The Sustainability Change Laboratory : Fostering Transformative Agency for Sustainability Integration in Higher Education

Obexer, Regina and Bligh, Brett (2026) The Sustainability Change Laboratory : Fostering Transformative Agency for Sustainability Integration in Higher Education. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Despite the urgency of sustainability transformation, Higher Education (HE) institutions worldwide have been slow to embrace their role in promoting sustainable development. The extant literature about HE sustainability integration debates this issue frequently in terms of organisational barriers and drivers such as leadership, collaboration, resourcing, incentives, and stakeholder engagement. However, there is growing recognition that static views of these barriers are insufficient, and a more dynamic understanding of transformative efforts is needed. This requires attention to the processes by which this change can be achieved and to the concept of agency in this context - areas still largely underexplored in this field. This thesis explores process and agency in sustainability integration in higher education by considering a research intervention at an Austrian University. Using Change Laboratory methodology grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the project engaged staff and student participants in online sessions to examine current sustainability practices and co-develop new solutions, such as strategies for curricular integration and new learning options for students. The research focuses on how transformative agency, understood in turn through the lenses of expressions, turning points, and the Transformative Agency through Double Stimulation (TADS) model, emerged throughout the intervention. Research data are derived from session recordings, collaborative participant outputs, surveys, and a research diary. The findings show how transformative agency, traced through participants’ agentic expressions, emerged throughout the intervention, with three turning points denoting a shift in emphasis from explicating the university’s role in sustainable development and criticizing current conditions, to envisioning shared solutions, and finally to developing concrete implementation plans for sustainability learning pathways. TADS analysis further explores the process and mechanisms by which sustainability agency emerged as aspirational and systemic conflicts of motives were surfaced, reflecting the nature of sustainability-focused projects where motivated participants, driven by their own values and broader social concerns, are challenged by institutional realities. Participants demonstrated agency by rejecting researcher-provided stimuli in favour of their own, and by arguing strongly that all students should engage with sustainability issues, even when this conflicted with arguments about upholding student choice. This study contributes to the literature investigating HE sustainability integration approaches by advancing a dynamic, participatory and process-oriented approach that foregrounds learning, systemic understanding and the transformative agency of participants and productively employs contradictions as catalysts for change. It contributes a detailed, theory-informed account of how collective agency develops through mediated engagement. Conceptually, it proposes reframing the fragmented notion of sustainability agency as a form of transformative agency, offering a new model of sustainability agency based on the theoretical foundations rooted in CHAT.