Sustainable Higher Education and Leadership
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Management".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2022) | Viewed by 18097
Special Issue Editor
2. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Interests: transformational leadership; governance models; sustainability for a just transition; change management; change agency; empowerment; social networks; stakeholder engagement; radical collaboration; higher education
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Given its primary role as a knowledge producer, higher education can serve as a powerful means to help to create a more sustainable future through its academic mission. Universities and colleges can play a critical role in developing new systemic and transformative solutions through multistakeholder collaboration. However, as organizations that have stood for many centuries in some cases, the ability of higher education institutions to deliver on sustainability demands that they too adapt to this new global agenda for change.
Change for sustainability must be led. Rather than a regulatory or discretionary activity, sustainability is reframed as a strategic agenda and essential for long-term value creation in higher education. Drawing on global megatrends and conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, higher education is positioned as a force for good.
For an organization to change, individuals need to change—organizations do not change, people do. The importance of aligning actions with values to empower people to change and support others in transition draws on formal and informal leadership, networks, and power that can be leveraged to drive change in support of embracing sustainability.
Concepts such as adaptive leadership, leading beyond one’s authority, the targets of leadership, followership, and change agency at the levels of the individual and higher education institution are of great interest. How leaders choose to frame and talk about sustainability to promote engagement and empower others to lead change across the higher education landscape is relevant to this issue. The influence of students and wider networks and associations is also important to building our understanding of leadership of sustainability in higher educational contexts. The role of university and college boards of non-executives/governors/council members in strategic leadership of governance is also relevant.
This Special Issue of Sustainability will focus on the role of leadership at all levels from the executive/administrative/board to the faculty and staff, students and alumni, and partners and stakeholders and regulators and governments, examining sustainability as a driver of change and transformation in higher education and beyond. Manuscripts can be illustrated by cases drawn from regional, national, and international levels.
Dr. Wendy Purcell
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- Higher Education
- Leadership and Governance
- Sustainability
- Transformation
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