Abstract

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia is a signatory of the Tallores Declaration and as a role model, has to develop and maintain a sustainable campus. Political modernisation, a central tenet of Ecological Modernisation Theory, has transformed the traditional hierarchical mode of governance into a participatoryform. The focus of political modernisation is the government-industry linkage. The research here adopts a new variant of political modernisation by looking at the government-university linkage. This paper has a two-prong objective. The first objective is to test the applicability of political modernisation on the development of a sustainable campus. The second objective is to develop a quantitative methodology to test the linkages on the impact of the state’s environmental policy and reform on the development of a sustainable campus. The government-university linkage is operationalised via specific variables. Spearman’s correlation is used as ordinal data were obtained. A total of 60 respondents were selected via stratified sampling. The findings of this research show that the new variant of political modernisation in the form of government-university linkage has been proven quantitatively. Positive relationship exists between the state’s formulation of environmental policies cum laws and UKM’s formulation of environmental policy and the utilisation of science and technology. Likewise, the state’s implementation of environmental reform has a positive relationship with the campus environmental support system, the utilisation of science and technology and the creation or investment in environmental infrastructure by UKM. This also shows that the realm of environmental policy has moved into the implementation stage.

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