Many universities embedded sustainability into their academic systems after top management commitment with Sustainable Development (SD) following Copernicus Charter and/or Taillores Declaration signature beforehand. However, some Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) implemented sustainability without such a formal commitment. At Northern and Western European countries, like Sweden and Wales, good practices are already being implemented following this flow, but at southern European countries like Portugal, those top driving forces are not being conducted. Moreover, Portuguese universities’ autonomy and social responsibility led them to develop several timely initiatives and policies towards ESD that resulted from their proactiveness and not from a superior entity recommendation. Also, due to economic crises over the last decade as well as political instability institutions are implementing SD as it one possible rhythm and each University had its own strategy or policy. Nevertheless, the initiatives seem to have been taken in isolation from each other and not integrated at all. This study’s aim is to determine how sustainability was integrated into policies and strategies within the framework and goals of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) 2005-2014 and give insights for future directions. The research was built upon discussions whether each university has its own sustainability implementation designed to commit their institutions to SD. Earlier detailed content analysis on all public universities plans, strategies and reports, found that, in Portugal, campus operations and SD through on-campus experiences were the main topics of SD implementation of the recognized university system. A questionnaire survey to each person responsible of SD implementation at university was developed based upon a literature review of relevant peer-reviewed papers. Their responses were analyzed via descriptive analysis, grounded theory, and inferential statistics. Preliminary results confirmed that there were multiple and diversified examples of sustainable development implementation throughout the system as most universities are making efforts to contribute to SD. However overall, the implementation of SD in universities is not holistically integrated throughout the institutions. Each university had its own strategy, which is seemingly in line with the lack of national integrated strategies or policies related to Education for SD. As there is still potential for the community to learn from the processes striving to embed sustainability in Portuguese Universities community, a proposal of a thinktank of initiatives, to enlarge the knowledge and sharing of good and integrated practices in Portuguese Universities will be conducted.
Keywords: Education for Sustainable Development, Higher Education Institutions, Portugal, Universities, holistic approach
2b. Educating for sustainability
