ABSTRACT The UK higher education sector faces overlapping pressures from decarbonisation, digital transformation and rising demands for public value. Yet universities often address these pressures through fragmented agendas, treating sustainability, digitalisation and societal engagement as separate domains of action. This paper develops a UK‐oriented account of ‘University 5.0’ by reframing it not as a technological stage model, but as a problem of governance and capability alignment under green–digital transition. Drawing on publicly available system documents, including REF 2021, the knowledge exchange framework (KEF) and higher education innovation funding (HEIF), the paper adopts a conceptual‐policy analysis supported by one institutional vignette. The analysis shows that the UK already possesses important instruments for advancing University 5.0: HEIF provides capacity for knowledge exchange, KEF makes external collaboration visible and REF gives formal status to impact and institutional environment. However, these instruments remain only partially aligned with the 5.0 standard of human‐centric and ecological value. They are stronger at evidencing activity, partnership and impact narratives than at routinely capturing inclusion outcomes, distributional effects and the environmental implications of digital infrastructures. The paper contributes a governance‐oriented framework for understanding University 5.0 as the institutional capacity to coordinate funding, evidence, partnerships and accountability around public value under digital and ecological transition.
Yuan et al. (Sun,) studied this question.