Using a Multi-Criteria Ranking Method to Assess Factors Influencing the Implementation of Sustainable Development at Higher Educational Institutions

Abstract

Over the last years, there has been a significant increase in interest in sustainable development in higher education institutions, and many have begun to implement sustainable development into their system. Several sustainable development assessment tools have also been developed to help universities systematically measure, monitor, benchmark, communicate, and manage their sustainable development efforts. These efforts have led to mixed results. It seems that one of the main reasons for this situation is the non-systematic and non-holistic approach to implementing sustainable development in universities. Thus, it can be assumed that the implementation of sustainable development in a university should cover all dimensions of its functioning and involve actors within it. Therefore, the aim of this article is to present a tool (inspired by the concept of university sustainability), based on the method of multicriteria rankings, for assessing the factors influencing the implementation of sustainable development in higher education institutions at the level of departments, as relatively autonomous wholes, based on the analysis of departments at one of the leading technical universities in Poland. The proposed tool provides an opportunity for a more holistic view of sustainable development implementation, both by prioritizing factors and by considering that higher education institutions are systems that are, in fact, composed of two distinct but necessarily cooperating subsystems: the academic subsystem and the administrative subsystem. The proposal is preliminary, but it seems that given the relevance and urgency of the sustainable development issue, this is the direction to take in research on sustainable development management in higher education institutions.