The Pillars Of The Earth.pdf
Halima Wallace
As previously discussed, culture should be integrated into the pillars of sustainable development predominantly because it encompasses social and economic dimensions. But that is not the only reason, culture can also be employed as an effective strategy to support the three fundamental pillars. It plays a socially-binding and facilitating role in the face of economic, societal and environmental challenges.
? Therefore, it could be said that sustainable development is not defined by three fundamental pillars, but through four major dimensions: social, economic, environmental and cultural.
The approach of implementing these four pillars of sustainable development within your company can only be beneficial for the smooth running of your business and for adopting a responsible management policy (CSR).
Of the various works discussed here, it is possible to broadly distinguish between two ways in which the pillars have been conceptualised. The first approach follows that of Barbier in presenting the individual dimensions as distinct, yet interacting systems, as taken by e.g. Cocklin (1989), Hancock (1993), and Basiago (1995). Secondly, there are those who follow from Brown et al. in seeing three distinct, yet interrelated perspectives or schools of thought such as Lélé (1991), Munasinghe (1993), and Goodland and Daly (1996).
Whilst there exists an obvious semantic difference, and implicit focus in meaning, this distinction is not always present in the literature, especially in reference to the pillars formulation (Pope et al. 2004; Johnston et al. 2007; Waas et al. 2011; Carter and Moir 2012). We revisit this distinction in Sect. 4.
The implementation and reporting of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is one of the emerging challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs), but the lack of well-defined reporting structures and topics for this sector makes it difficult to map and evaluate HEI performance in relation to 2030 Agenda. This study aims to assess the SDG performance and reporting by the 13 HEIs that integrate the Times Higher Education Impact Ranking (THE_IR), from the perspective of the five pillars of the 2030 Agenda in the Portuguese context, where research on this topic is quite scarce.
Monteiro, S., Ribeiro, V. and Molho, C. (2023), "A 5 pillars approach to the sustainable development goals performance and reporting in Portuguese higher education institutions. Proposal for an applied framework", International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. -02-2023-0047
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