Insights on Sustainable Universities from Economic and Statistical Perspectives

Šipilova Viktorija
Additional contact information
Šipilova Viktorija: Researcher, The Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Daugavpils University, Latvia

Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2019, vol. 8, issue 2, 186-198

Abstract: Currently, the issues on sustainability receive extremely high interest, especially from young generation. This makes universities as key participants in sustainable development as far as they provide wide possibilities for engagement in the process. Despite many studies devoted to universities as participants of sustainable development, there still is insufficient knowledge about their contribution to the process. Mostly, studies are qualitative and consider certain examples of good practices, which do not provide insights on common and different characteristics and trends of universities’ contribution to sustainable development. This is the result of the early stage of development of the reporting about universities’ sustainable efforts what limits possibilities to carry quantitative analysis. The paper aims, first, to search for characteristics of universities’ contribution to sustainable development and, second, to detect trends by using numerical secondary data worked up in UI GreenMetric World University Ranking. The paper focuses on universities from European Union. Special attention is devoted to countries’ economic development level as far as scientific literature suggests that the level of economic development may affect involvement in sustainable development. Research findings allows to indicate that there are both common and distinct characteristics across the cases from economically high and less developed countries what is significant for further policy-making and popularizing of sustainability idea across universities in the European Union. Universities continue to improve practices and search for new accents. However, universities’ intention to report about their sustainable efforts in long-term perspective for continuing data collection must be more active.

Keywords: universities; sustainable development; economic development level; data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/ajis-2019-0030 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vrs:ajinst:v:8:y:2019:i:2:p:186-198:n:20

DOI: 10.2478/ajis-2019-0030

Access Statistics for this article

Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies is currently edited by Marco Cilento

More articles in Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().