The Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences’ 2025 Research Day held on 6 November 2025 captivated its audience with a series of outstanding presentations – none more powerful than two forward-looking explorations of sustainability. Together, these presentations offered not only sharp analysis of the challenges facing our world but also imaginative possibilities for navigating a more sustainable future.

Higher education’s role in driving a sustainable future

In her presentation titled “Validating Higher Education’s Role in Regional Collaboration Towards a Sustainable Future,” Chanel Venter from the Department of Business Management explored how a collaborative role in regional innovation systems can accelerate society’s move toward a more sustainable future.

“For us as a society to move into a sustainable future – a desired state that is economically viable, socially just and environmentally resilient – we need to go through extensive changes on several levels, called transitions,” she explained. 

“If we think about the diverse problems we have to overcome when we speak about sustainable futures, it becomes obvious that the solutions to these problems won’t only come from one perspective, agent or actor. We need the involvement of different actors who engage collaboratively to get solutions to these problems. Therefore, the main aim of my research is to consider which regional actors would be best placed to drive and coordinate this vision of working towards a sustainable future together.”

According to Venter, if the aim is to move from an unsustainable current state to a more sustainable state from a regional innovation system perspective, then a very prominent actor comes to mind – higher education (HE).

“Universities have traditionally been labelled as one of the most prominent players in regional innovation systems. These institutions possess extensive experience in contributing to sustainable development and are increasingly being called upon by stakeholders to actively contribute to sustainable development. Yet we now also see that stakeholders - civil society, the private sector, government – are becoming increasingly critical and more cynical of the role universities are playing in this regard. These stakeholders also seem to expect more and more of universities.”

In response, Venter examined whether there is a governance intervention role within sustainability transitions research that could help universities better anticipate and mitigate the risks associated with these escalating stakeholder expectations and provide a clear role outline.

Using a systematic literature review, topic modelling, and the conceptual framework analysis method developed by Jabareen (2009), Venter conceptualised what she terms the HE Intermediary Collaborative (HE-CI) role. The HE-CI role is defined through five key activities:

1. Mediating change: Supporting other actors within the transition landscape.
2. Managing transition politics: navigating power dynamics within collaborative sustainability efforts.
3. Acting as a boundary spanner: Serving as a connector across geographies, sectors and stakeholders.
4. Driving a place-based focus: Emphasising the unique local contributions of HEs
5. Facilitating support structures: Aligning actors, networks and institutions towards transformation.

However, the question remained whether the proposed activities in the HE-CI role outline should form part of the role and can be deemed sensible and valuable to both researchers and HE practitioners. Therefore, this research validated the notion of 'Higher Education Collaborative Intermediary (HE-CI)' and its associated activities. 

Venter emphasised that the validated HE-CI role provides universities with a practical and legitimised framework for its collaborative involvement in regional sustainability transitions.

“This role can help universities establish a baseline for collaboration by identifying which actors in their regional innovation systems are already fulfilling — or can be supported to fulfil — intermediary functions,” she explained. “In doing so, it reframes and reaffirms higher education’s role within the sustainable development discourse.”

Ways of navigating planetary collapse

Nina Callaghan, from the Centre for Sustainability Transitions, delivered her presentation titled, “Embodied Sustainability: Cultivating dispositions and capabilities to navigate planetary collapse.”

“Collapse is a central theme of this presentation,” she began. “Not to invoke a doomsday scenario for the future, but to acknowledge a current and unfolding process – one that we set in motion long ago through unsustainable and inhumane practices.”

Callaghan’s research draws on the work of two groups of scholars, between whom she seeks to strike a balance. Her goal, she explained, is “to avoid trafficking in despair while keeping some form of active hope alive”.

“These scholars argue that social, economic and political breakdowns can cause huge climate change and ecosystem decline, and that collapse is not one apocalyptic event but rather a series of interconnected, dynamic collapses which then interact – and this is when collapse comes into it.”

“They describe it as a failure of consumer societies,” Callaghan said. “We no longer grow our own food or create the essentials of life within our communities – we buy everything from supermarkets. But what happens when the shelves are empty in a time of collapse? The same applies to basic services like water and electricity?”

These so-called collapsologists build their case on climate science, warning that if the world continues with business as usual, we are on a trajectory toward 2.7°C of global warming within the next 70 years — up from the current 1.2°C. “That scenario,” Callaghan noted, “would be an absolute disaster for our planet.”

Yet rather than yielding to despair, Callaghan seeks to bring hope and healing to the sustainability discourse by turning to art for guidance.

“Both art and science are practices of world making, they both are involved in storytelling. This is why I was drawn to making art part of the study. It is a really important process for me because I want to bring all of my worlds together – my domestic world, my spiritual world. I want to do something not only for myself but also for sustainability. The question is, how do we evolve theory into practice? Can art offer a pathway to sustainability?”

Among the themes Callaghan plans to explore are the value of personal and ecological grief, as well as the transformative potential of somatic (body-based) practices.

These are values and practices I believe sustainability scholars should embrace,” she said. “They are deeply relational, helping us build the emotional and physical capacity to face reality. Grief, too, can mobilise communities — it helps us to care and act, and reconnects with our bodies so that we can truly feel.”

The second phase of her study will involve conducting grief rituals and somatic practices with others and reflecting on their shared experiences.

“Can such practices deepen our somatic intelligence?” she asked. “And can they help us decolonise our ways of knowing – restore some sort of self-knowledge and community knowledge through embodied experience?