Quality assurance can no longer sidestep sustainability

For three decades, sustainability has circled the edges of higher education policy; visible in strategic plans, institutional marketing and the occasional module but curiously absent from the systems that define what quality actually means. This absence is no longer tenable, and a new joint survey by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) has just put a number on the gap.

Not an optional add-on

Twenty-nine quality assurance agencies, mostly from across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), responded to our survey on quality and learning for sustainability.

The headline finding is not that agencies resist sustainability; it is that most have never been asked to think about it systematically and so have not. A significant number of agencies have no formal, system-wide definition of sustainability.

Where definitions exist, they range from narrow framings that equate sustainability largely with environmental management or campus operations to compliance-driven interpretations concerned primarily with labour-market responsiveness or institutional efficiency, with only a minority drawing on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or wider UN frameworks that now shape policy in other sectors.

Understanding of learning for sustainability remains weaker still. It is often conflated with campus initiatives, such as carbon reduction targets or greener operations, rather than recognised as a question of curriculum, pedagogy and the quality of students’ learning.

The case is not for imposing uniform sustainability content across every degree or module but for ensuring that each programme engages meaningfully, and in ways appropriate to its discipline, with the knowledge, professional practices, ethical responsibilities and longer-term consequences that sustainability brings into focus.

Sadly, this is not a minor definitional quibble. Quality assurance (QA) is one of the principal mechanisms through which higher education systems decide what counts as a good education. It shapes programme benchmarks and approval, institutional review and expectations for improvement. If sustainability sits outside that mechanism, it will continue to be treated as an optional addition: worthy and well-intentioned, but structurally marginal.

The survey does, however, complicate any simple narrative of inertia. Scattered, innovation does exist. Sweden’s higher education authority undertook a mandatory, sector-wide evaluation of sustainable development across all 47 institutions; arguably the most systematic national exercise of its kind to date.

In Spain and Andorra, agencies developed a nine-dimension framework for embedding the SDGs into institutional quality assessment, which was translated into a voluntary certification scheme.

In the United Kingdom, a University of Gloucestershire-led project used student co-creation to build a quality framework and an “anti-greenwash” toolkit, tested across 87 courses. These may be pilot curiosities, but they are also proof that sustainability can be assessed rigorously within existing QA architecture, without inventing an entirely parallel system.

What these examples share is fragility. Each is project-based, nationally specific and often dependent on a handful of committed individuals rather than embedded expectations. None has yet become the common reference point the sector needs.

Sadly, that is the real story here, not an absence of ideas but a failure to move promising practice into the mainstream.

Structural barriers

The barriers agencies report deserve to be taken seriously precisely because they are structural rather than ideological. Many agencies operate under legal mandates that make no reference to sustainability, while responsibility formally sits elsewhere in government – with environment or energy ministries, for example. This reinforces the perception that this ‘is not ours to assess’.

Expertise among reviewers and quality assurance officers is also described as thin and unevenly distributed, while building it requires time and resources because the field is interdisciplinary by nature. Agencies are equally concerned about ‘QA inflation’, the risk that adding sustainability criteria to already-stretched review frameworks produces box-ticking rather than genuine institutional reflection.

Unfortunately, this risk is real. Nobody serious about sustainability should want it reduced to another compliance checklist sitting alongside plagiarism policies.

This is why the timing of the current revision of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (the ESG) matters.

The ESG is the common European framework covering internal quality assurance within universities, external review processes and the work of quality assurance agencies. Implementing them is a central Bologna Process commitment, and they underpin trust, mobility and recognition between higher education systems.

The ESG is influential without prescribing a single national system: they establish the accepted scope and principles of quality assurance across the EHEA. A clear majority of responding agencies indicated that deeper integration of sustainability into their work is far more likely if it were reflected explicitly in the ESG.

Agencies, in other words, are not waiting to be persuaded that sustainability matters. They are waiting to be told, through the instrument that actually governs their work, that it is within scope. This is a rare and time-limited policy window, and crucially, it would be a significant missed opportunity if the revised ESG said nothing substantive on the matter.

A phased approach

None of this argues for heavy-handed regulation arriving overnight. Agencies themselves are asking, sensibly, for a phased approach: shared definitions and conceptual frameworks first, then practical tools and indicators, then peer learning and capacity-building, with formal requirements following only once agencies and institutions have had a genuine chance to build competence.

The professional development gap is not peripheral to this but perhaps a precondition for everything else. Systems thinking, ethical reasoning, critical literacy about greenwashing and familiarity with learning for sustainability and SDG frameworks are not natural extensions of traditional QA training. Without deliberate investment in these competences, even a well-designed framework will be applied inconsistently or reduced to symbolic gestures.

There is also a quieter but important finding: many agencies see a legitimate role for themselves even without a formal mandate.

Embedding sustainability literacy into reviewer training, publishing thematic guidance and good-practice resources, introducing relevant questions into self-evaluation and using annual reporting to draw attention to unclear mandates and encourage governments to clarify the place of sustainability within national higher education and quality assurance policy are all things agencies can do now, using existing tools, without waiting for the ESG to change.

Quality assurance bodies can be culture-setters and developmental partners as much as regulators, and several already are, quietly.

What emerges from this survey is a sector at an early but genuinely moveable stage – closer to consensus than the surface fragmentation suggests. Agencies want a shared reference point rather than 40 competing national approaches. The alternative is another decade of good intentions sitting just outside the systems that actually decide what quality in higher education means for students’ actual learning experiences.

Professor Daniella Tilbury is the UK Government Focal Point to the UN Economic Commission for Europe Steering Committee and leads its Quality Education strand across Europe, North America and Central Asia. She has served as a vice-chancellor, dean, director of research and professorial chair at universities in Asia, Europe and Oceania. She is an honorary fellow of St Catharines College, Cambridge.

A digest of the study is available.

This opinion piece was written by the author in a personal capacity and does not represent the views of UNECE or ENQA.

Commentary articles are the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.