Moving towards an ecologically sound society? Starting from green universities and environmental higher education

Moving towards an ecologically sound society requires strong support from higher educational institutions. During the past decade, the Journal of Cleaner Production has published more than 150 articles that have highlighted advances in academic efforts on sustainability in higher education, that were focused upon education, research, outreach and greening of campus operations in universities from many regions of the world. However, most of them were conducted in the context of developed countries, and there was no Special Volume (SV) focused upon Green University Initiatives and Education for Sustainable Development (EfSD) in developing and emerging countries. Thus, for this SV, we challenged the academic world to provide us with their wisdom, intelligence and experiences on building Green Universities and in promoting EfSD in developing and emerging countries. In the resultant sixteen articles, the authors evaluated the roles of Green Universities and EfSD with different methodologies at different scales, and they presented information about their practices and methodologies of incorporating Green Universities Initiatives and EfSD in primary and in higher education. The differences and similarities between develop countries and the emerging countries were documented. The authors found the main difference is that economic-development related classification cannot be applied simplistically to environmental performance evaluations when it comes to environmental behavior. Some similarities were also identified by the authors including the importance of motivation, perceived effectiveness, formal education and knowledge of environmental issues, and gender factors. The authors also concluded that support from university leadership, safeguarding of long-term funding, development of appropriate supervisory capacity and integration of Sustainable Development (SD) into existing academic structures and administrative processes were critical factors for the success of the program in the short and longer-term.