Part I - Overview

What sustainability means

7. Sustainability can be defined along the following lines:

An institution is being managed on a sustainable basis if, taking one year with another, it is recovering its full economic costs across its activities as a whole, and is investing in its infrastructure (physical, human and intellectual) at a rate adequate to maintain its future productive capacity appropriate to the needs of its strategic plan and students, sponsors and other customers’ requirements.

8. Another way to express this is to say that the institution needs to do the activity today in a way which will not threaten its ability to do it in future.
9. The reference to future needs suggests that what is needed is ‘adaptive’ capacity, i.e. sustainability is not about preserving current activities indefinitely but rather about preserving the right sort of capacity (changing over time) to carry out the activities that are necessary in the future.
10. Institutions need to do five things to manage their research on a sustainable basis. These are:
    • establish and recognise the fEC of research;
    • manage the research activity strategically;
    • secure better prices for research;
    • improve project management and cost recovery;
    • invest in the research infrastructure.
11. This must be done as part of a long-term strategy for the institution. As part of this institutions will need to realign their resource allocation models in order to ensure that these do not give perverse incentives, and that information from these and from TRAC costing systems do not conflict.
12. Further information on managing for sustainability was given in a section in the original TRAC fEC Manual, now available as an extract.^xv
13. The Funding Councils will monitor institutions’ ability to manage themselves sustainably. The metrics used in this might include trends in the financial health of the institution, the productivity and quality of staff, the level of investment in equipment and buildings, and the reduction in the size of the backlog maintenance required.
14. Implementing these processes is a significant challenge for many institutions. They need to introduce some relatively well understood business techniques, but to do it in a way which respects the nature of the academic process and does not threaten the conditions which make a research unit, academic department, university, college or other academic institution successful – and different from a commercial business.