Two terms as the University of Waterloo’s Associate Vice-President, International – with a year as a Senior Advisor at the Association of Commonwealth Universities in between those two terms (about which I have written at some length, though not (yet?) published) – taught me a lot about the ways in which higher education can work internationally to advance sustainability. During this period, I worked to generate insights that found the light of day through op-ed type contributions (see, for instance, pieces in University World News on university partnerships and prospects) as well as data-rich type investigations (I did, for example, a presentation at the 2021 CBIE conference matching U15 (Canada) and Russell Group (United Kingdom) members through bibliometric analyses).
I continue to be interested in the issue, and I want to continue to contribute to our understanding and our impact. Research and innovative activity around international, inter-university partnerships is front of mind for me right now.
I have three projects underway in this area:
i) International, inter-university energy networks: Thinking about Canadian collaboration candidates
International academic work can be potentially impactful: different expertise, perspectives, infrastructure, and networks can catalyze new insights, learnings, breakthroughs, and discoveries. Inter-institutional, international academic work, in particular, can also be potentially transformative: it has, for instance, greater potential for interdisciplinary discovery by virtue of multiple perspectives collaborating within a single institution and then reaching out across international boundaries. It can also be strategic: while these are challenging financial times for many in higher education, it appears to be the case that resource availability at universities to seed activities is focusing upon priority areas and is more likely to happen with reciprocity of some kind.
With this context, I developed a presentation and draft paper (which is, say, 80% towards a full first draft) for the recent (May 2024) conference of the Ontario Network for Sustainable Energy Policy with the following research question: ‘Where are the best prospective international, institutional-level partners for Canadian universities with respect to energy research, generally, and energy policy and energy transition research, more specifically?’ To answer this, I used global-reach, country-based energy activity data, bibliometric data, reports from ranking organizations, and international relations analyses to screen and to identify candidates.
Next steps for this work include completion of that aforementioned-draft and reflection upon what ‘spin-offs’ might be possible. Taking this kind of analysis from the ‘country-level’ (as a reminder, in this, I look at ‘Canada’) to the ‘institution-level’ (for an individual university, what partner(s), where, make(s) most sense?) is something I am interested in pursuing. There is the potential for collaborative work on both the frameworks developed (what is used to ‘scope and funnel’) and applications to individual country, region, and/or institutional cases.
ii) Universities and global sustainability rankings
Balsillie School PhD student Brandon Dickson is, for his dissertation, locating his work in the context of global sustainability governance. He is exploring how sustainability transitions are being undertaken by universities, and how universities are affecting – and are affected by – developments at local, provincial, national, and global levels. Within that context, he and I – in my role as one of his PhD co-supervisors – are having discussions about relationships between global university sustainability rankings and university decision-making. We will be offering – with Brandon presenting – some of our thoughts in this area at the National Sustainability Society National Conference (Seattle, 9-11 September 2024).
iii) European university networks
Preliminary work – indeed, not much more than ‘ideas in my head’ at this time – has involved reflecting upon Europe’s expanding network of intra-continental university associations (in particular, the European Universities Initiative) to think about the characteristics of the alliances that have formed. I have not even gotten to the stage of identifying the specific knowledge need and thus the associated research question, but I am interested in understanding better the cross-European connections – why they have arisen in the ways that they have, how they might have most impact, how they might reach beyond Europe, and more. Of course, such international associations are not only found within continents (see, as well -- in addition to this European example -- the ASEAN University Network and the African Research Universities Alliance), but also across continents (e.g., the University Global Coalition; and the International Association of Universities); thus, there is potential for collaborative work across multiple areas.
