Introduction
It is important to both discover and develop effective ways in which school–community partnerships can flourish to produce effective potentials for sustainability as a global educational and political challenge that requires democratic action and communication as a basis for action competence. This is the focus of the present special issue, which, from the perspective of families and community involvement, brings together contributions from disciplinary and multidisciplinary fields. We hope it will provide a timely, cutting-edge and distinctive intervention of value to policy and practice research in a shift from consulting communities to actively sharing policymaking power. Including articles in which researchers and local community members have developed shared, structured frameworks for participatory co-production and local intervention-modelling, framed in relation to four thematic areas of education, the ambition is to bridge persistent theory–practice gaps when planning research, developing policy and combining research and policy in action.
The four thematic areas of education are, Education for Empowering Communities for Change through Climate and Cultural Heritage; Families and Communities Educating for Sustainable Futures; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Education for Building Resilience in the face of Environmental Complexity and Uncertainty; and Integrating Methodologies for Researching and Developing Action Competence for Environmental and Community Sustainability through Education (Reid, Reference Reid2019; Southwick et al., Reference Southwick, Bonanno, Masten, Panter-Brick and Yehuda2014; Trott et al., Reference Trott, Lam, Roncker, Gray, Courtney and Even2023; White et al., Reference White, Ardoin, Eames and Monroe2023).
Interdisciplinary commitment towards family development can help to forge communities that cultivate a sustainable future that is both achievable and inclusive (Henry et al., Reference Henry, Sheffield Morris and Harrist2015; Sanders et al., Reference Sanders, Divan, Singhal, Turner, Velleman, Michelson and Patel2022; Wals & Benavot, Reference Wals and Benavot2017), and interaction between schools, environmentally conscious families and communities is fundamental to cultivating this competence. It helps to mix individual consciousness with collective action able to make an impact on environmental sustainability and promote values that give priority to environmental care and the transfer of intergenerational knowledge (cf. Williams et al., Reference Williams, McEwen and Quinn2017). Families and communities play a crucial role in promoting the competence of environmental action, particularly when facing the complexities that surround climate change (cf. Payne, Reference Payne2010). Climate change education (CCE) is more powerful when it is inclusive of the perspectives and heritage values of families in local communities (Rap & Bodas, Reference Rap and Bodas2024) and developing effective ways in which school–community partnerships can flourish to produce effective potentials for sustainability (DePetris & Eames, Reference DePetris and Eames2017).
Several articles in the special issue align with this position regarding the value added to education when families and communities are involved in the educational process regarding environmental resilience. Like Williams et al. (Reference Williams, McEwen and Quinn2017), they articulate the effectiveness of intergenerational action-based learning in promoting understanding and proactive measures in relation to multiple environmental challenges and show how communities contribute to this educational framework by creating collaborative environments for emphasising values relating to cultural heritage (Tal, Reference Tal2004). Community-based climate action can be effective when it encapsulates local knowledge and sociocultural narratives, promoting a sense of belonging and responsibility. As Rieckmann (Reference Rieckmann, Leicht, Heiss and Byun2018) suggests, successful educational initiatives understand and develop the key skills that allow students to transform their communities through sustainable practices, and heritage is a critical component. De Vreede et al. (Reference De Vreede, Warner and Pitter2014) indicate that education between peers can facilitate these processes.
The use of participatory approaches, dialogue and shared experiences that strengthen the collective action towards sustainability within the community are also deeply valuable and similar to Haynes and Tanner (Reference Haynes and Tanner2015), several contributions in the Special Issue illustrate participatory methods centred on youth, such as video-based narration, and how they allow young people to articulate their concerns and solutions related to climatic challenges. This empowerment connects to social justice, as indicated by Teixeira and Krings (Reference Teixeira and Krings2015), and can support a framework of environmental justice. Self-perception is crucial to promote a proactive mentality towards environmental issues in these circumstances, opening the way for present and future generations to adopt sustainable lifestyles (Rieckmann, Reference Rieckmann, Leicht, Heiss and Byun2018).
