments. In doing so, it
creates a forum and a momentum to allow sustainability to mature in the university.
“Transition UGent” organized dozens of roundtable exercises between 2012 and 2014 to
develop system analyses, visions and transition paths on nine fields of action of UGent,
including research. Focusing on the pathway that was developed for research, and which is
particularly relevant for engineering schools and students, the following transition path was
developed. Starting with a critical analysis of the situation in 2012, a stepwise transition
path for 2013-2017 was proposed with 2020 as long-term time horizon. The university-wide
obstacles identified in early 2013 included the compartmentalization of research, the lack of
student involvement in research; the lack of cooperation with business and government; the
lack of focus on societal relevance; and the output-driven research culture (“publish or
perish”). In 2020, the stated objectives (which are arguably yet purposely broad) are to focus
on socio-ecological challenges, to use societal relevance as a key criterion for research, to be
in a situation where multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research is considered mainstream
and to perform research sustainably.
The UGent case does devote explicit attention to the implementation of
transdisciplinarity and, as such, started an experiment at the end of 2015: a platform on
sustainable cities where about 20 academics from different disciplines and about 20
policymakers from the city of Ghent try to build a knowledge platform on wicked issues. In
doing so, the city of Ghent functions as a “living lab” for researchers and municipal actors
can make a more effective use of the academic expertise of UGent. This platform crosses
traditional boundaries at three levels: within the university, as it crosses disciplinary
boundaries; within the municipal authorities; and between the city and academia. The Maturation
shared sense of ownership of sustainability research initiatives is hence developing in the process
Ghent area, which is a key indicator for maturation of sustainability as a social issue
(Devolder and Block, 2015). UGent's proposed adjustment of the university's assessment
system and career evaluation also provides an interesting first step in implementing
sustainability in academic research. It emphasizes the fact that there is no need to wait until
regional/national-level funding channels have been reformed. Increased visibility and
communication are stressed both to inform the internal university staff and to showcase the 445
unicity of sustainability innovations, the latter objective mainly targeting external actors
(potential students and (non-)academic research partners). While an awareness of context
specificities is key, the initiatives proposed by UGent are at least partly transferable to other
HEIs, ideally as part of a broader change movement toward academic sustainability (see
also Adomssent et al., 2007). The recent creation of living labs within UGent (regarding
spatial planning and ICT) are other examples of this ongoing maturation of sustainability
initiatives at UGent.
The sustainability history of the University of Ghent can be presented as follows: the
loose gatherings of the early stages of the “UGent Transition” initiative are stage 1
(emergence); the growth and consolidation of the “UGent Transition” process by way of the
two published university-wide, participatory “Memorandums” (documents listing actions
for sustainability) as the popularization stage (stage 2); and the uptake of sustainability in
the mission and vision of the University of Ghent as formalization, and as a sign of general
acceptance by the university leadership of sustainability as a key issue.

Experiences in Chile
Founded in 1842, the University of Chile is the main and oldest institution of higher
education owned by the State in Chile, with a national and public character. It is a research-
oriented institution, and it is organized in 14 faculties. The FCFM, in which our work is
focused, hosts the School of Engineering. It has 425 professors, 1,100 graduate students and
4,860 undergraduate students.
The University of Chile defines sustainability as the aspiration of humanity to perpetuate
the existence and well-being of all forms of life on the planet, considering socio-cultural,
environmental and economic dimensions. Under this perspective, the curriculum of the
university aims to incorporate sustainability in the academic programs in a transversal
manner. In this fashion, sustainability dimensions are topics and competences of each
discipline, and they seek to train students in a variety of abilities, such as systems thinking
tools, anticipation of future problems, environmental awareness and understanding of the
normative-environmental aspects, management strategies, collaboration, and interpersonal
participation with community profile. All those contents are validated within the specific
competences of the academic programs of the university.
The history of the Sustainable Campus (SC) at the FCFM can be divided into three
periods, each marked by the appearance of a new and relevant actor dedicated to
sustainability: Oikos Student Group (2005), Sustainable Campus Commission (2011) and
Office of Engineering for Sustainable Development (2014).
In 2005 a group of students, named Oikos (a Greek word that means home and hearth,
household, or family), promoted the idea of recycling on campus. These students noticed
other problems related to the environment that needed a more complete work. This group
pushed for a more complex concept of SC, which should look for environmental, social and
economic sustainability. Also, it had to be constructed in a democratic and participative way
(that is, composed by professors, students and staff) and cover all aspects of the University:
IJSHE teaching, research, outreach and management. After five years of work, Oikos, along with
20,3 professors, presented a proposal for a SC to the Faculty Council in 2010, which gave birth to
the Sustainable Campus Commission in 2011, whose objective was to advise the Dean on
matters of sustainability. The commission was formed with Oikos students, academics and
FCFM officials.
The second period, between 2011 and 2013, is defined by the execution of sustainable-
446 related projects connected with academia, outreach and resource management. Key
elements that surfaced in this period are the drafting of the FCFM Sustainable Campus Plan
and the participation in the drafting of the Sustainability Policy for the University of Chile
(2012). One of the most important conclusions in this stage was the need to hire a full-time
staff with experience in sustainability matters to carry out the SC project at the FCFM. This
professional would be in charge of supporting the management and development of all the
initiatives that are carried out both inside and outside the faculty. Thus, the position of
Sustainability Chief and the Office of Engineering for Sustainable Development was formed,
which marks a milestone in the institutionalization of the challenge for a SC.
As a result, in 2014, started the third period where the Office of Engineering for
Sustainable Development was founded. This area attempts to create a culture of
sustainability among the members of the FCFM community, incorporating responsibility,
critical and ethical thinking. Main results of this period were a cleaner production agreement
between the FCFM and the Chilean Government (which was 100 per cent fulfilled in three
years), and the design of a Sustainability Policy for the FCFM.
Some highlights of the resulting sustainability policy in the teaching area are the following:
 creation of a Minor in Engineering for Sustainability;
 identification of 107 courses focused and/or related to sustainability;
 creation of four new sustainability courses among the 12 engineering departments;
and
 creation of a Diploma in Organizational Sustainability Management.

