What if today’s higher education institutions are holding back their potential to prepare society for the future? The globally recognised pioneer in sustainability education, Professor Emeritus Stephen Sterling, warns that academia is currently not doing enough to change its ways. What then, must the sector do next?
Linn Meidell Dybdahl, senior adviser, NMBU
Across the sector, universities are making visible progress. Solar panels are appearing on rooftops. Climate targets are written into strategies. Sustainability-focused degree programmes are attracting new students. These are welcome developments, Sterling acknowledges – but they can still leave the underlying logic of the system untouched. Our troubled times require a deeper and urgent response.
“Most universities are trying to graft sustainability onto an old operating model – one built for a very different era,” he says. “True transformation means rethinking the model itself.”
Here he refers to Donella Meadows’ concept of “leverage points”: places where small shifts can trigger deep change. Adding a course or a recycling programme is low leverage. Changing the goals, governance, and mindsets of an institution is high leverage, and those are the moves that can ripple across the system.
The challenge for leaders, educators, and staff is whether sustainability will remain a side project – or become the organising principle that guides all decisions.
The Purpose Shift
For much of the past century, universities saw their role as producing highly specialised knowledge and preparing students for professional careers. Sterling believes this is no longer enough in a world of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and social instability.
“Higher education has a societal duty,” he says. “It’s not just about preparing individuals for work, but about equipping society itself to navigate uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change.”
This reframing invites universities to become catalysts for transformation – partnering with communities, governments, and industry to co-create solutions, and acting as living laboratories where new social, economic, and technological models can be tested. For policy makers in ministries, for rectors and deans, for teachers and researchers, the key question becomes: how can decisions made today prepare higher education to meet tomorrow’s realities?
The Power of Networks
No single university can change the system on its own. Collaboration is essential – not just for sharing best practice, but for building confidence to act boldly.
“Networks create shared capacity and confidence,” Sterling notes. “They allow universities to learn from each other and act together.”
By linking people across roles, disciplines, and institutions, such networks help ideas spread and take root more quickly.
For a teacher or administrator, joining such a network can open new perspectives; for researchers, it can spark collaboration; for managers, it can provide tested approaches that reduce risk.
One example in Norway is the National Network for Sustainability in Higher Education, initiated in 2024. It is open to anyone in the sector who wants to learn, share, and explore what actually works when embedding sustainability in teaching, research, and governance.
Leadership and Policy: Unlocking the Leverage Points
Sterling is clear that the deepest changes often depend on decisions made far from the classroom. When policy makers and institutional leaders act together, they can unlock the high-leverage points that reshape the system.
Public funding can be tied to projects that cut across disciplines and address real-world sustainability challenges. Universities can embed climate action, resilience, and societal well-being into their core missions, not just as strategy add-ons. Leadership teams can foster collaboration by rewarding co-teaching and joint research, and by making campuses active testbeds for sustainable solutions.
These are not small adjustments – they reshape what is valued, how success is measured, and what kind of graduates and research the system produces. For funding agencies, this means rewarding societal impact alongside academic output. For leadership teams, it means revisiting incentive structures. For ministries, it means writing sustainability into the statutory purposes of higher education, and supporting the change-processes needed in the sector.
Culture: The Invisible System
Even the best-designed reforms can fail if the culture of an institution remains unchanged. Sterling describes culture as the “invisible system” – the norms, incentives, and habits that shape behaviour without being written down.
“Transformation is as much about mindsets as it is about structures,” he says. “You can change the rules, but if people are still playing the old game, the system snaps back.”
Here, every group has influence by challenging status quo: technical staff in daily operations, teachers in the classroom, researchers in their projects, administrators through governance routines, and students through their demands and initiatives. Informal leaders – those whose actions inspire others – often create the cultural conditions where change becomes possible.
From Vision to Action
For Sterling, this is not a call for instant perfection, but for clear direction. Higher education should move deliberately toward being a regenerative force in society – where every policy, investment, and research choice strengthens resilience and well-being. This involves a learning journey for the whole university community.
“Universities are among the most enduring institutions in society,” he reflects. “If they can transform themselves, they can help transform the world. But we must start now, and we must start with the system itself. Encouragingly, there are already exemplar institutions and networks across the world showing how this renewal can successfully be taken forward.”
The choice is stark but full of promise: keep improving the current model at the edges, or use this moment to reimagine higher education as a cornerstone of a sustainable future. For teachers, researchers, administrators, technical staff, ministry officials, and leaders at all levels, the opportunity is here – each with a distinct role to play in making transformation real.
Stephen Sterling
Dr. Stephen Sterling is Professor Emeritus at the Sustainable Earth Institute, University of Plymouth, where he for many years was head of education for sustainability. He has worked with environmental and sustainability education in academia and the NGO sector for five decades, including as a consultant and advisor to UNESCO’s programs on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).
Sterling is the author of several books, the most recent being “Learning and Sustainability in Dangerous Times” (2024). A summary of Sterling’s key ideas can also be found on his website.
Networks create shared capacity and confidence, Stephen Sterling argues.
Foto: Erlend Eidsem Hansen , NMBU UMINAR 1