The importance to environmental sustainability of emphasising the essential roles that families and communities play in promoting the competence of action cannot be understated (cf. Reffhaug et al., Reference Reffhaug, Andersson-Bakken and Jegstad2024; Roczen et al., Reference Roczen, Kaiser, Bogner and Wilson2014; Tayne, Reference Tayne2022). Interaction between families and communities is fundamental to cultivating this competence as families serve as the main social units by which environmental values and practices are cultivated and children begin to develop their environmental identities. Moreover, educational initiatives in families are fundamental to shape the understanding and proactive behaviour of young people in relation to environmental sustainability, reflecting a need for families to integrate sustainability into their daily lives (Klein et al., Reference Klein, Watted and Zion2021; Payne, Reference Payne2010). They form effective engagement strategies that reinforce collaboration between families and communities as participatory approaches that enable families to decide the environmental actions that resonate with their values and goals.
Collaboration between stakeholders, including educational institutions and government agencies, plays a key role in ensuring that families and communities receive the support and resources needed to make changes (Klein et al., Reference Klein, Watted and Zion2021; Wals & Benavot, Reference Wals and Benavot2017). It is by adopting participatory approaches, leveraging educational structures and promoting emotional connections with the environment that it becomes possible to nurture sustainable practices over time and generate combined efforts to encourage significant and lasting transformative changes (Debrah et al., Reference Debrah, Vidal and Dinis2021; Gholami et al., Reference Gholami, Watson, Hasan, Molla and Bjorn-Andersen2016; Laurie et al., Reference Laurie, Nonoyama-Tarumi, McKeown and Hopkins2016). This, and a multidisciplinary approach, acts as a basis for innovative solutions that meet the unique needs of communities in the face of global changes and the environmental challenges they can bring with them (Tittonell et al., Reference Tittonell, Klerkx, Baudron, Félix, Ruggia, Van Apeldoorn, Dogliotti, Mapfumo and Rossing2016). Appealing to the values and aspirations of the community helps in mobilising resources, while collaborative efforts are essential to achieve sustainable development objectives through action competence and family development when communities face growing environmental and social pressures.
Multidisciplinarity and the integration of methods, concepts and insights from different academic disciplines to solve complex problems also play a role according to several special issue articles. This is important because, unlike treating fields in isolation, it actively merges different perspectives, knowledge and theories to generate innovative solutions that no single field could achieve alone. It is by connecting the strengths of different fields that we can face the complex network of challenges to sustainability, to improve not only the resilience of communities but also the general quality of life for their inhabitants (Zylstra et al., Reference Zylstra, Knight, Esler and Le Grange2014).
Through multidisciplinary commitment to family development, communities can cultivate a sustainable future that is both achievable and inclusive. Annan-Diab and Molinari (Reference Annan-Diab and Molinari2017) defend interdisciplinary approaches to achieve the objectives of sustainable development and the integration of STEAM methodologies that can reinforce innovative approaches to environmental education, particularly in areas such as waste management (Syahmani et al., Reference Syahmani, Hafizah, Sauqina, Adnan and Ibrahim2021). Literature suggests that place-based pedagogies enrich students’ connections to their communities, promoting a sense of responsibility for local environments (Yemini et al., Reference Yemini, Engel and Ben Simon2025). However, critical evaluations of sustainable development education reveal challenges in the fulfilment of global goals (Kopnina, Reference Kopnina2020), suggesting that educators need to attend not only to content but also to practices that can support planetary health and enable future generations (Debrah et al., Reference Debrah, Vidal and Dinis2021).
The contribution of this special issue
The articles presented in this special issue result from an open, international call for papers. As that call set out, it is important to highlight both the discovery and development of effective ways in which school–community partnerships can flourish and produce effective potentials for sustainability. Identifying ways of addressing global educational and political challenges of policy development and engagement was important, as were democratic action and communication as a basis for action competence from the perspective of families and community involvement.
The contributions come from different disciplinary and multidisciplinary fields, and they are organised here into four thematic areas. The first is Education for Empowering Communities for Change through Climate and Cultural Heritage. Families and communities play a crucial role in promoting the competence of environmental action, particularly when facing the complexities that surround climate change, and heritage is a critical component. The second is Families and Communities Educating for Sustainable Futures. Families serve as the main social units where environmental values and practices are cultivated, and interaction between families and communities is fundamental to cultivate this competence, as it helps to mix individual consciousness with collective action. The third is Interdisciplinary Approaches to Education for Building Resilience in the Face of Environmental Complexity and Uncertainty. There are multiple sources of challenge towards community sustainability; they include global climate change, economic disparities and social injustices, and meeting them requires interdisciplinary strategies and an understanding of resilience, defined as the ability of individuals and communities to adapt and thrive between adversities. The fourth is Integrating Methodologies for Researching and Developing Action Competence for Environmental and Community Sustainability through Education, by which the integration of various methodologies is essential to improve the understanding of global sustainability challenges. Each article is presented below with its title and authors and a summary of its key contributions.
