Rationales and factors influencing universities’ engagement with sustainability: an exploration of two Malaysian universities from stakeholders’ perspectives

The paper aims to enrich the discourse on global governance through the SDGs in higher education systems by focusing on the sustainability engagement of two prominent sustainability-led universities in Malaysia and the rationales and factors that drive or impede their engagement. Literature predominantly focuses on the normative and practical aspects of universities’ capacity to contribute to the SDGs through their three missions of education, research, and outreach, but there is a lack of discussion on rationales for universities to orient toward the global agenda. Through qualitative case studies of two universities in Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and Sunway University (SU), selected for initiating their sustainability engagement before the adoption of the SDGs, the study uses complexity theory to analyze the motivations, drivers, and barriers for their actions, from the perceptions of university management and faculty members. The study found that although the rationales and factors varied in significance over time, the diversification of actors and bottom-up processes, situated with positive feedback from internal and external stakeholders, contributed to the continuity of sustainability-focused governance and operations within both universities. This suggests that universities in non-Anglophonic and non-Western contexts interested in elevating their sustainability engagement should create interventions at multiple levels to generate momentum toward sustainability engagement among their stakeholders.