Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) occupy a paradoxical position in the sustainability transition. They train professionals, researchers and policymakers who will manage environmental and social change. However, their own operations, governance structures and reward systems frequently reproduce the short-termism and fragmentation the sustainability agenda seeks to overcome (Stephens et al., 2008). European policy reaches a similar conclusion: the European Commission's proposal for a Council Recommendation on learning for environmental sustainability states plainly that the field “is not yet a systemic feature of policy and practice in the EU” (European Commission, 2022a). The European University Association's 2021 survey of nearly 400 institutions found that three-quarters had taken concrete steps toward environmental sustainability at the strategic level, yet most still lacked integrated policies that cover teaching, research, campus operations and stakeholder engagement (Stöber et al., 2021). The same fragmentation appears in how sustainability is measured: reviews of the assessment tools used by HEIs find that most privilege dimensions that are easiest to quantify, chiefly operational eco-efficiency and governance structures, while faculty development, multi-stakeholder decision-making and curriculum integration remain comparatively unaddressed (Findler et al., 2019; Niedlich et al., 2020).
This Special Issue addresses that gap directly. Its point of departure is the whole-institution approach to sustainability, that is, the proposition that a HEI becomes sustainable not through discipline-specific or department-level interventions but through the coordinated integration and alignment of governance, curriculum, operations and community engagement, organized through systems thinking rather than accumulated piecemeal (Christou et al., 2024; Leicht et al., 2018; Bianchi et al., 2022), a premise that also aligns with the macro-objective of the European Commission's 2022 strategy for universities as agents of the green and digital transitions (European Commission, 2022b). The call for this Special Issue, “Green Horizons: Navigating the Transition to Systemic Sustainability in Higher Education Institutions,” translated that premise into a research agenda.
Sterling (2004) argued two decades ago that HEIs' response to sustainability would remain cosmetic as long as institutions treated it as a bolt-on rather than as an occasion for systemic learning that changes the assumptions underlying an institution's operations, not only its stated policies. Lozano et al. (2013), reviewing a decade of sustainability declarations, found a similar pattern: declarations proliferated while measurable institutional change lagged. The 11 papers selected for Part 1 of this Special Issue, drawn from quantitative and qualitative submissions across four continents, engage directly with this gap between declared intent and systemic practice, spanning institutional governance and individual cognition, from European to Asian and Middle-Eastern universities.
This Special Issue has received more than 40 submissions, of which around 65% were deemed in line with the Special Issue's core ideas and to display a research quality aligned with the high standards required by the Journal. As the number of accepted papers exceeded expectations, the submissions are being published as a double special issue, of which this constitutes Part 1.
Part 1 includes the first 11 accepted papers in the special issue. These papers have been categorized based on the following areas relevant to sustainable development in HEIs:
Governance and institutional alignment
People, behavior and the limits of formal structure
Curriculum and pedagogical innovation
Diversity of institutional and delivery context
Part 2 is expected to include around 15 more papers categorized differently, which clearly broadens the analytical spectrum for the overall special issue.
Governance and institutional alignment
The clearest diagnosis of the systemic problem appears in Berg (2026), who applies institutional decoupling theory, whose foundational formulation dates to Meyer and Rowan (1977), to four European universities. Meyer and Rowan argued that organizations under pressure to conform to a legitimating myth often adopt the formal structure associated with it while keeping actual operations decoupled from it to preserve operational flexibility. Nearly 50 years later, Berg (2026) find the same mechanism at work in environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments: based on 20 semi-structured interviews with students, staff, administrators, leaders and industry representatives across four institutions, they identify environmental education gaps, uneven digitalization, misaligned infrastructure investment, unresolved social inequalities, and, underlying all three ESG dimensions, governance deficits marked by short-term budgetary thinking and weak transparency. Their contribution lies in showing that governance deficits serve as the structural catalyst sustaining decoupling across the three ESG dimensions simultaneously, rather than each dimension decoupling independently for its own local reasons.
Attah and Jibrin (2026) offer a partial account of when this gap closes rather than persists. Working across 40 HEIs and combining quantitative analysis of sustainability performance metrics with qualitative thematic analysis of institutional documents, they find that sustainability performance is contingent on what they term “governance-leadership coherence”: neither governance structures nor leadership vision produce transformation in isolation, but their dynamic interaction does, with governance supplying stability and accountability and leadership supplying adaptive capacity. Regional variation in how this coherence is achieved suggests that the pathway to alignment is context-dependent, even when the underlying mechanism is not.
Hasan et al. (2026) extend this concept to the operational layer, linking governance decisions to day-to-day institutional life. Drawing on a conceptual review of 164 peer-reviewed studies and six semi-structured interviews at a Global South institution, they find that sustainability outcomes strengthen when curriculum integration, governance and campus-community partnerships are intentionally aligned through pedagogical and operational innovation. Integrated dashboards, authentic student projects and reciprocal partnerships are identified as potential feedback mechanisms that connect macro-level policy intent to micro-level learning and operational routines.
