Mapping the Strategic Documents of Universities through the Lens of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: the Case of Romanian Public Universities

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a structured framework for addressing sustainability, and their applicability for higher education institutions has only increased in recent years, as some international rankings use them as a reference. In this context, the purpose of this study is to map the strategies of Romanian public universities to determine how they internalise the SDGs in their actions.

Our perspective is twofold as we are interested in identifying both explicit and implicit references. For this purpose, we conducted a content analysis by examining any explicit references to sustainability and then using keywords associated with the first 16 SDGs. The results indicate that universities that report their commitment to sustainability international rankings have more SDG-related links in their strategies.

However, institutional documents do not directly pursue the UN SDGs; instead, they implicitly correlate to them through their specific operations and activities. Additionally, we determined the most relevant SDGs for universities’ operations, observing differences in the distribution of interest. Clustering universities based on their interactions with the SDGs was influenced by their internal characteristics. As sustainability becomes increasingly important on universities’ agendas, our approach provides a state-of-the-art analysis showing that, although not always directly, institutions have prior experience.