The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a collective global strategy to create a world where “no-one will be left behind”. Higher education institutions play a critical role in fulfilment of the goals and can do more to connect their work with the communities they serve and help create a more sustainable future. As organizations that have stood for many centuries in some cases, the ability of universities and colleges to deliver against the goals will demand they adapt to this global agenda for change.

Higher Education and the Sustainable Development Goals is a series of 17 books that address each of the SDGs in turn specifically through the lens of higher education.

The COVD-19 pandemic drew attention to the interconnected and hyper-dependent nature of health with the economy, equity and the environment. While lockdowns and social distancing strategies might have been a welcome respite for the environment, imposing human inactivity devastated livelihoods with under-served communities experiencing the worst hardships. Those in Travel & Tourism (T&T), service and retail sectors were particularly hard hit. To recover T&T and ‘build back better’, we posit placing health and well-being as a fourth pillar of sustainability, sitting alongside the pillars of economy, society and the environment. Healthy people, healthy planet and healthy prosperity for all – this is what sustainability means when we describe a world where no one is left behind[i]. Embracing the wellbeing of people and planet as core strategic drivers of sustainability in T&T could help the sector pivot more powerfully from the pandemic’s impact. Adopting sustainability as a driver of radical systems transformation[ii] is core to sustainable development and could help T&T make a just transition to the ‘next normal’. Here, we make the case for health and well-being as key to advancing sustainable T&T and explore what this might mean for the sector going forward.

The COVID-19 health crisis has caused profound social and economic disruptions. Affecting everyone, its impact is not equal. Exacerbating deep social fissures and long-standing systemic inequalities, the pandemic reveals the fragilities and inequities in global higher education. Accelerating underlying trends and triggering seismic shifts in the sector, collective efforts over a period of weeks delivered massive change in a sector not known for being fleet-of-foot. As we envisage the ‘next normal’ for higher education, problems with the ‘old normal’ may be fixed and some recent innovations carried forward. Representing a period of punctuated equilibrium, COVID-19 could lead to transformation of the sector towards greater equity and impact across teaching/learning, research/innovation, community  service/engagement and the staff/students’ experience. As we ask, “When will HE open again?”, and “When we do, what will it be like?” we may also find ourselves considering “Will some institutions open at all?” Seeking to navigate these volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times—so-called VUCA conditions—we propose that the SDGs are positioned as a lens to re-imagine higher education in mounting an antifragility response. We examine whether a new paradigm is forming that could be more sustainable as budgets, priorities and institutional archetypes are challenged fundamentally in line with delivery against the SDGs.

Partnerships are essential to delivering the transformational change demanded by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and essential to achieving Agenda 2030. It is therefore necessary to strengthen the partnering capacity of different types of organizations so they can collaborate in multi-stakeholder partnerships. However, partnership working can be costly in terms of time and other resources and is complex. Given the urgency and importance of sustainable development, illustrated by the recent pandemic and social unrest around inequity, we focused on the creation of a partnership that became effective quickly and was able to deliver societal impact at scale. Using a case study approach, the transformational potential and the early stages of “El día después” (in English, “The day after”) were analyzed as it represents a multi-stakeholder partnership forged to frame an SDG-oriented collaborative response to the COVID-19 crisis in Spain. El día después is defined as a partnership incubator, a space where public administrations interact under conditions of equivalence with all the other stakeholders, where private companies can link their innovation processes to other SDG-committed actors and social needs and where the academic sector can participate in a sustained dialogue oriented to the action. Our findings reveal that in order to catalyze the co-creation process and achieve systemic change through a set of connected multi-stakeholder initiatives, a very flexible collaborative arrangement is required, with all partners acting as facilitators. In this way, a solid interdisciplinary team is created, united around a shared vision, with trust-based relationships and a common identity fueling impact-oriented projects targeted to advance the SDGs.

Preparation of Foreword and Certified Evaluator