Realizing sustainable development goals through higher education institutions. Vol. 60, No. 12, March 21–27, 2022.

Abstract

Sistla Rama Devi Pani opens this special issue of University News at a moment when the pandemic has strained the social fabric that Sustainable Development Goals are meant to repair, pushing higher education institutions to ask what their role in that repair looks like. The issue sets the ambition of a universal 2030 agenda against the harder question of how individual universities, working with limited resources and local realities, can act on it at all. Bringing together the AIU Vice Chancellors Meet deliberations, it moves across all seventeen goals through essays on gender equality, employment, clean energy, biodiversity, and inclusive education, alongside institutional profiles and thesis summaries. The contributions show how universities take up the SDGs within their own local contexts and resource constraints. Collectively, the issue frames SDG implementation not as a uniform institutional mandate but as an ongoing process shaped by diverse, locally grounded efforts across higher education institutions.