This study systematically examines how higher education institutions have embedded sustainability across teaching, research, governance, operations and community engagement between 2015 and 2025. It seeks to analyze the organizational mechanisms, tensions and governance dynamics that shape sustainability institutionalization and produce divergent trajectories across institutions.
Following the PRISMA protocol, 126 peer reviewed articles from Scopus indexed Q1 and A ranked journals were analyzed. A combined inductive and deductive coding strategy informed by organizational theory was applied across five domains: campus operations, curriculum development, research and innovation, governance and policy and community engagement. Thematic synthesis and bibliometric mapping were used to identify recurring patterns, cross domain dynamics and structural imbalances in the literature.
The findings indicate that sustainability embedding in higher education unfolds as a paradoxical organizational process rather than a linear progression of best practices. While formal governance mechanisms, ESG reporting and sustainability rankings increase institutional commitment and visibility, implementation remains uneven and frequently fragmented across domains. Recurring patterns include partial institutionalization, symbolic compliance, stakeholder driven adaptation and governance constraints. Emerging trends include digital transformation, intensified accountability pressures and context specific localization aligned with the SDGs. Persistent challenges relate to capacity gaps, decentralized authority and misalignment between formal strategy and everyday academic practice.
By reframing sustainability embedding as an organizational behavior phenomenon, this review advances organization theory by explaining how institutional pressures interact with loosely coupled academic structures to shape uneven transformation. The study offers a theory of informed synthesis that moves beyond descriptive aggregation toward a conceptual understanding of sustainability institutionalization in complex organizations.
