Guest editorial: Green horizons revisited: toward systemic alignment in higher education sustainability

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Green horizons revisited: toward systemic alignment in higher education sustainabilityHigher Education Institutions (HEIs) occupy a paradoxical position in the sustainability transition.They train professionals, researchers and policymakers who will manage environmental and social change.However, their own operations, governance structures and reward systems frequently reproduce the short-termism and fragmentation the sustainability agenda seeks to overcome (Stephens et al., 2008).European policy reaches a similar conclusion: the European Commission's proposal for a Council Recommendation on learning for environmental sustainability states plainly that the field "is not yet a systemic feature of policy and practice in the EU" (European Commission, 2022a).The European University Association's 2021 survey of nearly 400 institutions found that three-quarters had taken concrete steps toward environmental sustainability at the strategic level, yet most still lacked integrated policies that cover teaching, research, campus operations and stakeholder engagement (St€ ober et al., 2021).The same fragmentation appears in how sustainability is measured: reviews of the assessment tools used by HEIs find that most privilege dimensions that are easiest to quantify, chiefly operational eco-efficiency and governance structures, while faculty development, multi-stakeholder decision-making and curriculum integration remain comparatively unaddressed (Findler et al., 2019;Niedlich et al., 2020).This Special Issue addresses that gap directly.Its point of departure is the whole-institution approach to sustainability, that is, the proposition that a HEI becomes sustainable not through discipline-specific or department-level interventions but through the coordinated integration and alignment of governance, curriculum, operations and community engagement, organized through systems thinking rather than accumulated piecemeal (Christou et al., 2024; Leicht et al., 2018;Bianchi et al., 2022), a premise that also aligns with the macro-objective of the European Commission's 2022 strategy for universities as agents of the green and digital transitions (European Commission, 2022b).The call for this Special Issue, "Green Horizons: Navigating the Transition to Systemic Sustainability in Higher Education Institutions," translated that premise into a research agenda.Sterling ( 2004) argued two decades ago that HEIs' response to sustainability would remain cosmetic as long as institutions treated it as a bolt-on rather than as an occasion for systemic learning that changes the assumptions underlying an institution's operations, not only its stated policies.Lozano et al. (2013), reviewing a decade of sustainability declarations, found a similar pattern: declarations proliferated while measurable institutional change lagged.The 11 papers selected for Part 1 of this Special Issue, drawn from quantitative and qualitative submissions across four continents, engage directly with this gap between declared intent and systemic practice, spanning institutional governance and individual cognition, from European to Asian and Middle-Eastern universities.This Special Issue has received more than 40 submissions, of which around 65% were deemed in line with the Special Issue's core ideas and to display a research quality aligned with the high standards required by the Journal.As the number of accepted papers exceeded expectations, the submissions are being published as a double special issue, of which this constitutes Part 1.Part 1 includes the first 11 accepted papers in the special issue.These papers have been categorized based on the following areas relevant to sustainable development in HEIs:(1) Governance and institutional alignment

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