O Compromisso institucional de Universidades do Cerrado com as transições regionais para a sustentabilidade

Abstract

This research sought to answer the following question: What is the institutional commitment of federal public universities located in the Cerrado Biome to regional sustainability transitions? The general objective was to assess the institutional commitment of Brazilian federal public universities located in the Cerrado Biome to regional sustainability transitions. The specific objectives were: to assess the incorporation of sustainability into the strategic institutional policies of these universities; to identify the paradigmatic orientation of sustainability adopted in their strategic institutional policies; and to characterize the incorporation of territoriality into their strategic institutional policies. The research adopted a qualitative, exploratory, and interpretive approach, based on an abductive logic, using Content Analysis according to Bardin (2015) as the main analytical technique, combined with the simultaneous coding proposed by Saldaña (2021). The corpus comprised strategic institutional documents (Innovation Policy, Sustainable Logistics Plan (PLS), Institutional Pedagogical Project (PPI), and Institutional Development Plan (PDI)) from four federal public universities located in the Cerrado Biome: Federal University of Goiás (UFG), Federal University of Western Bahia (UFOB), Federal University of Tocantins (UFT), and University of Brasília (UnB). The analysis was guided by three analytical axes: modes of engagement with sustainability, territoriality, and sustainability paradigm. The results indicate that the institutional commitment of the universities analyzed lies predominantly between the latency and instrumental phases, without reaching the operational phase and, consequently, the adaptive or regenerative transition phases. This finding demonstrates that environmental sustainability does not yet constitute a structuring guideline within strategic policies. Territoriality remains absent or diffuse in the documents. When present, environmental sustainability is predominantly associated with the hegemonic paradigm. These findings indicate that the urgencies arising from the socio-environmental and climate crisis are not translated, in the documents analyzed, into an institutional orientation capable of redirecting the universities’ activities, restructuring their priorities, and positioning them as agents of regional sustainability transitions. The main contributions of this research are: the construction of the concept of institutional commitment; the proposition of an original inference matrix for assessing institutional commitment; the analytical incorporation of the counter-hegemonic sustainability paradigm as a category of analysis; and empirical evidence that, in the strategic documents analyzed, institutional commitment remains restricted to the latency and instrumental phases, indicating that the universities analyzed do not yet act as intermediaries of regional sustainability transitions in the Cerrado Biome.