Higher Education is changing, and many institutions are undertaking ever-greater efforts to anchor sustainability in their institutional practices, whether in research and teaching, through campus-related activities or in administration, such as procurement or facility management systems.
One of the reasons for this is that universities understood their unique role as places for inspiration, and link their activities to a comprehensive organizational development process for systemic change. Innovation strategies, climate emergency declarations or sustainability plans are some of the instruments that help to regulate this change process towards sustainability.
At Freie Universität Berlin, we also strive for this. Through an idea and innovation management, for instance, we engage all university members in a participatory multi-stakeholder approach in order to implement jointly the ambitious objectives we have set ourselves in our climate emergency declaration.
In this workshop, we presented and discussed organizational change management approaches and change factors that make a decisive contribution to a holistic process for embedding sustainability. We addressed some of the following questions:
- How can we catalyze systemic change?
- How can we best understand the complex interplay between the diverse university members and organizational structures?
- How can innovative and participatory processes be used to change organizational structures in universities?
- What indicators can we profit from to measure progress?
After keynotes on the current state of research and best practice experiences, we organized an interactive session for joint exchange and learning.
The workshop was organized in the framework of the University Alliance for Sustainability and open for interested universities. For further information on the workshop please contact Katrin.Schweigel@fu-berlin.de.
Keynotes by:
