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Universities can do more to deliver against the sustainable development goals (SDGs), working with faculty, staff and students, as well as their wider stakeholder community and alumni body. They play a critical role in helping shape new ways for the world, educating global citizens and delivering knowledge and innovation into society. Universities can be engines of societal transformation. Using a multiple case study approach, this study aims to explore different ways of strategizing sustainability toward delivering the SDGs are explored in a university setting with an example from the UK, Bulgaria (Europe) and USA.

The first case is a public UK university that adopted enterprise and sustainability as its academic mission to secure differentiation in a disrupted and increasingly marketized global higher education sector; this became a source of inspiration for change in regional businesses and the local community. The second case is a business sector-led sustainability-driven transformation working with a private university in Bulgaria to catalyze economic regeneration and social innovation. Finally, a case from the office for sustainability in a major US research university is given to show how its engagement program connected faculty and students in sustainability projects within the institution and with external partners.

Each case is in effect a “living lab,” positioning sustainability as an intentional and aspirational strategy with sustainable development and the SDG framework a means to that end. Leadership at all levels, and by students, was key to success in acting with a shared purpose. Partnerships within and with universities can help accelerate delivery of the SDGs, enabling higher education to make a fuller contribution to sustaining the economic, environmental, cultural and intellectual well-being of our global communities.

The role of universities as the engine of transformational sustainability toward delivering the SDGs has been explored by way of three case studies that highlight different means toward that end. The collegiate nature of the higher education sector, with its shared governance models and different constituencies and performance drivers, means that sustainability at a strategic level must be led with leaders at all levels acting with purpose. The “living lab” model can become a part of transformative institutional change that draws on both top-down and bottom-up strategies in pursuit of sustainable development.

Disruptive megatrends, such as technology and globalization, are driving transformational change in universities as they seek to differentiate themselves given economic and social market forces. However, higher education (HE) institutions can struggle to achieve change at the scale and speed needed, given their pluralistic nature and competing goals. As primarily collegiate organizations run by academics, leadership and governance are by persuasion and consensus over diktat. A retrospective analysis of the transformational journey of a UK university that set its radical new mission to become “the Enterprise University” has been undertaken, and a new leadership and governance framework articulated. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Drawing upon a conceptual framework of leadership and governance to codify change management and its acceleration, the change journey in a university undergoing a strategic transformation has been analyzed. Leadership and organizational frameworks are examined focusing on the interactions between the senior management hierarchy (SMH), as the command-control operating system, and the adaptive community of social networks within the university and external stakeholders. The critical steps in effecting institutional change and the nature of the social agreements underpinning transformation are subject to retrospective analysis. How ideas flowed through the organization to create value through innovation is reviewed.

Analyses reveal how the SMH worked with the adaptive social networks of staff and stakeholders in concert around a shared purpose, identifying enablers and barriers to a healthy idea flow. Drawing on the leadership and governance framework empowers organizational transformation, paying more deliberate attention to the stewardship of ideas and how change actually happens. To thrive in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments and sustain competitive advantage in a dynamic global market place, leaders need to be able to harness the social forces and inspire people to take actions around a shared vision of the future.

Universities represent a traditional community of knowledge workers and service professionals where approaches to leadership and governance are typically collegiate and consensual. Examining the strategic transformation of a university seeking to move at pace to accommodate the global disruption of the HE sector is relevant to how change happens in related environments. Given the growth of the knowledge economy, represented as organizations and networks, key lessons are available. The importance of activating people around shared purpose through deliberate engagement by leaders with social networks is relevant to delivering transformation in conditions of super complexity.

Anyone seeking to influence another is a potential leader. Within higher education, determining what an institution should undertake on sustainability can be daunting. Sustainability leaders face labyrinthine, multifaceted sub-cultures, influencers and viewpoints across staff, students, government, business and alumni all with an opinion on whether, how and in what order of priority sustainability should be taken forward. In this paper we take on this challenge by synthesising and critically evaluating core principles and working models for influencing and leading for sustainability in higher education. We identify a series of eight challenges affecting delivery of sustainability and seek to understand how conceptual models and principles in sustainability decision-making and leadership could address these. We draw on the experience of both authors, in tandem with comments from workshop and leadership training programme participants who attended the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) Leadership Lab training in the UK, as well as reflections arising in a detailed case study from the University of Edinburgh. We bring key insights from theory and practice for the benefits of individuals or teams seeking to influence and persuade key decision-makers to embrace the sustainability agenda.

School sex education has the potential to evoke a range of personal and political reactions. While it is usually agreed that sexuality should be ‘done’ in school, few agree on the best way of ‘doing’ it. This article provides a personal account of the development of sex education at Shepparton South Technical School, Victoria, Australia from 1973‐1985. It is supported by interviews with the people involved in those events and archival materials, including media reports. It also documents the efforts of extreme right activists to discredit and stop programmes, and the State Liberal government’s attempt to formulate a policy on sex education. First I provide a general background to technical schools in Victoria in the 1970s followed by a discussion of Shepparton South Technical School specifically. I then discuss the development of the sex education (social biology) programme, the pivotal role of the Social Biology resource Centre, and the networks involved. I also describe the attacks on the programme in the late 1970s, and their origins and impact. I conclude with a discussion of the outcomes of this intense public scrutiny, and the demise of social biology and the secondary technical schools, the ‘techs’ in the 1980s.