“Environmental Stewardship: An Inquiry on Benchmarks and Blueprints” in “Environmental Stewardship”
Environmental Stewardship: An Inquiry on Benchmarks and Blueprints
Thelma Flores (Miami International University of Art and Design)
The research is focused on the examination of benchmarks and good practices in environmental stewardship. As we take value in EDRA’s history over fifty years, it is a worthy undertaking to illuminate the key ascendancies and exemplary practices of similar environmental organizations through an evidence-based inquiry. With the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education's (AASHE) compendium of projects, there is apparent manifestation that institutions have presented projects reflecting the campus stewardship programs highlighted in the previous century. The objectives of the study is to systematically present the contextual relation of the two established models such as to show the dichotomies of Ecodemia benchmarks and the AASHE blueprint of outcomes; the Ecodemia perspective and AASHE practices; and the Ecodemia initiatves and AASHE project implementations.
In 1995, Julian Keniry published the twelve Ecodemia benchmarks of campus environmental stewardship, a set of initiatives to drive higher education’s collective effort and implicate the ethical commitment of various stakeholders therein. The set of benchmark included the plethora of initiatives surrounding executive support, environmental policy, provision of resources and incentives, structural framework for committees and task forces, curriculum to ensure the environmental responsibility, research to pursue environmental agendas, ecological planning and campus design, connecting campus to community programs, measurable reduction of cost and waste, documentation of program impacts and effectiveness, financial accountability, and leadership development and training.
Ten years later particularly in 2005, AASHE was officially launched as the first professional organization that spearheads campus sustainability in North America. Since January 2008, the organization has indexed and archived nearly 12,000 blueprints of completed projects. It was noted that institutional submissions were examined based on clarity and coherence of goals and implementation, level of innovation, degree of replicability, dimensions of sustainability in project outcomes and results, and engagement of stakeholders.
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