In attempts and movements to foster a sustainability transition of higher education, there is an inherent ambiguous relation with the current configuration of higher education. On the one hand, the notion of transition implies a radical change of the current regime (i.e. a break away from how the system is currently configured). On the other hand, the current regime can also provide valuable resources and tools to foster more attention for sustainability. For example, many quality assurance frameworks contain opportunities to promote transformative learning for sustainable development (Janssens, Kuppens, Mulà, Staniskiene, & Zimmermann, 2022).

This ambiguity has been briefly addressed and explored in literature on sustainability in higher education in relation to elements of marketization and corporatization of contemporary higher education. Whereas some argue against “compromise, accommodation and incorporation”, stating that practitioners should be more “political in their contestations of institutional practices” (Blewitt, 2013, p. 61) others are more nuanced, pointing at risks, pitfalls and limitations, but also opportunities of using the current regime to instill a change towards a more sustainable university (see e.g. Bessant, 2015; Bessant & Robinson, 2019; Bessant, Robinson, & Ormerod, 2015; Deleye, Van Poeck, & Block, 2019; Maxey, 2009). Maxey (2009), discussing contemporary higher education primarily in terms of the corporate university, states that we should move “beyond a binary framing of sustainability vs. corporatisation” (p.440) and that the way this relationship between sustainability and corporatization is to take shape is ongoing and not yet fixed. Especially in practice this openness is the case, because practice is much more complex than any possible ideological contradictions between sustainability and the way contemporary higher education is structured might make appear (Bessant, 2017).

In this paper, we aim to nourish and further substantiate the scholarly debate on this topic by approaching it as an empirical question: We aim to create detailed empirical knowledge on how exactly this tension is dealt with in practice. We do this by studying how university practitioners in a concrete change practice at an engineering faculty of a Belgian university navigate characteristics of the way the university is structured at the moment. The aim is to provide insights into how such regime characteristics affect how the sustainable university is envisioned and worked out in practice, but also how in turn such change practices might affect (the role of) regime characteristics in turn. Zooming in on one concrete change practice in a case study allows us to not only complement the existing research with detailed empirical insights on the processes of change in relation to existing regime. Such knowledge is also, we would argue, necessary to build up in order to scientifically substantiate the design of change processes in higher education.

This translates into one research question:

How do those involved in a sustainable university change practice – individually and as a collective – negotiate (i.e. recognize, negotiate, use, accept, counter, transform…) the current HE regime.

The object of study (empirical object) is a change practice where professors, lecturers and administrators meet on a regular basis to make the education at their faculty more sustainable, while negotiating institutional expectations of the university.

Answering the research question requires the construction of a specific methodological framework, which we design out of a combination of Transactional Didactic Theory and the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) on sustainability transitions, in combination with the analytical method Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA). First of all, an analytical model and empirical input is needed to operationalize “the current regime” for analytical use. This has to be done not only in abstract and theoretical terms (i.e. what is a regime), but also specific to this context (i.e. what does this regime consist of). For this, the results of an earlier MLP analysis of sustainability in higher education in Flanders (Deleye et al., 2019) are used. The MLP is a middle-range theory that helps to better understand transitions of complex socio-technical systems (e.g. mobility, energy and agri-food systems) (Geels, 2011). The MLP analysis by Deleye, Van Poeck, and Block (2018) offers, among other things, a description of the Flemish HE regime through the identification of regime characteristics, lock-ins and internal contradictions of the regime, which provides us with an operationalization of the regime tailored to the specificity of this study. Secondly, for an understanding of how these regime elements are negotiated in the change practice, we turn to transactional didactic theory (Östman, Van Poeck, & Öhman, 2019; Van Poeck & Östman, 2021). Central in this theory is the focus on the interplay (i.e. transaction) between the intrapersonal and elements of the environment (Östman et al., 2019). However, not all of these elements are included in the collective meaning-making as it unfolds, which brings us to the concept of Privileging. Privileging refers to the dynamic process of inclusion and exclusion of such elements (Wertsch, 1998). In this sense, the regime elements are conceptualized as transactional resources that are used or not used in the meaning-making of participants in change practices. To analyze this privileging process, we combine document analysis and interviews with key participants with observations of the HE change practice. The latter are analyzed with PEA (Wickman & Östman, 2002) which allows to trace in conversations what is privileged, how this privileging steers the meaning-making taking place (Van Poeck, Vandenplas, & Östman, 2023) and, thus, how this affects the (envisioned) endpoint of the sustainability change practice. This allows us to empirically reveal how regime elements function as transactional resources in the collective decision making in HE change practices.

The main object of knowledge of the study is to see which and how elements of the contemporary higher education regime play a role (i.e. function as transactional resources) in sustainability change practices, and, in turn, how these practices affect this regime. Our analysis of which of the 21 regime characteristics identified by Deleye et al. (2019) actually play a role in sustainability change practices and how this exactly takes place reveals how those involved in such practices to embed sustainability navigate regime elements: avoid obstacles and lock-ins, use particular elements to their advantage etc. Such an empirical analysis of what happens in practice sheds further light on the ambiguous relationship of transition movements and practices with the current regime configuration and moves the debate on this topic beyond principled discussions by approaching it as an empirical question. By showing how specific elements of the regime that have been cursed because of their neoliberal aura (e.g. by Blewitt (2013)) can prove to be fruitful and meaningful in practice, while elements and concepts that have been highlighted in recent literature as potential opportunities for change (e.g. quality assurance frameworks by Janssens et al. (2022)) can prove to be more of a burden than a blessing in evoking meaningful change, our focus on how practitioners deal with such elements will hopefully both muddle previous dichotomies and shed light on how to move on.

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