Capacity Building for Sustainable Development: Coherent Concepts of Universities’ Third Mission as a Parameter

The 2030 Agenda emphasizes the requirement for researchers to collaborate with policy makers, practitioners and other stakeholders in providing solutions to sustainable development challenges, benefitting the most vulnerable and marginalized and leaving no one behind. However, the establishment of high-quality and fruitful collaboration is difficult, and there are several challenges in transferring research evidence into practice. To cope with this situation, we have recommended a systematic six-step procedure, which summarizes the most relevant actions to be taken and issues to be considered on the part of (individual) researchers. Broad engagement of individual scientists in the 2030 Agenda also requires respective support from universities; furthermore, universities provide the necessary framework for sustainably integrating the SDGs into research agendas at all levels. In recent years, there is a growing expectation that universities not only produce new knowledge but do so with social and economic perspectives in mind, which has been codified as the obligation of universities to perform a Third Mission. While there is a rich variety of Third Mission activities already being carried out in research and teaching, there is a lack of distinct Third Mission profiles at universities, conceptualized as deliberate and programmatic directions to face the high complexity of societal challenges and considering the 2030 Agenda for new research. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the necessity and the potential of such explicit concepts for universities to contribute to sustainable development. The University of Vienna serves as a case example for illustrating how a distinct Third Mission profile can be developed.