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Organisations have been working towards becoming more sustainable; where their efforts have been mainly on a steady state focussing on internal proactive changes. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how external events, e.g. COVID-19, affect organisations and their sustainability efforts.

A survey was sent to a database of 11,657 contacts, with a response rate of 5.60% obtained. The results were analysed using descriptive statistics, ranking and a ratio analysis comparing different types of organisations (corporations, higher education institutions, civil society and public sector organisations).

COVID-19 changed the organisation drivers for and barriers to sustainability perspective towards external stimuli, rather than internal factors. COVID-19 also affected the system elements negatively, with the exception of organisational systems. The results also show that the system elements are affected by an external event or crisis and are dependent on the type of organisation.

This paper proposes the “Organisational sustainability transition forced by exogenous events” framework to help organisations better understand and be prepared for unexpected external events. Organisations should learn from the experiences in dealing with COVID-19 and adopt a more humanistic approach to their sustainability efforts, rather than traditional approaches based on solipsism and techno-managerial centrism.

This paper aims to conceptualize impacts of higher education institutions (HEIs) on sustainable development (SD), complementing previous literature reviews by broadening the perspective from what HEIs do in pursuit of SD to how these activities impact society, the environment and the economy.

The paper provides a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2005 and 2017. Inductive content analysis was applied to identify major themes and impact areas addressed in the literature to develop a conceptual framework detailing the relationship between HEIs’ activities and their impacts on SD.

The paper identifies six impact areas where direct and indirect impacts of HEIs on SD may occur. The findings indicate a strong focus on case studies dealing with specific projects and a lack of studies analyzing impacts from a more holistic perspective.

This systematic literature review enables decision-makers in HEIs, researchers and educators to better understand how their activities may affect society, the environment and the economy, and it provides a solid foundation to tackle these impacts.

The review highlights that HEIs have an inherent responsibility to make societies more sustainable. HEIs must embed SD into their systems while considering their impacts on society.

This paper provides a holistic conceptualization of HEIs’ impacts on SD. The conceptual framework can be useful for future research that attempts to analyze HEIs’ impacts on SD from a holistic perspective.

Government-owned companies (GOCs), such as ports, have engaged in efforts to become more sustainable. Most of such efforts have been technological and policy ones and mainly focusing on the environment, with limited research on organisational change management. This paper aims to provide insights into how ports have been addressing sustainability change forces and pressures.

Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with top-level directors and sustainability managers, representing ports across Europe’s maritime regions and a range of port types and sizes. The interviews were analysed using grounded theory’s constant comparative analysis.

The findings highlighted that the ports’ success in their process to become more sustainable depends on how they take advantage of the thrust forces and reduce the drag ones. The findings serve to develop the “ports’ sustainability change management framework”, with five stages: reactive, proactive, transactive, interactive, and sustainable port.

Ports, and other GOCs, should capitalise on their private–public nature in their contribution to making societies more sustainable by adopting a holistic perspective and interactive changes.

This paper provides a dynamic perspective on corporate sustainability efforts, particularly on GOCs, through organisational change management complementing technocentric and managerial approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to review and assess the state of sustainability reporting in universities.

Analysis of the performance level of 12 universities sustainability reports using the Graphical Assessment of Sustainability in Universities tool.

The results show that sustainability reporting in universities is still in its early stages (both in numbers of institutions reporting and in level of reporting) when compared to sustainability reporting in corporations.

The research is limited by the limited number of universities that publish sustainability reports. However, the results show that universities could learn from the experiences of corporate sustainability reporting efforts, and incorporate them into their efforts as learning organisations to better align their systems with sustainability.

University leaders and champions need to consider publishing more information on the social and educational dimensions.

The paper provides an analysis of sustainability reporting in universities, which has the potential to better incorporate and institutionalise sustainability.

This study aims to identify the growth pattern of research literature, most influential authors, most impactful documents and most relevant topics on sustainable development (SD) in higher education management (HEM) from 2000 to 2023.

The research approach used descriptive quantitative and bibliometric analysis. Scopus was used to retrieve data from 811 selected documents from 2000 to 2023. Data analysis used VOSviewer and R Biblioshiny.

The results showed intense development of sustainable development research in higher education management, especially in 2013–2023. Core literature was identified based on the volume of publications or citations from the perspective of authors, documents and keywords. Global research topics on SD in HEM focus on curriculum development and sustainable learning, sustainable higher education management and enhancing research and development of SD in HEM. The results of this research reveal the emerging intellectual structure in the field of educational management and provide reference points for academics who wish to study this discipline.

This study offers a valuable knowledge map for future research on sustainable development in higher education management. As a map, researchers can find core documents and current topics and identify potential research issues in this study.

