Abstract:
Many higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world are involved in a variety of sustainability initiatives.
These are acknowledged to be important elements in fostering the cause of sustainability in HEIs, in further
developing the organizations’ culture and in acting as enablers in the institutional embedding of sustainability.
But despite the relevance of sustainability initiatives, there is a lack of systematic international efforts in how
best to map them, especially in Latin America. On the basis of the need to address this gap, this paper reports on
the results of an empirical study, aimed at analyzing the current status of sustainability initiatives among Latin
American HEIs. Apart from a review of the latest literature, an international survey was performed to design a
model using principal component analysis to identify the main descriptors of sustainability initiatives among
Latin American HEIs and also the major drivers and challenges. The study sheds some light on the ways universities
perceive and handle sustainability-related initiatives. The results show that sustainability is being
incorporated in more than 80% of the sampled universities, and that a special emphasis is being given to campus
operations. The value of the paper resides on the fact that it one of the few papers that have holistically
investigated trends in sustainable development across universities in Latin America. The implications of the study
are twofold. It maps for the first time how sustainable development initiatives are being practiced in 157 universities
in 13 countries, being one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind, and it also outlines some of the
main challenges that universities in the region face. The central message of this paper is that the different levels
of emphasis given to SD in Latin American universities need to be better understood in order to catalyze
continued and long-term actions.
