From a perspective of social responsibility, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) cannot remain on the sidelines of the profound changes which are taking place on the planet, such as poverty, inequality, climate change and environmental degradation, among others. Consequently, HEIs have a pivotal role in promoting The United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Social Transformation (UN, 2019) with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as universities have the ethical duty to train committed citizens, with social awareness and capacity for critical analysis to make appropriate decisions and clearly provide pathways to achieve a better future (Rodríguez-Izquierdo and Lorenzo Moledo, 2023).

In this sense, Service Learning (SL) is anchored in the strategic projects of many universities internationally, committed to enhance students’ academic learning, social responsibility, and citizenship skills, while developing community capacity through service (Rodríguez-Izquierdo, 2021). It is specifically this experiential learning and its ethic and civic dimensions that render SL as a suitable approach to work in the same direction as the SDGs (Rodríguez-Izquierdo, 2023; Ruiz-Corbella and García-Gutiérrez, 2023; Sotelino-Losada et al. 2023). It is worth noting that the SL approach seems to go against the present neoliberal, performative, market driven culture of HE based on other types of indicators such as the labour market and the ranking systems.

This paper seeks to identify and examine the scientific literature (2015–2023) on the interconnectedness between SL and the SDGs in HEIs, to provide knowledge of the state of the art and the advances that have been made in this field. The specific questions that guided the study were defined as follows: How interest in this topic has evolved? What is being researched about SL and SDGs? How do researchers approach the topic? What are the contributions of SL towards the development of SDGs in HEIs? Further, the study will expand the existing literature in sustainability education and provide insights into the impact on the expansion of SDGs through the implementation of SL courses in HE.

To answer these questions, a systematic literature review was developed, understood as the systematic process of developing and extending theory through the review and analysis of relevant sources in a given field of knowledge (Newman and Gough, 2020). The procedure performed in the systematic literature review was based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement (Page et al., 2021). Following Alexander (2020) guidelines the present study was organized in four phases: 1) The research questions were defined. 2) The search for the selected terms was carried out in the fields "article title, abstract and keywords” according to the terms defined by the searches and focusing exclusively on articles published in peer-reviewed journals. In this review, we cross-searched ‘higher education’ terms with ‘service learning’ OR ‘service-learning’ AND ‘sustainable development goals’. 3) The searches were conducted in November and December 2023 using the main databases in social sciences: Web of Science (WOS) and SCOPUS both in English and Spanish. 4) The search procedure focused on review articles, published from 2015 to 2023. It is worth emphasizing that the starting date corresponds to the intersection between the SDGs and the former Millennium Development Goals, an alignment already identified and anticipated at the Conference on Sustainable Development held previously in Rio (United Nations, 2012). The first search yielded 107 possible articles (WOS (n=15); SCOPUS (n=92)). Before processing the data, we removed duplicates reaching a total of nearly one hundred journal papers (n = 87). The articles were again assessed through the application of the selection criteria searching for relevance, thus records retrieved were screened through the reading of the abstract, thus the articles that either did not focus on SDGs or did not consider the link with SL in HEIs were also eliminated. After refining the results of the search, the study finally included 31 articles. The selected documents were analysed from a qualitative perspective of thematic analysis using the software Nvivo.

The publication dates of the articles identified indicate that the subject has been active throughout the period examined. However, research on the subject is not evenly distributed by country. The interest in this subject is highly noticeable in papers published in Spanish-by-Spanish authors who seem to produce the most academic literature on this topic (Sotelino-Losada et al., 2021) followed by USA and UK. Regarding the types of studies and research methods used, the vast majority are qualitative (74% of the works analysed), compared with only 17% quantitative and 11% that used a mixed design with a predominance of assessment of programs and results. The latter examines the influence of SL on the development of the SDGs with several papers pointing at SL as a tool to develop competencies related to the challenge of sustainability allied with the SDGs. These papers claimed SL as a useful tool to align instructional methods with the SDGs to transform awareness into commitment as SL seems to be an optimal methodology that questions the structural causes of impoverishment, inequality, or various forms of domination. However, authors described factors and barriers that impede the development of both SL and SDGs in HEIs. Finally, the studies reviewed show several limitations. Their findings are not generalizable as they are very local and mainly qualitative. Further, there is a predominant number of studies done in courses taught at teacher education leaving other degrees unexplored. However, given the increasing attention being paid to SDGs within HEIs it was an appropriate time to contribute to the debate of connecting HEIs instructional methods with SDGs. We also see this review as potentially initiating a wider conversation about sustainability and responsible pedagogies in HE and call for serious attention to the teaching strategies used.

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