Integrating Sustainability in Higher Education: Tracking Progress, Drivers and Orientations in a Business School Initiative

Many business schools have set strategic objectives to integrate sustainability in their curricula; however, there is limited evidence of effective curriculum change initiatives, including organizational change approaches that could inform effective strategy design and implementation. This paper examines how a business school sought to embed sustainability content in undergraduate business education, and how it navigated contested understandings of sustainability and multiple orientations to teaching sustainability, including ESG, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Social-ecological Systems, and Social Innovation. Using qualitative documentary curriculum data, a curriculum mapping methodology is presented to quantitatively assess year-on-year changes in sustainability content at curriculum, discipline, and orientation levels. Findings show that sustainability integration increased over the period studied, albeit unevenly across the curriculum, with integration driven by educators of various instructor types and sustainability orientations. The discussion highlights factors that likely supported progress, including the School’s approach to change and the strategy’s explicit recognition of multiple sustainability orientations. The study presents a practical methodology that senior managers seeking to integrate sustainability in higher education can use to track curriculum change progress, drivers, and orientations. It also offers guidance on how to advance sustainability integration in organizational contexts characterized by different sustainability orientations.