Exploring Sustainability Assessment Practices in Higher Education: A Comprehensive Review through Content and Bibliometric Analyses

Abstract

The drastically increasing significance of sustainability development has motivated higher education institutions (HEIs) to make efforts to achieve sustainability development goals (SDGs). This has led to the inevitable need to track and assess these efforts. This review is centered on the meticulous collection and analysis of pertinent papers within the context of HEIs, subsequently organizing and consolidating them into distinct sustainability domains by utilizing the PRISMA methodology. A collection of 83 pre-existing articles and publications retrieved from the Scopus database is employed for an in-depth exploration of the current research. This study employs both bibliometric and content analyses to explore distribution and citation dynamics and identifies six primary thematic concentrations within the field. The key findings highlight a significant increase in the importance of sustainability, emphasizing the critical need for HEIs to integrate SDGs across all departments. Additionally, the development of cross-institutional evaluation tools tailored to various sustainability aspects is underscored. These tools elucidate key competencies and broaden the application of educational sustainability in both research and curriculum development. The study also identifies a need for future research to explore how effectively these assessment methodologies drive tangible sustainability outcomes within HEIs. It suggests that developing more nuanced and adaptable evaluation tools could better meet the diverse needs of institutions globally. Additionally, the findings support HEIs’ and stakeholders’ decision making by identifying potential challenges in the implementation and assessment of sustainability.