Taken together, these three papers reframe how the sector should diagnose its slow progress. The decoupling identified by Berg (2026) is not, on this reading, an implementation failure that a better policy language would correct, but a structural default, the condition an institution reverts to unless governance, leadership and curriculum are actively and continuously aligned through the feedback mechanisms that Hasan et al. (2026) describe and through the governance-leadership interaction that Attah and Jibrin (2026) model. Sustainability offices and strategic plans that operate parallel to, rather than embedded within, ordinary governance and budgeting processes should expect this pattern to reassert itself over time.
People, behavior and the limits of formal structure
A second cluster of papers shifts the unit of analysis from the institution to the individual dimension, examining why people within HEIs comply with, resist, or actively undermine the sustainability initiatives implemented by governance and leadership. This individual-level focus aligns with the results evidenced by a survey, which found that heavy workloads, insufficient training and disciplinary silos are among the barriers that academic staff most frequently cited for not pursuing sustainability initiatives (Jongbloed and Veidemane, 2024). Mahmood et al. (2026) provide the clearest bridge between the governance-level and individual-level literature in this issue. By analyzing 785 middle managers across 62 Pakistani HEIs using a time-lagged design, they find that employees who identify strongly with their institution tend to translate their institution's corporate social responsibilityand sustainability initiatives into green behavior and knowledge sharing, consistently with the theory on social identity. This mechanism does not hold unconditionally, however: when employees perceive high levels of organizational politics or chief executive officer narcissism, their trust in the institution's ethical standards declines and the link between identification and green behavior weakens or reverses. This gives the governance-decoupling thesis a micro-foundation: individual leaders, through narcissistic or self-interested behavior, can actively produce decoupling within a single department, even against institutional policy.
Shaikh et al. (2026) examine a different individual-level variable: generational cohorts. Surveying 284 employees across HEIs in Pakistan and applying SmartPLS multigroup analysis, they show that digital technology, information and communication technology (ICT)infrastructure and technology leadership can significantly predict green human resource management practices, which in turn enhance organizational commitment to sustainability. This pattern of structural relationships is significantly affected by whether the workforce belongs to Generation X, Y, or Z. In other words, workforce composition is itself a variable that institutions must manage in transition planning, since a technology-leadership intervention calibrated for one generational cohort may underperform for another.
Asad et al. (2026) shift the lens to gender composition in a study directly relevant to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5. Using a survey of female educators in public-sector HEIs in Sindh, Pakistan, analyzed with descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation, they find that participants entered the area of teaching primarily for intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations, and that work-life balance, contrary to a common assumption in the literature, was not reported as a serious challenge for this population group. Through Expectancy-Value Theory, this suggests that retaining women in HEI teaching roles in this context may depend more on strengthening intrinsic rewards, mentorship, recognition and professional identity than on addressing work-life balance in isolation.
Three of the six behavioral and organizational studies in this special issue specifically draw on Pakistan's higher education context, thus providing the issue with an interesting regional depth, though these findings should not be read as universal without replication elsewhere.
Curriculum and pedagogical innovation
A third cluster of papers in this Part 1 addresses a more concrete question: what does sustainability-oriented teaching look like in the classroom or studio, once governance and behavior are aligned in principle? Galindo-Durán et al. (2026) map scientific production in the didactics of artistic expression across Spanish HEIs and find that evaluation systems built around productivity metrics continue to reward publication volume over research with tangible social or environmental impact, a version of the publish-or-perish logic that Leal Filho et al. (2018) identify as an obstacle to faculty commitment to sustainability teaching. Read alongside the other papers dealing with governance in this special issue, this is a curriculum-level instance of the same decoupling problem: institutions may declare commitment to SDG-aligned research while internal evaluation criteria continue to reward output disconnected from those goals.
O'Brien and Kearney (2026) approach the question from the opposite direction, using a qualitative case study at an emerging regional university informed by action-learning cycles of reflection and engagement. Drawing on the philosophy of personalism and treating place as a relational, context-specific construct, the authors show that place-based signature pedagogy makes regenerative enterprise education actionable. In doing so, it offers a credible alternative to the extractive economic models that conventional business curricula often take for granted. The place-based practice encouraged students to engage with real-world questions about place, economic opportunity and socio-ecological impact and the depth of their evaluation reflected the framework's pedagogical value. This paper offers a working alternative to the decoupled default: a pedagogy in which sustainability is the organizing logic of the learning experience, not an add-on unit.
