Toward an empirical research agenda for sustainability in higher education: exploring the transition management framework
Introduction
In response to growing societal concern about environmental degradation and intensifying calls for a transition to a more sustainable society, institutions of higher education throughout the world have begun to alter their educational missions and practices to incorporate and address sustainability. As this has occurred within the past decade, the role of higher education in the context of an ongoing societal transition toward greater sustainability has emerged as a subject of significant scholarly attention [1], [2], [3]. Although this emerging literature on sustainability in higher education is varied, it is dominated by empirical and descriptive studies of specific approaches, strategies and initiatives at specific institutions [4], [5], but also includes prescriptive studies that often call on universities to play a more prominent role in sustainability and sustainability education [6], [7], [8], [9]. Much of the descriptive literature to-date has focused on specific strategies or actions taken at specific institutions [10], [11]. Descriptions of first-movers and early-institutional-actors that demonstrate potential ground-level initiatives for change has been a significant, and persistent, part of this work [8], [11]. This often includes descriptions of “best practices” and details of development, implementation and assessment of individual programs [12], [13], [14].
The largely empirical focus of this emerging literature can be understood by considering the near-term immediate needs of sharing information in a rapidly changing environment and the hybrid scholar-practitioner perspectives of many individuals involved in the implementation and assessment of sustainability initiatives in higher education. Given the nascent stage of this research area, the emerging body of research appears to have minimal cohesion and some degree of repetition and redundancy. In addition, a strong theoretical underpinning of the research agenda has not yet been established.
Developed over the past decade by systems and governance researchers, transition management (TM) is a multi-scale, multi-actor, long-term, process-oriented approach and analytic framework used to both understand and promote transformations of major social systems [15]. TM encompasses dual functions: it is both (1) an intervention, management and governance approach to initiating transitions, and (2) an analytic framework to explore and understand historical transitions and use that understanding to inform governance of future transitions [16]. As such TM can be deployed for prescriptive purposes – in that it provides direction toward shaping policy processes, implementation and evaluation – and for descriptive purposes, in that it is useful for understanding the evolution of social transitions. The TM framework builds upon and contributes to a broader field of transition studies as well as theory of socio-technical systems – theory that recognizes a fundamental relationship between technology and society that suggests social change and technological change are interrelated, inseparable, and therefore need to be considered in conjunction [17].
Architects of TM speculate that the framework may be useful for sub-system, or sectoral analysis, as well as organization-level analysis, and they invite exploration of its potential value in different contexts to further develop empirical consideration of this theoretical framework [18]. To date the TM framework has been applied to sectors defined by various environmental subsystems including electricity [19], water [20], and transportation [21]. TM has also been applied to the regional scale [22], and recently to the urban scale [23], but to our knowledge the TM framework has not yet been explored within the specific societal sub-system of higher education.
To contribute to the advancement of the literature on sustainability and higher education, and in an attempt to provide some cohesion and a framework for informing and prioritizing future empirical research in this important emerging field, this paper explores the theoretical framework of TM. This exploration of TM in the context of higher education requires adjusting the TM lens to consider socio-technical change at three scales: society wide, within the higher education sector, and at the individual university-community scale. TM provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of structural change, so refocusing the TM lens to the societal sub-system of higher education assumes a complex co-evolution of economic, cultural, technological, and organizational factors influencing change within this sub-system [23].
The goals of this exploration are twofold: (1) to inform prioritization of an empirical research agenda in the field, and, at a more fundamental level (2) to enhance understanding of the interface between organizational change and social change related to sustainability. While many of the insights of this exploration are likely to be relevant to higher education in many contexts throughout the world, this paper draws on a largely North American and European literature as well as the authors' direct experiences in the United States system of higher education.
Section snippets
Background – higher education and movement toward sustainability
Universities have distinctive organizational cultures that value and promote learning and thus can play a vital role in processes of societal transformation that are reliant on educating new generations of citizens and leaders. Higher education has always been responsive to societal needs, and the history of higher education demonstrates an evolution of university structure and purpose that reflects directly on the dynamics of society's socio-technical systems [24], [25], [26], [27]. As
Exploring the TM framework for insights relevant to universities and sustainability
In its dual function as both (1) an intervention, management and governance approach to initiating transitions, and also (2) an analytic framework to explore and understand historical transitions, TM encompasses both prescriptive and descriptive capacities. Given that the growing literature on sustainability in higher education also encompasses both prescriptive and descriptive qualities, an initial resonance is apparent. Key elements of the TM framework with relevance to considering
Apparent limitations of TM to considering universities and sustainability
Organizational theory recognizes leadership and culture as features of organizational dynamics that have a particularly powerful impact on learning [52]. The TM framework does not facilitate explicit consideration of either of these important features.
The dynamics of power and leadership and their roles in promoting or opposing structural change has not yet been given a particular focus within the TM literature, although the literature does recognize that transitions are ultimately shifts in
Reflections and concluding thoughts
A fundamental premise of the TM framework is that the identification of the various complex mechanisms by which different actors influence ongoing transitions in different ways may empower and enable actors to be made aware of the impact on these processes so that their actions can be better aligned towards contributing to a desired transition [23].
An over-arching justification for the application of some components of the TM framework to consideration of future empirical research on higher
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Richard Freeland, Mary-Ellen Boyle, Halina Brown, and Philip Vergragt for helpful discussions that stimulated, challenged, and strengthened our thinking. We also thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback that greatly improved this manuscript.
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