This paper is concerned with the twinning of sustainability with priorities of economic neoliberalization in education, and in particular via the mobility or diffusion of education policy. We discuss the literature on policy mobility as well as overview concerns regarding neoliberalism and education. The paper brings these analyses to bear in considering the uptake of sustainability in education policy. We ask to what extent sustainability as a vehicular idea may be twinning with processes of neoliberalization in education policy in ways that may undermine aspirations of, and action on, environmental sustainability. Toward the end of the paper, we draw on data from an empirical study to help elucidate how the analytic frames of policy mobility can inform our analyses of the potential concerns and possibilities of sustainability as a vehicular idea. In particular, we investigate how sustainability and related language have been adopted in the policies of Canadian post-secondary education institutions over time. The paper closes by suggesting the potential implications of the proceeding analyses for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers concerned with sustainability in education policy.

Declarations for sustainability in higher education are often seen as a set of guiding principles that aid institutions of higher learning to incorporate the concept of sustainability into their various institutional dimensions. As the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development draws to a close and in the shadow of the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, it seems appropriate to re-evaluate how these declarations have changed over the past two decades. In this study, we apply critical discourse analysis to examine how sustainability and the university are socio-politically constructed within these documents. Our analysis uncovers evidence of ideological assumptions and structures that are potentially misaligned with notions of sustainability often discussed in the Sustainability in Higher Education (SHE) literature. It is not the purpose of this study to provide a definitive reading of the documents, but rather to ply a novel critical lens to help elucidate how some taken-for-granted assumptions present in the declarations may work against their stated goals.

Abstract:Campus sustainability is an increasingly popular notion for universities around the world in light of increasingly serious global environmental problems. Yet the very concept of -sustainability‖ itself is a complex, or -wicked‖, problem that makes managing this transition complex and difficult. The scope of a sustainable campus could include anything from greening facilities, increasing environmental education, integrating sustainability priorities into purchasing policies, and an endless list of other considerations.Given the breadth that sustainability could have on a university campus, employing tools to help manage this goal will create more effective and immediate change. One possible tool is Knowledge Management (KM), the practice of -capturing, organizing and storing information‖ (-Imperial College London,‖ 2010, para. 25). Specifically, a framework by Allen et al. is applied to the sustainability in higher education (SHE) problem to help universities take steps towards creating sustainable campuses.