Rethinking digital sustainability in higher education: organisational barriers and pathways for low-impact academic conferences

Abstract

This paper examines why carbon-intensive practices at academic conferences persist despite growing sustainability commitments within higher education institutions (HEIs). While prior research has addressed the environmental footprint of academic events and the technical feasibility of hybrid or decentralised formats, limited attention has been paid to the organisational and institutional mechanisms through which unsustainable conference practices are reproduced. The paper addresses this gap by investigating how organisational routines, institutional incentives and governance arrangements shape the adoption of more sustainable conference models. The study adopts an exploratory empirical design combining a structured literature review with survey evidence collected during the 2024 EGOS Colloquium. The analysis examines travel and accommodation choices as indicators of the extent to which sustainability commitments are translated into conference-related practices. The findings show that sustainability awareness alone does not lead to lower-impact behaviour. Carbon-intensive practices persist because they are embedded in organisational routines, reinforced by prestige- and networking-based participation norms, and weakly challenged by existing governance mechanisms. The study suggests that the persistence of unsustainable conference models reflects not only individual choice but also broader institutionalised patterns of academic participation. The paper contributes to organisation theory and behaviour research by conceptualising conference sustainability as an organisational governance problem rather than only an environmental or technical one. It extends current debates on sustainable academic events by showing how institutional incentives and organisational inertia constrain change and by proposing an (E)ESG-based framework to support the assessment and redesign of conference governance in HEIs.