A culture of sustainability at universities

Higher Education Institutions in Society – Real-World Experiments in Transformative Learning and Research Processes for a Culture of Sustainability at Higher Education Institutions (KuNaH)

From July 2024 to September 2025, the professorship was associated with the “Culture of Sustainability” project. It was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project partners were the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, Leuphana University Lüneburg, the Free University of Berlin, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

In recent years, a wide range of initiatives and approaches for implementing the guiding principles of sustainable development have been developed and tested at universities in Germany. While this has made it possible to identify new knowledge, concepts, and methods for implementation at universities, there was still a lack of integrative approaches that systematically bring together the various areas of university activity as a “whole-institution approach” and promote a comprehensive “culture of sustainability” at universities.

As part of the funding guideline “Pathways to Transformation for Sustainable Universities,” the KuNaH collaborative project was launched in October 2022. It addressed the question of what a culture of sustainability (KdN) might look like at universities and how it can be promoted and further developed in line with a whole-institution approach. A culture of sustainability is understood as the active practice of sustainability in relation to formal and informal processes for shaping basic assumptions, goals, regulatory systems, and systemic frameworks.

Jonas Schmitt was a project team member.