Unipoli Green—Four Universities Working Together for Sustainability

Abstract

This paper introduces the Finnish context for promoting sustainable development in higher education and describes and analyzes the development of cooperation in Tampere, Finland: its benefits, challenges and limitations. The expectations for universities to promote sustainable development are rising while the resources for sustainability work are scarce. In Tampere there are four universities, Police University College, Tampere University of Applied Science, Tampere University of Technology and University of Tampere, educating and employing over 40,000 people. Promoting sustainability is in different phases at each of these universities. The coordinators of sustainable development in these universities met in spring 2014 and agreed on information sharing and cooperation in the form of concrete events and thematic days. This initiative was supported by the existence of the universities’ cooperation platform UNIPOLI. Later the cooperation has found three major fields: (1) awareness raising, (2) sharing information and influencing management and (3) curriculum development. Possibility of sharing knowledge and experiences and building a community has enabled more efficient actions in all these fields, but the vague mandate of network has caused confusion and hindered realization of some ideas.