A consideration of the changing focus on the sustainable development in higher education in Poland

The main goal of this article is to analyse the implementation of the sustainability factor in Polish higher education after the amendment to the Law of Higher Education. On the one hand Poland participates in European environmental politics, takes part in international forums, on the other hand the application of sustainable development for concrete sector policies is weak, if not insufficient, which attests to the discontinuity of transmission between declarations and political actions. The first part of this article shows the key challenges to the concept of a "sustainable university" as well as the level of its implementation within the Polish higher education system. The next section deals with Poland. Its purpose is to demonstrate the possibility of sustainable change in Polish tertiary education institutions according to the Law of Higher Education. The last part presents two case studies: The University of Warsaw (UW) and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (AMU), the leading Polish institutions of knowledge. This part of the paper also presents institutional obstacles to the implementation of sustainability in the Polish tertiary education system. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.