Resilient and Sustainable Leadership in Higher Education

Toward a Four-Axis Integrative Framework

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_28How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Resilient Leadership; Sustainable Leadership; Higher Education; Artificial Intelligence; Integrative Framework

Abstract

Higher education institutions are entering the second half of the 2020s un-der compounding pressure — geopolitical instability, demographic decline, financial volatility, and the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into teaching, assessment, research, and governance. Against this backdrop, resilience and sustainability have become the two dominant discourses through which contemporary policy and scholarship articulate what good leadership in higher education ought to be. Yet the two discourses have largely evolved in parallel, addressing different time horizons, units of analysis, and operational moves.

This paper argues that resilient and sustainable leadership are theoretically reconcilable, that their integration is already articulated piecewise across recent policy and scholarly discourse, and that an organizing approach can be derived to support both research and practice. Through a dis-cursive synthesis of contemporary contributions, the paper identifies four bridging constructs — emotional intelligence, distributed leadership, alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals, and AI-augmented decision support — and proposes a four-axis integrative framework defined by time horizon, locus of action, resource logic, and accountability frame. The framework is offered not as a complete playbook, but as a defensible compass for leaders navigating universities through a turbulent decade.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Marius Claudiu Langa
AU  - Adriana Nicoleta Lazăr
AU  - Sofia Loredana Tudor
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/31
TI  - Resilient and Sustainable Leadership in Higher Education
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Management and Entrepreneurial Leadership for K-12 Education Excellence (LEADK12 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 436
EP  - 446
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_28
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_28
ID  - Langa2026
ER  -