Benchmarking environmental performance in the english university sector: The experience of the Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement (HEEPI) project

Abstract

The Higher Education and Funding Council for England and Wales (HEFCE) distributes public funds to the higher education sector and oversees quality assurance on behalf of the UK Government, and also sponsors a number of research projects to promote good management practice. This paper reports on a project to promote good environmental management in universities by researching into the use of environmental performance indicators through a series of benchmarking workshops. The project found that attempts to compare aggregate data at an organisational level between institutions without being able to control adequately for differences in structure and activities offered only limited potential for success, but that benchmarking at lower levels by focussing on defined specific types of buildings was more successful.