Much of the current literature on integrating sustainability into HEIs is focussed on why HEIs should embrace sustainable development (SD) and what is still missing or hindering work and the integration of efforts. There is much less exploration of how SD has been interpreted at the individual HEI level and action taken as a result. This case study reflects on important elements of the journey Nottingham Trent University (NTU) in the UK has taken to integrate sustainability, focussing on key decisions and activity in 2009/10. In highlighting this, the authors seek to empower those looking to support and/or lead the embedding of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), separately or as part of an integrated effort, in their own institution. Today in 2019, NTU is a global leader in integrating ESD as part of a wider SD agenda. The work which this paper presents, to understand and establish a baseline of key elements of NTU's existing ESD activity and systems, was an important turning point. Activities undertaken to review and assess “where are we now?”, primarily through an institution-wide survey in 2009/10, led to important insights and supported dialogue, as well as the connection and underpinning of core administrative elements of the NTU SD framework and systems. Further recommendations are given in the final section of this paper on other drivers that can help to embed ESD within an HEI.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse through a systematic literature review the evolution of the theme of environmental social and governance (ESG) in universities, correlating variables and presenting a panorama for Latin American universities.

This paper uses a systematic literature review approach. The Web of Science database was used for data collection, and a set of keywords (Environmental, Social and Governance × Universities) and a classification method were used, resulting in 111 articles classified in the Zotero software. After classification, these publications were analysed in the VOSviewer software.

The main evidence about ESG and universities shows that its relevance has been growing worldwide with an emphasis on England, the USA, Spain, followed by Brazil in fourth place regarding the number of papers published worldwide. The most representative areas identified were governance, sustainability, higher education, sustainable campus, environmental science, ecology, science and technology. The journals presenting more published papers under the topic are International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Journal of Cleaner Production and Sustainability. As for the most relevant authors, the Europeans Lozano and Leal Filho, Velasquez from Mexico and Brandli from Brazil were identified. As for institutions, the University Durham, State University System of Florida and State University of Campinas do Brazil stand out.

As the main limitation of the study is related to the sample of articles. This study is focused on the analysis of publications from the last decade, presenting only 111 results. However, this restriction in the timeline is justified as it is a new topic; this study was also limited to the use of a single database; in this sense, future research can carry out a more comprehensive review of the sustainability literature covering periods prior to a decade and an analysis in other databases.

These results provide a basis for improving sustainability in universities and ESG in Latin America. It also allows to explore and reflect on several indicators, enabling the evaluation and planning of actions to improve competitiveness.

The increasing global concerns about the environmental degradation and climate changes oblige architecture students to apply sustainable design approaches in their studio projects. Therefore, renewable energy raises the expectation of providing sustainable solutions for their architectural design proposals. This paper aims to investigate the learning of students in knowledge, awareness and applicability on sustainability during their first three years of the part 1 architecture programme. Surveys were conducted on 500 students from eight architecture schools from the local universities, two architecture schools from the polytechnic colleges and three architectural schools from the overseas universities. These survey results from 335 respondents confirmed that the learning on sustainability through self (51.6%), peer (48.6%) and design studio lecturers (37.0%). These results confirmed also that most respondents did rely on pre-design assessments to develop sustainable design strategies in their final architectural design proposals. These results concluded that the perception of architecture students on learning sustainability is based mainly on other sources. These findings provide knowledge for educationists and practitioners towards the planning of architecture curriculum and the implementation of pedagogical approach in sustainability. This paper determines the most important source of learning on sustainability knowledge for students in the pedagogy at university level.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse 12 assessment tools of sustainability in universities and develop the structure and the contents of these tools to be more intelligible. The configuration of the tools reviewed highlight indicators that clearly communicate only the essential information. This paper explores how the theoretical concept of a sustainable university is translated into more measurable variables to support practitioners and academics in assessing sustainability in universities.

The main method for this paper was a desk study approach, which incorporated reviewing research papers, graduate theses, academic books, network platforms and websites.

The tools reviewed share similar traits in terms of criteria, sub-criteria and indicators. Five benchmarks are essential for a holistic framework: management; academia; environment; engagement and innovation.

This research can not only be used to improve existing assessment tools but also as a means to develop new tools tailored for universities that face a variety of challenges and lack the ability to measure their sustainability policies.

Making higher education more sustainable through all the criteria mentioned influences students, as well as staff, to maintain a culture of sustainability.

This study contributes to the literature by simplifying and detailing the structure and contents of the tools in a way which indicators are shown, giving a full picture of these tools to enable universities to be more aware of the sustainability issues that affect them.