In the research area, the following milestones were achieved:

 Five international magazine articles on sustainability issues in HEIs were
published.
 Staff participated in five international conferences on sustainability issues in HEIs.
 Three undergraduate thesis on sustainability topics were co-guided.
 A seminar in sustainability research was organized in universities. As a result, one
digital book on sustainability research in universities was published.

In campus operations, several initiatives were undertaken. Among them, it is worth

mentioning:
 An energy audit process was carried out.
 Six energy efficiency measures were implemented.
 A solar plant was designed and implemented with installed power of 15 kW.
 An audit of the water resource was carried out in campus.
 Three calculations of the carbon footprint of the FCFM were developed.
 63.4 tons of waste were recycled with the Waste Management Plan.
 A sustainable alumni network was created, with 88 participants.
Finally, in the dimension of outreach, the following are the main results: Maturation
 Four sustainability newsletters were published. process
 Nine sustainable tips campaign were designed and published.
 Two contests to award the most sustainable office on campus were organized.
 Two versions of the CEUS University Student Sustainability Congress (organized
by FCFM students) were sponsored.
447
In summary, a policy with annual milestones was set up for the period 2014-2017, which
included:
 creation of Office of Engineering for Sustainable Development;
 sustainability policy design for the FCFM;
 sustainability award in sustainable construction category for the “Beauchef 851”
building because of its LEED Gold Certification;
 realization of energy audit;
 first calculation of the carbon footprint;
 design of a Minor in Engineering for Sustainability;
 implementation of the “ReBeauchef” recycling system;
 development of a study on water management and efficiency;
 inauguration of the solar plant;
 making of two events to recycle e-waste;
 publication of the first sustainability newsletter;
 implementation of two work meetings on sustainability (with the campus
community);
 design of an Energy Policy for the FCFM;
 implementation of a seminar about sustainability research in universities;
 compliance of the Cleaner Production Agreement;
 creation of a sustainable alumni network; and
 beginning of the sustainable hints/tips campaign.

The FCFM sustainability history here presented allows us to identify the Oikos period as the
Stage 1 of emergence, the Sustainable Campus Commission conception and development as
the Stage 2 of popularization and the creation of the Office of Engineering for Sustainable
Development as Stage 3 of formalization.

Critical aspects: Requirements and implementations

Now moving beyond the history and accomplishments of the Belgium and Chile experiences
previously described, the main lesson learned are here presented.
First, we identify the relevance of the existence of sustainability champions. They might
be students, staff or professors, and their desire to move forward and break the
organization’s inertia is perceived to be absolutely necessary within the transformational
process toward sustainability. Second, the importance of the emergence of new actors, who
will create commissions, centers and other types of networking initiatives inside and outside
the university, is recognized as another critical factor for success. Third, the significance of
IJSHE the coordination and collaboration between existing players can prove to be another tipping
20,3 point in the process. This can also become a major challenge within large traditional highly
specialized and compartmentalized organizations.
When it comes to obstacles and barriers encountered, lack of budget, insufficient support
from the authorities, not having enough staff to carry out the needed and expected
developments and the complexity of the internal administrative university procedures are
448 acknowledged as key matters.
These change processes can be problematic to manage, because of the obstacles and
barriers just mentioned, but the observed practical approach to overcome them has been the
following: using the power of negotiation with the authorities, bringing inter-disciplinary
actors together and involving them in those discussions and consultations, coming up with
innovative projects to show stakeholders and the community about the benefits of
sustainability, working along with the Government and private sector seeking synergies
which might facilitate accomplish these innovative projects, and finally communicating to
the entire community the achieved goals and ongoing initiatives.
Fortunately, institutional support was gained – at least partially – in both experiences,
mainly due to the pressure of present and new actors of the university, in most of the HEIs
levels. By this we mean working sideways with students, staff, professors and authorities,
pushing for sustainability changes in several of the university dimensions – teaching,
research, campus operations and outreach. Also, the opportunity for savings and economic
benefits has been found to be a motivation for the authorities to engage, as well as
reputation matters. Additionally, it has been key to advance in institutional commitment, for
sustainability units to be very effective and do proper monetary resource management in
their project developments, to convince about the opportunities and added value that
investing in sustainability initiatives can bring to the campus and academia.
While this study allowed to pinpoint the different stages in the maturation of
sustainability in HEIs, the limited sample of two institutions (despite the differences in socio-
economic and geographic aspects, and academic culture) makes it necessary to conduct
similar in-depth case studies in other HEIs. This is a limitation of this study, which we
suggest to solve by enlarging the sample of studies HEIs in the future and repeating similar
studies in the same two institutions to gather a more comprehensive view of the maturation
of sustainability, which is by definition, a dynamic process of constant change.

