From Missions to Indicators: An Analysis of University Contributions to the SDGs within Institutional Strategic Plans

This paper aims to enhance understanding of how universities contribute to sustainable development by examining which components of their strategic plans (SPs) contain segments identified as contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), following the framework developed by Di Nauta et al. (2020). It was found that SDG contributions appear predominantly in the missions, visions, strategies and objectives of the plans, and were less present in the values, means, indicators and targets. SDGs that touch on the themes related to university’s triple mission of teaching, research and external engagement were predominant over those that do not. These results support the findings of a lack of transformative engagement for SD in the SPs of Canadian HEIs, as identified by previous studies.