The Cookbook for the (sustainable) university is a booklet providing 14 cutting-edge examples of campus sustainability initiatives around the globe. The booklet was recently published by Morgen, the Dutch student network for a sustainable future. The booklet aims to inspire both students, facility staff and teachers to look at the opportunities of a greener campus and the social responsibility of a university as a key catalyst in developing a sustainable society.
“If not our universities and colleges, then who will lead the way to sustainable practice?”
Julian Keniry, Senior director at the National Wildlife Federation’s Youth and Campus programs, USA.
There are currently 64 universities and colleges in the Netherlands enrolling about 578000 students per year. With a combined budget of about €9400 million per year, higher educational institutes in the Netherlands have a substantial influence on the integration of sustainable practices by their business partners and in the wider community. Universities and colleges are our source of innovation: they shape our understanding of the world and the decisions and behaviour of our future work force.
Although universities are good at demonstrating the scale of the environmental problems and are breeding grounds for sustainable technologies, the knowledge they generate is only slowly seeping into the daily operational practices of the university organization, let alone generating ripple effects in the wider community. This booklet is thus partly about short-cuts to implementing sustainable alternatives in universities and colleges. Rather than waiting to implement industrialized proven-technologies, universities and colleges can step to the forefront of the societal transition towards sustainability, by becoming test-beds for social and technological in- house innovations. As S.H. Creighton wrote in her book Greening the ivory tower, universities are “microcosms of society”. As organizations composed of multiple actors with different roles, talents and resources, they provide an ideal ‘live laboratory’ to test and showcase these innovations in practice.
This booklet describes a selection of unique projects across the world in which knowledge, leadership and university or college operational management come together. During the making of this book, we glimpsed the enormous variety of impressive sustainability initiatives, each driven by a small core of passionate and ambitious student, staff or external leaders. Far from being a comprehensive overview of sustainable university practices, we adopt a cookbook formula to describe the process by which a small selection of inspiring sustainability initiatives were developed. Each recipe is an insight into the resources and actors that need to be mobilized to use opportunities and overcome constraints in setting up these initiatives.
These 14 innovations in practice demonstrate several common denominators: individual leadership, novel forms of collaboration and simply utilizing opportunities that are up for grabs!
Morgen is the Dutch national student network for sustainable development. It is a small NGO run by students aiming to promote sustainable development in and around higher education.
The Cookbook for the (sustainable) university was released last March 2009 during the symposium Greening the Ivory Tower, organised by Morgen.
- Are you curious about what’s in the book? You can download a copy or read more about it, at www.studentenvoormorgen.nl/git
- Would you be interested in being involved in a next version of this publication, or would like to submit your own best practices stories for the next publication? Send an email to cookbook@studentenvoormorgen.nl with your story and contact details, and we will get back to you.
- Read more about Morgen at www.studentenvoormorgen.nl
- Download the book as pdf
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