Conceptualizing and comparing world-class universities’ contributions to global sustainability: Pathways, priorities and potential indicators

Sustainability is a goal for today, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) acting as a guiding framework in a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. As research universities with distinctive global orientations, world-class universities (WCUs) are key players in promoting global sustainability, though there may be wide variation across WCUs in how, and to what degree, they are promoting global sustainability. By collecting and coding vast amounts of official textual data from 60 WCUs, this study indicates that WCUs’ contributions to global sustainability can be seen in the following five dimensions: education and research, outreach and engagement, campus operation and transportation, landscapes and ecosystems, and global leadership and impact evaluation. Additionally, the results reveal different priorities of WCUs in promoting global sustainability, identifying four distinctive clusters of WCUs based on their focus areas, designated as generally-balanced, academically-dominated, externally-associated, and internally-reformed. This study also attempts to construct a framework to measure WCUs’ contributions to global sustainability, which is useful to characterize WCUs’ contributions as expressive, constructive, projective, and evaluative.