The Impact of the Sustainability Principles on the Strategic Planning and Reporting of Universities. An Exploratory Study on a Qualified Italian Sample

Strategic Plans (SPs) and Sustainability Reports (SRs) represent institutional communication tools implemented by universities to demonstrate their adoption of sustainability and sustainable development goals (SDGs of Agenda 2030) as drivers in their strategic planning processes. These tools make the adopted strategies and operations visible and easily understandable to stakeholders, highlighting the university’s commitment to a new balance between business, environment, and the social sphere. Moving from this premise, with the aim to evaluate the degree of transposition of sustainability and sustainable development principles into the Italian university system, we propose an exploratory research on universities’ institutional declarations, in the form of the SRs and SPs available on their web sites. To this aim, we conducted a content analysis aiming at a preliminary phase of text coding, based on a set of analytical categories—pillars—namely Education and Learning, Research, Operations and Governance, and External Leadership. The work has allowed us to identify: an interesting extent to which the sustainability principles have been transposed into the Italian university system, with particular regard to the third category of Operations and Governance (36% of coded segments in SRs and 32% of coded segments in SPs); a considerable awareness of universities of their key role played on the sociopolitical and economic levels for the diffusion of the Agenda 2030 within civil society.