Conclusions
The experiences of Belgium and Chile presented reflect some of the diversity in pace of
adoption and the wide range of interpretations and practices in sustainability incorporation
in HEIs, where the social issue maturation framework was applied to identify and describe
patterns of change.
We can observe from both cases that sustainability change processes emerge as ad hoc
processes which grow and mature over time. Likewise, the integration of sustainability
comes along with the modification of existing structures, which creates many challenges
related to the involved actors, the available resources, values and ideas, and strategic
choices to be made. In addition, sustainability in these universities is observed to be
connected with sustainability in the private sector and public actors.
While the diversity of experiences and lessons learned is a necessary quality of the
inherently experimental learning-by-doing approach underpinning sustainability change
processes, some patterns emerge in the developments of these two universities. In the
emergence phase, communication and networking among different categories of actors is
key to maintain an open and pluralist interpretation of the contested sustainability concept.
The popularization phase is built on a broadening of the support base and on the planning of Maturation
future management steps. The next step entails formalization, in which a commitment from process
the central administration and the set-up of some type of sustainability office structure is
key. Finally, to achieve maturity in the organizational uptake of sustainability, a network of
interlinked, innovative sustainability entrepreneurs is necessary.
This study’s findings are based on two in-depth cases, yet in combination with the rich
body of literature on sustainability in higher education (introduction); this study allows us to
point out some generalizable prospects for the future:
449
 There are different degrees of institutionalization of sustainability in HEIs, which
provide for a range of degrees of ambitions and allow a diversified, customized
approach to gradual or fast uptake of sustainability into the core of a HEI.
 Reform toward a strong sustainability identity can happen fast, when boundary
conditions are met (such as support from the highest academic authorities, the
presence of a multi-stakeholder core group of change-makers within the institution,
and a sense of urgency that allows to link global sustainability challenges to local,
institution-specific issues).
 The dynamics of sustainability allow HEIs to re-invent themselves when faced with
the complex, wicked global challenges HEIs are supposed to contribute to solve.

Some main lessons emerging from the paper include the realization of the complexity and
the uniqueness of sustainability incorporation processes within HEIs. In this context, the
social issue maturation framework has proved to be a valuable tool as it allows to categorize
the stages of development and better comprehend the dynamics occurring in each phase. As
to future prospects, a simple projection might be to widen the amount of universities
involved in upcoming studies. It would also be beneficial to narrow the scope of the
maturation process tackled, focusing the research on enablers, barriers, networks, strategic
choices, values or another critical aspect alone.

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About the authors

Professor Luis Vargas received Electrical Engineer Diploma (1985) from the Universidad de Chile,
Santiago, Chile. He obtained MSc from Universidad de Chile in 1987 and PhD in Electrical
Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada. From 1994, he has worked at the Universidad
de Chile, where currently, he is an Associate Professor.
Professor Claudia Mac-Lean obtained the Industrial Engineer Diploma (2010) from the
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile. She completed MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable
Development from the University of Cambridge in 2012. From 2013 to 2018, she worked at the
Engineering Faculty of the University of Chile, implementing an Office of Engineering for
Sustainable Development. Recently, she has started working at the University of Magallanes, located
in Patagonia. Claudia Mac-lean is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: clau.maclean.b@
gmail.com
Professor Jean Huge obtained Bio-Science Engineering diploma and MSc in Conflict and
Development from the University of Ghent, Belgium. He obtained PhD from the Université Libre de
Bruxelles (ULB) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2012. He currently works at the University of
Hasselt as an Assistant Professor and conducts research at the VUB, the ULB and at the University
of Ghent. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Paris School of Technology (MINES Paris Tech,
France).

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