INTERNATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVES IN UNIVERSITIES: A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY

Abstract

Environmental, social and governance practices are relevant to all stakeholders in any business sector, including education, for demonstrating transparency in business. This raises curiosity about the existence, in the international Administration literature, of researches focused on the relationship, in universities and those practices. Bearing in mind that sustainable universities have been an important issue, when examining sustainability in higher education (SHE), particularly as it relates to raising awareness about the deterioration of the environment, more than 1,400 universities around the world have signed an SHE declaration..  Not only universities, but also companies that want to achieve sustainable development need to worry about several aspects: 1) economical, such as type and value of investment, smart products, and market presence; 2) Social, such as good business practices, sustainable consumption and social responsibility related to the safety of collaborators, stakeholders and communities; 3) Environmental, which relates to the life cycle of the product encompassing design, transport, raw materials for production, and recycling. As the first step in a larger investigation, this conceptual paper performs this mapping restricted to publications from the year 2021, through the triangulation between bibliometric research and literature review. The main objective of the present paper was to verify the state-of-the – art of international academic research – published in 2021-on sustainability in universities in published research regarding ESG, to identify any gaps that can be covered in a subsequent larger study. As a result, it was found that, in addition to being treated in isolation, those practices are not located in the educational segment, establishing gap that deserves attention.