Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Campus Sustainability 3.0

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Leith Sharp has been one of the folks leading the charge on campus sustainability over the past decade.  In her latest article Higher education: the quest for a sustainable campus in Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy (open access), she assesses some of that history from her work at Harvard and offers a few thoughts on what the next wave might look like.

A few excerpts:

• I wondered how it could be possible to make widespread institutional changes to meet the demands of environmental sustainability when it was not even being done in the very university sector where these ideas were being promulgated. If universities would not change, then who can and who will, I wondered? To a growing number of people, the idea of teaching sustainability without demonstrating it is highly problematic.
• [A]long the way some of us started to notice that while universities were amassing project successes in a piecemeal fashion, they were not achieving the kind of deep organizational transformation many of us now see as fundamentally necessary. For example, it was not uncommon for an institution to construct a showcase green building project one year only to revert to conventional building design in later projects.
• The latest NWF Survey also showed that staff, faculty, and student-advocacy groups have been equal champions of the movement, debunking a common misconception that it was primarily student driven.
• Throughout the 1990s and up until fairly recently, the view of colleges and universities was that greening their campuses would simply cost too much, taking precious funds away from teaching and research. It is only recently that our institutions are finally realizing that an enormous amount can be achieved either at no added cost or within a very reasonable payback period.
• Most global environmental problems are escalating at an exponential rate, and despite the last fifteen years of effort, the campus sustainability movement has not yet succeeded in achieving wide-scale transformation of college and university campuses into models of sustainable practice. To increase its effectiveness, the campus sustainability movement must now turn toward organizational change management, basing its strategies on a much more sophisticated understanding about how universities (and other large organizations) actually function so we can begin to unearth the enormous opportunities for increased innovation and transformation, adopting a systems-thinking perspective to steer an effective course forward.
• Currently, universities do not do well with interdepartmental and interdisciplinary decision-making processes because, for one thing, their success depends upon transcending institutionalized habits of territorialism involving powerful personalities and significant complexity. Instead of addressing these challenges we commonly see our organizations structure the responsibility and leadership for sustainability under just one group or department. In the long term this can create a variety of undesirable tensions and issues resulting from a lack of effective coordination and integration.
• What we are just starting to realize is that our organizations need to make a sizable staffing investment in a change-management function to drive organization-wide progress toward sustainability.
• Over many years, I have observed that the common belief that people are innately adverse to change is not generally true. People are not resistant to change, they are opposed to instability, and they simply assume that change equals instability. When people experience stable processes of change they generally thrive on the experience and will readily embrace more change.
• Furthermore, by having enough positive change experiences, people often undergo a personal transformation, shifting from being passive participants to becoming leading agents of ongoing innovation and continuous improvement in the organization.
• When we first started to use the USGBC’s LEED green building standard in 2001, we were told by many architects and engineers that we could expect to pay 5–10% more for our buildings. After five years of piloting LEED projects across the university, building internal capacities, and streamlining the overall process, Harvard was able to achieve its first LEED platinum renovation, the highest possible green building rating, at no added cost to the project.
• People are our greatest resource and, because the pathway to campus sustainability requires such wide sweeping and ongoing innovation and continuous improvement, our institutions must become learning organizations with the vast majority of people working in a state of public engagement and life-long learning. Most organizations have a long way to go before their community has evolved to this point.
• One of the most effective ways to foster engagement and learning across our institutions is through the use of peer-to-peer forums. During my time at Harvard, we experimented with dozens of different peer-to-peer models, working with building operations staff, kitchen personnel, residential students, facility managers, executive level managers, laboratory users, administrative staff, and more. We consistently found that structuring peers of the same social or professional group or managerial tier to engage with one another in a shared process of discovery, competition, teaching, and learning was extremely effective in tapping unprecedented effort and stimulating real learning.
• What remains to be discussed is how we can steer our course of innovation and transformation forward. Herein lies perhaps our greatest challenge, the task of adopting a systems-thinking approach to continuously diagnose and determine our path forward.
• Systems thinking presents us with such a profound challenge because it forces us to confront the way in which university functions are compartmentalized into divisions, units, departments, disciplines, and tiers of management. While this approach enables a good degree of control and accountability up the chain of command, it also ensures that the whole system is rarely considered when decisions are made.

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