Integration of project management elements as enhancers in the transition to sustainability in inter- and trans-disciplinary research centres

Nowadays we are facing a high level of sustainability problems due to the humans’ unsustainable behaviour, therefore a restructuring is expected from the educational system and its complex dynamics to manage the situation, promoting a new awareness-based model towards a sustainable society shaped by, and for, stakeholders involved, ensuring that the different organizations comply with the criteria of sustainability within their substantive functions (teaching, research and extension). It is sought to analyse and discuss the differences and relations between approaches of knowledge co-production in complex project management research. This includes the basic understanding of the perspectives on project management practices by illustrative examples from TrUST project. We relate the biophysical, the economic and the social perspectives by asking: How do different approaches turn aspects of the project management into a research problem and how do this approach is related to others? And how does this relate to specific local real-world problems? This work aims at tapping into management engineering theories of organizational change to find their overlaps with sustainability pedagogies in higher education institutions and research centres, and find out how this transition is taking place. After an extensive literature review, the results of 18 semi-structured interviews were elaborated, investigating the different inter/trans-disciplinary project management practices by actual coordinators and researchers in inter/trans-disciplinary research centres. We highlight which management approaches are used (consciously or not) to shape a new formative offer toward a sustainability-based course. Results show what is being currently done, and to which extent transdisciplinarity is used as the key approach to solving wicked problems in a multi-faceted perspective, involving the source dimension from which it is being operating. According to our dataset, high levels of effort, human care and fair allocation of resources are needed. Conclusions highlight the unmissable ingredients, attitudes and methods to pursue sustainability education with a more systemic and trackable management strategy.