Aluko (2026) brings the discussion into emerging technology, increasingly relevant to how sustainability content is delivered at scale. Surveying 278 lecturers and students across HEIs in the United Kingdom and using Hayes' PROCESS Macro to test a serial mediation model grounded in Experiential Learning Theory and Self-Determination Theory, they find that perceived immersive involvement in artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled virtual reality learning is associated with knowledge retention both directly and indirectly, through gamified motivation and through a serial pathway involving engagement and motivation together. Engagement alone did not significantly predict retention; motivation accounted for the significant indirect effect. This is a caution for institutions investing in AI and virtual reality (VR)infrastructure on the assumption that immersive technology will, by itself, produce deeper learning. Instructional design must deliberately build in a gamified motivational structure rather than rely on the novelty of the technology.
Diversity of institutional and delivery contexts
Two further papers, more distant at first glance from this special issue's central themes, test the boundaries of what systemic sustainability can mean once the frame widens beyond the secular research-university model that dominates this literature. Sujono et al. (2026) examine waqf, an Islamic philanthropic instrument with a documented history of financing education, health and social welfare, as a mechanism for sustainable human capital. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling on a sample of 163 students from Islamic HEIs in Indonesia who had participated in a “waqf-raiser” program, they found a positive and significant effect of waqf knowledge on individual performance, mediated in part by intellectual capital. Religiosity, contrary to expectations, did not moderate this relationship. The contribution positions religious and philanthropic institutions as a structurally significant and underexplored part of HEI sustainability infrastructure, where resource stewardship is embedded in doctrine rather than imposed by external ESG frameworks. Read against the European decoupling findings above, the waqf case is instructive by contrast: whereas ESG commitment there functions partly as external legitimating myths, subject to the decoupling described by Meyer and Rowan (1977), waqf knowledge in the Indonesian sample functions as an internalized value system that translates more directly into individual-level outcomes.
Tsaples et al. (2026) address a different kind of sustainability altogether, that of the educational delivery system itself. Reporting results from the Optimizing Distance Learning Educational Programs project across 12 university courses, based on questionnaires measuring students' and instructors' personality traits and teaching preferences, they find that matching student groups to instructors by compatibility measurably improves course performance. In a sector under pressure to widen access without proportionally more resources, this study examines the sustainable allocation of scarce resources: instructor time and attention. Its relevance to this special issue lies less in being an environmental or social sustainability study in the narrow sense than in demonstrating that operational infrastructure, that is, how institutions deliver more education without proportionally more resources, is itself a systemic sustainability question, one the governance-focused papers here tend to treat as background rather than as an object of study in its own right.
Toward a systemic research agenda
These 11 contributions substantiate the premise of this Special Issue's call: sustainability in HEIs depends on aligning governance, individual behavior, curriculum and operational design, not on adding isolated interventions such as a curriculum redesign or a stand-alone leadership training program. That alignment is easier to state as a principle than to observe in the data collected here.
Most studies in this issue, by design and by feasibility constraints, provide focused evidence within a single analytical layer, such as governance, individual behavior, or pedagogy, with limited empirical linkage across layers. Attah and Jibrin (2026) come closest to bridging governance and leadership within a single design, and Hasan et al. (2026) come closest to bridging governance and curriculum, but no paper here directly links, within a single dataset, a governance-level intervention to its downstream effect on staff behavior and, further downstream, to measurable curricular change. Longitudinal and multilevel designs that follow a specific governance reform as it propagates, or fails to propagate, into departmental practice, staff behavior and classroom pedagogy would let future researchers test directly whether the governance-leadership coherence model, such as the one proposed by Attah and Jibrin (2026), can effectively predict downstream behavioral and curricular outcomes, not only institutional performance metrics.
Cross-regional comparison is similarly underdeveloped, even though the issue's geographic scope, on a paper-by-paper basis, is very broad. European institutional decoupling, Pakistani generational and gender dynamics, Indonesian Islamic philanthropy, Spanish arts-education production and United Kingdom immersive learning appear here as parallel cases rather than as comparative ones. A natural next step is deliberate cross-national replication, testing whether the governance, leadership and behavioral relationships identified in one regulatory and cultural context hold with the same weight and direction in systems with different state-university relationships, funding models and leadership selection mechanisms. Comparative designs of this kind, rather than additional single-country studies, would help establish which of the issue's findings reflect general dynamics of the sustainability transition in higher education and which are contingent on the institutional context in which they were first observed.
Conclusion
A single claim underlies the empirical variety of these 11 papers: an HEI becomes sustainable not by adding sustainability to what it already does, but by changing how it decides what to do. Governance, curriculum, incentives and community relationships are not independent levers but expressions of one institutional identity, the premise of the whole-institution approach this Special Issue adopts; treating them as separable is itself a symptom of the decoupling reflected in these issue documents. For institutional leaders, this means sustainability initiatives that sit outside ordinary governance, budgeting and evaluation will remain vulnerable to that same decoupling, however well designed. The 11 studies gathered here do not offer a blueprint for closing that gap, only evidence that closing it is the only shift capable of resolving the paradox with which this editorial began.
