LANTERN Project
In the new project "University within the Anthropocene: Lighthouse-Adaption and Transfer for Sustainable Development (LANTERN)", the universities of Münster, Osnabrück, and Siegen, together with the social entrepreneurs from “Heiland & Caspari - Prozessbegleitung” have joined forces to learn from each other how to implement sustainability. In this way LANTERN aims to establish the concerns for sustainability and global justice within universities.
This new project will identify the success factors of projects for sustainability transformation, develop indicators to measure the success of projects, and understand the requirements to transfer such success stories. With the help of the Whole Institution Approach (WIA), new knowledge about the role of lighthouse projects in the process of transformation of universities will be generated. The WIA considers five dimensions of an institution: operations, research, teaching, governance, and transfer. Based on the new knowledge about lighthouse projects at universities, an exploration of existing lighthouse projects at the three involved universities will be conducted.
As a subsequent step, the project will conduct sustainability workshops at all three universities in cooperation with non-university institutions from the respective regions of the partner universities. The aim of those sustainability workshops is to initiate innovative lighthouse projects at the universities and a transfer beyond their boundaries. All workshops will be subject to close scientific scrutiny along the way. At the end of LANTERN, the success and the impact of the whole project will be analysed.
The immediate steps in LANTERN will be to identify existing lighthouse projects at the partner universities and conduct expert interviews. One objective is to analyse how a “culture of sustainability” affects the success of such projects. Key questions are: Which drivers support and which barriers prevent the achievement of projects? Are there institutional norms and daily practices, as well as underlying values that make projects more successful? What is the impact of group processes?
