Contributions of Universities to Local and Regional Development: Evidence from the Literature and Implications for Institutional Sustainability Policies

Abstract

Higher education, offered by Higher Education Institutions – HEIs (colleges, institutes, centers, universities, etc.), is essential in the construction of knowledge and professional qualifications. However, HEIs are expected to actively contribute to the development of society more broadly. This article, therefore, has a dual and interconnected objective: firstly, to investigate the various roles and contributions of HEIs to local and regional development through a systematic bibliometric review of articles from the Web of Science (2020-2025); secondly, to analyze and compare institutional sustainability policies of four federal universities (UFRJ, UFSB, UFPR, UFMS) and one private non-profit institution (Fundação Educacional D. André Arcoverde – FAA, for which a sustainable development policy was developed), in order to understand how these theoretical roles and contributions are translated into formal structures and management strategies. This exploratory, bibliographic, and documentary research used VosViewer (version 1.6.20) for bibliometric analysis of 36 selected articles and a comparative documentary analysis of institutional sustainability policies, categorized into six thematic areas. The literature review results reinforce the centrality of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the environmental, social, and economic spheres, aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as agents of local, regional, national, and global transformation. The comparison of policies, in turn, demonstrates that these serve as practical instruments to operationalize such contributions, with different approaches to governance, principles, operational management, and monitoring mechanisms. This dual approach allows contextualizing FAA's policy within the broader academic and institutional landscape, extracting valuable implications for improving sustainability policies. The limitations lie in the delimitation of the bibliometric review database and the sample size of the institutional policies analyzed.