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For Geneviève Le Fort, quality assurance has an important role to play to help universities better understand the relevance of their sustainability strategies and the impact of their actions, which can be framed by the ‘Three Horizons’ method.
Today, few would dispute that higher education institutions must take responsibility for sustainability. Indeed, when European Higher Education Area ministers met in 2018, they emphasised the role of universities “in securing a sustainable future for our planet and our societies and to contribute to meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at global, European and national levels.”
However, the primary mission of universities remains academic, and it is primarily through their teaching and research that they have a real capacity for action in favour of sustainability. But how can we assess universities' commitment to these issues? Quality assurance has an important role to play. To this end, QA instruments should pay particular attention to how academic missions address sustainability. This is essential to better understand the relevance of universities’ sustainability strategies and the impact of their actions. The ‘Three Horizons’ method, developed by Bill Sharpe, can serve as inspiration for how to assess a university's commitment to sustainability.
In this method, Horizon 1 represents the current context. It is the observation made by the university of the world in which it finds itself, its awareness of human impact on the planet, and its understanding of sustainability challenges. In addition, it also encompasses what the university has already put in place for a more sustainable world, the extent to which these issues have been integrated into curricula, and the responses provided by research and innovation. Then, Horizon 3 is the vision of possible, desirable futures—the scenario to which a university or a study programme aspires to contribute.
So, how do we get from Horizon 1 to Horizon 3? Horizon 2 represents the path to achieving this vision, including strategies and action plans. Its progress can be assessed at any given moment in time in relation to the degree of achievement of the university’s desired future. At the university level, this is materialised by the choices of strategic orientations, financial allocations and governance methods. At the study programme level, this represents the changes and developments to be integrated, the skills and knowledge to be transmitted, and the teaching methods to be favoured.
In Switzerland, institutional accreditation has included a quality standard on sustainability since 2015: “The higher education institution […] shall give consideration to an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable development in the completion of its tasks. The quality assurance system shall ensure that the higher education institution […] sets objectives in this area and also implements them.” However, this standard is very generic and can lead to highly variable and sometimes superficial interpretations by external experts. Universities, including my own, tend to report on this standard by describing existing strategies and actions without always explaining the vision of the future to which these commitments belong, nor the scenario to which they intend to contribute.
Rankings, ratings, and labels also enable universities to measure their commitment to sustainability. Several, including the well-known Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, help to assess universities’ contribution to the SDGs. As such, THE’s Impact Rankings are promoted within European Universities alliances, such as the Universitas Montium (UNITA) alliance, to compare sustainability-related quality practices based on a common and open framework.
Moreover, various interesting tools exist to help universities position themselves, monitor, and highlight their sustainability efforts. For example, a project led by the quality agencies of Andorra (AQUA) and the Spanish province of Aragon (ACPUA), presented at the European Quality Assurance Forum (EQAF) in 2019, proposed ‘Indicators to Embed the Sustainable Development Goals into Institutional Quality Assessment’. However, without linking these actions to a vision of a future world, it is difficult for these instruments to evaluate the relevance of universities' commitments.
The quality of a university today is also measured by its social responsibility and its commitment to sustainability. Research and innovation must contribute to finding solutions for a more sustainable world, while teaching must prepare younger generations to take up the challenges of sustainability in their professional practice and personal lives to empower them to be active agents of the transition.
The stakes are high, and it is crucial that quality assurance instruments support universities in these efforts. Approaches that incorporate elements of foresight applied to sustainability can help them to project themselves into a desirable future and thus to better orient their actions. Returning to Sharpe’s Three Horizons method, this means facilitating a diagnosis of the current situation (Horizon 1) and examining sustainability strategies and action plans (Horizon 2) in relation to the university's vision (Horizon 3)—the world it envisions for the future.
