Purpose This paper aims to explore a single-institution case study of partnership working between students, the University and Students' Union, through four student-led sustainability projects. The paper analyses the role and value of these partnerships and provides advice for other institutions on effective partnership working between these stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach A single case study of partnership working with multiple embedded units of analysis (four projects) is presented based on reflections of practitioners involved in the projects who have different roles within the University and Students' Union. Findings The longevity and effectiveness of student-led projects, and disciplinary-breadth of students engaged, can be enhanced by greater collaboration with, and integration into, University and Students' Union systems. Partnership working between different stakeholders is key to overcoming challenges and the success of student-led projects, helped by key staff "enablers". These projects provide myriad learning opportunities for developing change agency skills, even where projects are relatively short-lived and could be seen as failures in terms of longevity. Originality/value This paper draws together the experiences and reflections of four practitioners with different roles within the University and Students' Union across four different projects and provides advice to generate student-led sustainability projects which have longevity and impact for wider student populations and future generations of cohorts.

In an increasingly mobile world, transience is becoming the norm. Sustainable community food initiatives, therefore, must organise to withstand high turnover of volunteers. Using a case study of the United Kingdom’s National Union of Students’ food growing scheme in universities, this paper aims to map the causes and effects of short-term, irregular, and low participation using a causal loop diagram to understand how to mitigate their negative impacts and improve participation. Data was gathered through interviews, workshops, photovoice, a fishbowl discussion, and a reflective diary. We found three amplifying feedback loops increasing short-term, irregular and low participation, their causes, and their impacts. These feedback loops were precariously buffered by a continuous in-flow of new potential participants each academic year. We also found that the stakeholders of these gardens conceptualised time akin to both temporary and permanent organisations, and these differing conceptualisations were a source of tension. Furthermore, although ‘organisational amnesia’ was a problem, the gardens were still learningful spaces. We recommend both upstream and downstream solutions are implemented to buffer the impacts of transience and suggest that university and students’ union staff could play a crucial and subtle supporting role.

Interest in urban agriculture is growing. Yet despite its popularity barriers remain, preventing widespread uptake, especially for productive commercial urban agriculture. Stadsbruk is a method developed to foster dynamic commercial urban agriculture movements in Swedish cities. The method uses a brokering organization to: facilitate communication between urban farmers and municipalities; provide training programs for municipalities and farmers; support farmers to access municipal land for growing; and build networks of municipalities and other key actors involved in commercial urban agriculture. In this chapter, we use the city of Malmö as an example to show how Stadsbruk farms have the potential to make a substantial contribution to the city's self-sufficiency in terms of fresh vegetable provision. We then explain how Stadsbruk amplifies commercial urban agriculture by creating more resilient movements in the cities where it operates, increases the speed at which commercial urban agriculture is taken up, and thereby grows the movement itself. As such, the Stadsbruk network and its underlying principles have begun to spread across Europe. Importantly, Stadsbruk is influencing policy and shifting public perceptions of urban agriculture. While the method is promising, there continue to be many institutional barriers to more widespread success, and this is compounded because attempts to gain legitimacy through demonstrating impact can be thwarted by methodological challenges. As commercial urban agriculture is amplified, social and ecological sustainability values must be prioritized to ensure that it remains a genuine contributor to sustainability.

This chapter explores the concept of “activist learning for sustainability” and the role of activism and related pedagogies and the relationship to education for sustainable development (ESD). The chapter will reflect on a case study of student-led activism: the initiation of a “sustainable student house” devised and developed by students to allow them to “live what they are learning” and educate other students about sustainable lifestyles. Through reflections from this case this chapter explores: the relationship between the formal, informal, and hidden curricula in inspiring and supporting student activist learning for sustainability; some of the challenges of student-led activist projects, such as the sometimes-difficult relationships between students and university staff, and tensions between the students’ private and public spheres of life at university; and student learning as activists for sustainability. The chapter concludes with recommendations for ESD practitioners engaged in the development of activist learning opportunities. © 2022 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Universities have an important role in moving society towards a more sustainable future. However, this will require us to repurpose universities, reorienting and refocusing the different university domains (education, research, campus, and outreach) towards sustainability. The governance structures and processes used to embed sustainability into the activities and operations of the institution are critical to achieving the required transformation. Our current university systems which are seen as contributing to socio-ecological system unsustainability are resilient to change due to slow variables such as organisational and sector-wide prevailing paradigms and culture. Therefore, to repurpose a university requires us to destabilise our prevailing system, crossing a threshold into a new stable system of a ‘sustainable university’ across all its domains. This paper utilises an adaptation of Biggs et al. (2012) resilience principles for the governance of social-ecological systems to provide a framework to consider aspects of university governance for sustainability that can be utilised to repurpose universities towards sustainability, and destabilize unsustainable elements of the system. This paper draws out examples relating to sustainability governance within universities with regards to the four principles of (i) managing diversity and redundancy, (ii) managing connectivity, (iii) managing slow variables and feedbacks, and (iv) encouraging learning and experimentation within the context of complex adaptive systems. In this article, we have shown that using resilience in a non-normative way is possible (to decrease resilience of an unsustainable system), and that it can also be valuable to help understand how to shift organisational governance towards a particular end-state (in this case, university governance that advances sustainability). This paper provides an example of how to operationalise resilience principles of relevance to the resilience literature as well as providing a practical framework to guide higher education institution governance for sustainability.