STRATEGIC COMMITMENT OF BRAZILIAN PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES TO THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
The global efforts to ensure that the economic development takes place while all people from all the countries of the world have guaranteed access to decent life conditions and the environment is preserved or even recovered from the damages caused by human action are guided by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were proposed by the United Nations (UN). In this context, the higher education institutions (HEIs) are expected to perform a key role in providing human resources that are able to deal with sustainability issues, to engage the community in these issues and to develop science and technology aiming at social, environmental and economic development. HEIs have been formally committed to promote sustainability through international agreements since the Talloires Declaration in 1990. The research field in sustainability has been developed over the years and an important part of the works are contributions about achieving the SDGs, including studies that try to analyze the integration of the SDGs to the HEIs’ strategic level. For that matter, this work had the goal to verify the strategic commitment of Brazilian public universities to the SDGs, through the content analysis of strategic planning documents of 70 institutions (61,4% of the public universities in the country). The metrics of the Times Higher Education Impact Ranking (THEIR) 2020, which aims to measure the impact generated by the universities, were used as base for the analysis. As a result, the research was able to identify initiatives related to the 17 SDGs in the analyzed strategic plans and to create a national overview of university actions and policies towards sustainable development. This research can serve as a guideline to the implementation of actions in other Brazilian HEIs. It also can be used to compare sustainable practices that were identified in other studies developed around the world.