How do we equip and empower the entire faculty to meaningfully integrate sustainability into higher education — reaching beyond the already convinced?
This question sat at the centre of the recent HESI x Expandia Launch on scaling up train-the-trainer programmes for sustainability in higher education. Convened under the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI), in cooperation with Sulitest and with GRLI facilitating the interactive dialogue, the event brought together participants from around the world to explore not only what needs to change in higher education, but how change itself might be enacted.
The starting point was clear: sustainability integration is no longer only about creating specialist courses or persuading a small group of committed champions. The deeper challenge is to mainstream sustainability across disciplines, programmes and institutions – onto a whole institution and whole system level. Many faculty members still do not see how sustainability connects to their subject area, feel overburdened by existing responsibilities, or lack the confidence, incentives and institutional support to change their teaching practices. Expandia, with its ambition to train thousands of educators, offers an important opportunity to learn how such efforts might scale — not as a single model to be replicated, but as a living experiment moving system(s) to change.
One important insight from the event was that this is not primarily a knowledge problem. There are already tools, repositories, case studies, faculty development programmes and committed practitioners across the world. The issue is that these resources are often fragmented, unevenly visible, and disconnected from the systems in which faculty work. Scaling sustainability in higher education is therefore less about convincing more individuals to give their contribution and more about redesigning the conditions in which individuals can learn, teach, collaborate and transform practice.
This means spotlighting the culture(s) that we work in. Meeting people where they are, recognising the pressures and challenges they face, and creating pathways into the work that feel supportive rather than punitive. Clémentine Robert’s reflections from the University of St, Gallen offered a vivid example of this through Teach for Sustainable Futures, a collaborative initiative involving students, university administration, leadership offices and research centres. Its spirit is “no blame, no shame”: creating a constructive environment where faculty and programme managers can find tools, support and encouragement suited to their own starting points.
Adeline Ochs’ contribution from Audencia showed how culture can also be built through deliberate institutional architecture. The GIFT programme — Gaïa Improvement for Future Teaching — combines leadership support, faculty consultation, ambassadors across disciplines, course mapping, and recognition of faculty engagement. This points to a crucial lesson: culture does not emerge from strategy documents alone. It is curated through rituals, language, recognition and repeated practice. If institutions do not design the culture that enables change, the default culture will usually prevail.
The pedagogical conversation added another important dimension. Meredith Storey, speaking from the PRME perspective, reminded the group that train-the-trainer work only has value if the training itself is pedagogically meaningful. Sustainability cannot be integrated through content transfer alone. It requires educators to work with complexity, dilemmas, values, uncertainty and context. It also requires something rather human of teachers: the willingness to try new approaches, bring difficult issues into the classroom, and risk not having all the answers. This requires psychological safety, peer-to-peer and institutional support and a shift away from competitive academic cultures that reward individual prestige over collective uplift.
Usha Iyer-Raniga brought a vital disciplinary and regional lens through her work in the built environment. Decarbonising the built environment demands new technical skills, but also new forms of leadership, negotiation, collaboration and contextual judgement. Her contribution strongly challenged any assumption that sustainability education can be scaled by exporting generic models from one context to another. Global ambition must be translated through local wisdom. In the Global South especially, sustainability learning must draw on local knowledge, cultural context, local materials and place-based examples rather than reproducing pathways that may have contributed to the problem in the first place.
Across the fishbowl and breakout conversations, four interwoven lenses emerged: culture and resistance, pedagogical integration, capacity-building, and institutional alignment. But the most interesting learning happened between these lenses. Capacity-building is not simply about providing more resources. It is about creating coherent support ecosystems: time, tools, peer communities, incentives, recognition, leadership signalling and departmental contact points. Pedagogical integration is not simply about adding sustainability examples to existing courses. It is about rethinking the purpose of education so that students develop the capacities to navigate complex social, ecological and economic realities. Governance and institutional alignment is not simply about strategy. It is about aligning curriculum structures, assessment practices, quality systems, funding, research priorities and institutional development.
This is where the living systems framing becomes especially important. From a GRLI perspective, change is not something designed outside the system and then imposed upon it. It emerges through relationships, inquiry, experimentation and feedback. The event itself reflected this orientation by moving from input, to dialogue, to co-creation, and back into reflection. In that sense, the process was not separate from the outcome. “The process we use to get to the future is the future we get.”, as Myron Rogers would say.
Several practical invitations surfaced. Institutions can begin by mapping existing sustainability resources, champions and initiatives so that faculty can see what is already available. They can create peer groups to review courses and explore where sustainability is already present, where it might be deepened, and where outdated assumptions may need to be released. They can identify ambassadors or contact people in departments, use campuses as living laboratories, and create safe spaces to share failures as well as successes. At the global level, HESI and Expandia can help connect existing initiatives rather than duplicate them, building a shared learning infrastructure for faculty development across regions and networks and strengthening mechanisms to monitor curriculum integration and graduate competencies.
Perhaps the most important shift is from scale as standardisation to scale as adaptation. If sustainability is about living responsibly within interconnected systems, then our approaches to learning must also become more interconnected, relational and context-sensitive. The challenge is not to roll out one perfect model everywhere. It is to create the conditions for many meaningful models to emerge, learn from each other, and contribute to a wider movement.
From Conversation to Collective Movement
If there is one invitation emerging from this work, it is that the future of sustainability in higher education will not be delivered through isolated programmes, however well designed. It will emerge through the connection and amplification of what is already alive in the system.
This calls for a shift in posture: from designing solutions for others, to creating spaces where educators, institutions and networks can learn with and from each other. It calls for leadership that not only signals direction, but creates the conditions for distributed ownership. And it calls for a willingness to experiment — to try, to learn, to adapt, and to share not only what works, but also what does not.
The question, then, is not simply how to scale train-the-trainer programmes.
It is how to steward a global learning ecosystem in which faculty, institutions and networks can collectively explore what it means to integrate sustainability meaningfully into higher education — in ways that are locally grounded, globally connected, and continuously evolving.
In part 2 of our report we will dive into some of the key levers of change and actions underway that were co-designed during the interactive workshop.
