Assessing Resources and Dynamic Capabilities to Implement the “Green Campus” Project

“Green Campus” is a project developed by Politecnico di Bari, an Italian technical university, interested to start a “journey” towards sustainability. This paper illustrates the Green Campus project through the lens of two organizational theories, i.e. the resource-based view (RBV) and the dynamic capabilities theory (DCT). RBV is adopted to present the specific resources owned by Politecnico di Bari and analyze their usefulness for developing the project. DCT is used to describe the capabilities which Politecnico di Bari should leverage on to integrate, build, and reconfigure resources in order to meet the challenges of sustainability and actually implement the project. To the authors’ knowledge, neither RBV nor DCT have been still used to study organizations different from firms. The novel field of application of these theories is an interesting insight of the paper. Moreover, this study contributes to give a theoretical foundation to the topic of sustainable university, so covering a lack of the extant literature. Finally, it suggests specific directions in terms of resources and capabilities that universities need to commit to a sustainable future through the creation of a green campus.