Advancing sustainability leadership by shifting relational ‘agreement structures’: a transformational higher education change program

Abstract

Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires leaders to navigate different fields and work across public, private, and plural sectors. Higher education (HE) is positioned uniquely to bring disciplines together and convene leaders from business, government, and civil society by designing customized learning encounters. Here we explore the creation and delivery of a change program for leaders concerned with the SDGs based on a framework for understanding and shifting underlying relationships – termed here, agreement structures.Informed by meta-analysis of cases integrating social and technical innovations, an immersive personalized sustainability learning program was designed and offered in a university setting in summer 2019 in Spain. Drawing from academia (students and faculty), business and local government, learning experiences were co-created to help shift the paradigm for creating change among people, place, and planet. Making explicit agreement structures influenced learning design and enabled the co-creation of a customized cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral program for leaders concerned with fulfilment of the SDGs. Exploiting the unique convening and integrating power of HE, the SDGs provided a shared narrative around which the faculty could communicate and bring their unique perspectives to co-create the program. Focused on accelerating multi-actor partnerships for delivery of the SDGs, the program focused on enabling a shift in underlying agreement structures necessary for local-global collaboration and transformation. The study describes a program that made conscious the relationships that need shifting to fulfil the SDGs and offers new insights to leverage the convening power of HE to contribute towards fulfilment of the SDGs.

Keywords

• University
• higher education
• sustainable development goals
• agreements
• transformational change