Campus sustainability governance in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to provide an overview of a content analysis of sustainability policies from Canadian post-secondary education institutions. The paper reports findings on the orientations to sustainability evident in the policies; references to other policies within the documents; and other key themes on how sustainability is engaged in the policies in relation to overall governance, education, operations, research and community outreach. Design/methodology/approach – A sample of 50 Canadian colleges and universities was selected based on representativeness across a range of criteria. A qualitative thematic content analysis of these policies was conducted using a collaborative coding approach. Findings – Results suggest that most sustainability policies described a Brundtland (i.e. intergenerational) and/or three-pillar (e.g. economic, environmental and social) orientation to sustainability. Many sustainability policies also connected to other external municipal or provincial policies. In terms of various domains of sustainability, campus operations was discussed by all of the policies and in the most detail, while discussions of sustainability in education (i.e. the curriculum) and in research were vague, and discussions of sustainability in relation to community outreach were included less frequently. Originality/value – This comparative study provides a broad view of sustainability policies from post-secondary institutions across Canada. It deepens our understanding of the institutions’ conceptualizations of, and priorities for, sustainability. This paper has practical implications for institutions seeking to create or further develop their own policies, and it contributes to the comparative scholarly literature on the institutionalization of sustainability in higher education.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".