“Sustainability... it’s just not important.”: The Challenges of Academic Engagement with Diverse Stakeholders

Research at the intersection of sustainability and computing often engages with external stakeholders, and those engagements can determine success and impact of the sustainable goals as well as the entire research. In this paper, we reflect on various stakeholder en- gagements to derive lessons for the ICT4S community that seeks to broaden its sustainable impact beyond their own field. We briefly describe our experiences with case studies from each of the individual author’s research, and then synthesize across those experiences to reflect on similarities and differences. The resulting discussion highlights what we feel were our important lessons learned, as well as some of our thoughts on how to approach collab- orations or deployments with external stakeholders in sustainable computing projects.