From Implementation Tensions to Institutional Capacity Building for Sustainability Goals in Higher Education

Higher education institutions are expected to contribute to sustainability transformation, yet less is known about how institutional capacity supporting such transformation develops through educational innovation. This study examines capacity building during the implementation period of LIFE (2016–2020), a university-wide interdisciplinary project-based learning initiative. The exploratory case study draws on institutional documents, interviews with 4 university leaders, 19 academic supervisors, and 151 students’ open-ended and closed-ended responses to the feedback survey. Analysis traced implementation tensions and challenges through their recognition, response and adaptations, institutional embedding, and emerging capabilities. The study shows that educational innovation can create important institutional preconditions for sustainability transformation, especially when paradoxical tensions are activated through identities and agency, communities and networks, rules and regulations, and infrastructures and tools. Three recurring tensions were identified: autonomy versus guidance, interdisciplinarity versus disciplinary depth, and flexibility versus regulation and quality assurance, alongside the challenge of moving from project coordination to longer-term continuity. Adaptive responses contributed to emerging institutional capabilities and overall capacity for facilitating student agency, interdisciplinary collaboration, cross-disciplinary networking, organizational learning, adaptive governance, and project coordination. However, sustainability was more salient in strategic discourse than in supervisors’ and students’ accounts of everyday practice, and this capacity was not consistently mobilized towards explicit sustainability purposes. The findings therefore distinguish institutional capacity relevant to sustainability transformation from sustainability-oriented institutional capacity. Sustainability orientation requires explicit alignment of emerging capabilities and capacity with sustainability purposes.