ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the state of current university and international-development sustainable-development-evaluation approaches and briefly explores pathways for change. It elaborates a novel framework for university evaluation of sustainable-development involvement that moves beyond existing approaches and encompasses the multiple sustainable-development initiatives encountered at contemporary institutions of higher learning in the South and North. Current sustainable-development evaluations are limited in the first instance by lack of sufficient effort. In the realm of sustainable development, contextual diversity inevitably thwarts efforts to develop universally applicable evaluation approaches. University operations provide the overwhelming emphasis of prevailing sustainability-evaluation tools. A critical component of a comprehensive framework for university sustainable-development evaluation involves student-learning outcomes. The time lag between university activities and sustainable-development outcomes and impacts presents serious methodological challenges. Sustainability-ranking and rating systems, such as STARS, have become "part of the managerialism of higher education". The world's experience with international-development evaluation is longer and deeper than it is with university evaluations of sustainable development.