The 2030 Agenda to assess the sustainability of campus operations: EPFL as a case study

The EPFL sustainability unit was created in 2007 to coordinate, support and propose sustainable development actions on the campus. Its 2018-2020 strategy introduced a project called CORE SUSTAINABILITY, aiming at the progressive integration of sustainability within the organization, at the heart of EPFL's core missions (education, research, innovation), but also in the various Vice-Presidencies and their departments, thus at the heart of the organization. The objective is to empower all stakeholders, by committing them to sustainability goals that they should integrate to their management and reporting tools, in order to multiply the achievements and the exposure in this field. It is important to address the question of how this integration should be conducted. This master project would analyze the use of the UNO's reference frame, namely the 2030 Agenda and its well-known seventeen Sustainable development goals (SDGs). The working hypothesis would be as follows: 1. Are SDGs an effective tool for conducting sustainability integration strategies in universities? 1.1 Do SDGs make it possible to define indicators that stakeholders consider relevant? 1.2 Do SDGs bring stakeholders together around a common notion for sustainable development? It is necessary to give a clear definition of the different notions used in that working hypothesis. "Effective" is defined as "that achieves its goal, that leads to useful results", which is understood in the sense of creating a common vision, that could then easily be implemented. For conducting this research project, and because of the limited time available, a focus on three illustrative SDGs will be done (for example: 13. Climate action, 5. Gender equality, 12. Responsible consumption and production or 7. Energy, 9. Industry, innovation and infrastructure, 4. Quality education). This choice should however not erase the general theoretical frame from our minds. The methodology for this project would consist in a comparative case study on processes and reference frame choices for implementing sustainability (and more specifically by means of sustainability's indicators definition) at a university campus level. The different steps would be as follows: a) Literature review b) Review of sustainability policies at the universities c) Application of the MONET methodology (similar to the canton de Vaud methodology) to define indicators relative to those SDGs for the administrative services of EPFL: (i) distribution of the targets to the respectively responsible services; (ii) review of existing indicators at the EPFL campus level (cf. GRI reporting in 2012 and 2014) and matching to the targets at issue; (iii) participative definition (by the services) of indicator(s) for each target, based on the existing indicators listed d) Analysis of the proposed methodology for indicators definition: (i) qualitative data collection (survey and interviews with key stakeholders); (ii) qualitative data analysis (are the defined indicators seen as relevant by the stakeholders? Do stakeholders share a common vision of the notion of sustainability?) e) Comparative analysis of another methodology for indicators definition (in another university): (i) quantitative analysis: are the selected indicators similar? (ii) qualitative analysis: are the defined indicators seen as relevant by the stakeholders? Do the stakeholders share a common vision of the notion of sustainability?