Mapping Hope: Designing Interplays for Climate Action in Higher Education

As sites of knowledge production and future-making, universities bear a profound responsibility to address the climate crisis. Research highlights a lack of strategic leadership and the fragmentation of climate initiatives into institutional silos. However, universities contain diverse actors with unique capabilities and knowledges. So far, limited attention has been paid to the latent potentials and interdependencies between the work of actors at different levels of the institutional system.

This paper aims to reveal such institutional "interplays" (Easterling, 2021), examining how different actors leverage layers of the institutional system to shift existing frames towards climate action (Huybrechts et al., 2017). Participatory systems mapping was used to map a range of interventions by stakeholders from across a university, focusing specifically on how they influence existing structures or create new ones. The resulting mappings reveal the ways that initiatives operate through carefully cultivated interdependencies that adopt, repurpose and challenge institutional frames; tapping into local capabilities and opportunities beyond traditional governance structures.

Sharing both the mapping methodology and insights gained, this paper demonstrates how hope emerges when hidden connections between institutional actors and initiatives are made visible. By revealing these interplays, we move beyond the paralysis of waiting for top-down solutions to see how institutional transformation is already being prefigured through networks of small-scale interventions. It offers a practical method for seeing the connections among fragmented struggles and revealing spaces where other institutional logics are possible.