Developing Leaders for Sustainable Development: enabling behaviour change
The University of Sussex and Bournemouth University have been successfully awarded collaborative funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England's Leadership Governance and Management (LGM) Fund.
HEFCE invited applications to the LGM Fund for projects that would support the implementation of their sustainable development strategy for the sector.
Pat Pica, Energy & Environment Manager, submitted a joint bid with Chris Shiel, Centre for Global Perspectives, and Amanda Williams, Environment and Energy Manager from Bournemouth University for a small-scale project focusing on broadening leadership support for sustainable development.
The project will involve working with Board and Council members and senior management teams at these two distinctly different institutions, and cascading the learning to two further HEI's.
Workshops will seek to raise awareness about the broad sustainable development agenda with a specific focus on leadership behaviours to embed sustainable development and achieve challenging carbon reduction targets. Participants will have the opportunity to increase their knowledge of sustainable development; explore the breadth of concerns; identify the potential role in supporting culture change; and develop approaches to securing commitment to carbon reduction and sustainable development.
As external facilitator, Ann Finlayson (Director of SEEd) will contribute her experience as a Commissioner for Education and Capability Building for the Sustainable Development Commission, and bring to the project her expertise in leading workshops for senior staff including Government ministers.
Chris Shiel, Director of the Centre for Global Perspectives, said: "if we are to secure sustainable development and achieve ambitious carbon reduction targets, it is vital that members of our governing bodies and senior staff are able to lead by example. We are delighted to have been awarded funding to take this project forward".
In their feedback, HEFCE highlighted that it was a highly competitive field and the panel was particularly impressed by the proposal, which one assessor commented was a "valuable small scale project, capable of making a positive impact more widely on the sector".
LATEST NEWS - UPDATED APRIL 2011
The first two workshops have now been delivered. The first, at Bournemouth University on the 28th January, was to the Board of Governors. The event marked the successful launch of the project, and we are now planning the follow up event on the 16th June.
The project was launched at the University of Sussex on the 4th April 2011, and included the Vice Chancellor's Executive Group, Senior Management Group, the Director and Sabbatical Officers of the Students' Union, and student representatives from the Schools of Business, Management & Economics, Global Studies, and Engineering & Design.
The workshop outputs will make an important contribution to developing solutions for the sustainability-linked challenges we face as an institution. We developed a series of action plans spanning 5 key challenges in the workshop, which we will be working on over the coming months before having a follow-up event.
Those challenges are:
- Embedding sustainability into the curriculum and developing inter-disciplinarity;
- Travel;
- Growth vs. carbon emissions;
- Buildings/ energy & resources;
- Securing buy-in and communications.