Education for empowering communities for change through climate and cultural heritage
Preserving Cultural Identity and Moral Values Amid Globalisation: Field Research Within the UAE Higher Education Community by Yousef Alhaj Bakkar, Alaaeddin Alahmad and Abdullah Abdullatif (Reference Alhaj Bakkar, Alahmad and Abdullatif2026) examines the role of families in preserving cultural identity and moral values amid globalisation. Employing a mixed-methods approach, it highlights how cultural identity and moral values instil environmental responsibility and sustainability by revealing how families remain the cornerstone of preserving values and cultural identity. Globalisation through social media and globalised education threaten this potential for cohesion as a disruptor but also a potential enabler of hybrid cultural frameworks and actionable insights for sustaining cultural resilience in an interconnected world.
The Effectiveness of Cultural Studies in Promoting Socio-Cultural Awareness Among Students in the UAE Higher Education Sector by Alaaeddin Alahmad (Reference Alahmad2026) examines the growing importance of cultural studies in supporting the development of sociocultural awareness among students in the higher education sector. Focusing on the United Arab Emirates, it adopts a descriptive quantitative methodology to develop its findings, which indicated that instructors agreed that cultural studies play a significant role in promoting sociocultural awareness among students and that students perceive cultural studies as enhancing abilities to foster, appreciate and understand the value of coexistence and shaping communicative and life skills. These findings support the conclusions from the investigation about the need for the development of cultural studies courses is essential, aiming at adopting more effective strategies that promote students’ awareness in relation to future challenges. Cultural studies courses do not provide content severed from the main educational line, but are an essential part of the process of shaping identity and forward-looking social awareness. They can play an essential role in increasing students’ knowledge, raising their sociocultural awareness and supporting their behavioural practices.
Questions of place, memory and community knowledge are developed differently in Diffracting Childhood Memories, Place and Local Grassroots Mo(v)ements: Towards a Relational Environmental Education by Steffie Dmello (Reference Dmello2026). The paper employs auto-ethnography and poetic inquiry to examine how childhood experiences along the west coast of India were entangled with early understandings of environmental education. Drawing on memories of growing up in a rural region, it traces everyday intra-actions with land, sea, plants and community practices to illustrate how environmental awareness emerges through relational, place-based learning and unlearning rather than through universalised frameworks.
By weaving poetry and becoming-with literature, the article disrupts linear and Western epistemologies of research and learning. It unfolds through two interwoven processes: a reflexive return to childhood memories through poems that foreground relational encounters with coastal landscapes and more-than-human beings, and a becoming-with literature that attends to local grassroots mo(v)ements in the Vasai–Virar region. Its contribution to the special issue lies in showing how environmental education can benefit from recognising situated, relational and place-based ways of knowing. It also contributes to decolonising research practices and to rethinking how environmental education is understood, narrated and enacted within educational contexts.
The role of traditional knowledge, gendered leadership and informal environmental learning is further developed in Rural Women’s Leadership and Traditional Knowledge in Rural Tourism: Promoting Environmental Education and Family and Community Sustainability in Morocco by Fatma Mziouka and Saadeddine Igamane (Reference Mziouka and Igamane2026). This study investigates how rural women’s leadership, grounded in traditional knowledge and daily ecological practices, contributes to environmental education and strengthens family and community sustainability within rural tourism in Morocco. Conducted in the Taounate region, the study draws on semi-structured interviews, participant observation and thematic analysis to examine women’s role in local environmental learning. It shows that rural women are central to the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge. Through their everyday practices, they support sustainable resource use, encourage care for the local environment and strengthen ecological awareness within families and communities. The article is important because it moves beyond viewing rural women as passive participants in development. Instead, it presents them as holders of environmental knowledge and as active contributors to community sustainability. It also shows that rural tourism can support non-formal environmental education when it is rooted in local knowledge, family livelihoods, community participation and biodiversity protection.
Families and communities educating for sustainable futures
Climate change caused by human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation, presents a severe threat to planetary survival, and in Coordinated School and Family Environmental Education Efforts for a Generation of Eco-surplus Culture, Minh-Hoang Nguyen, Quan-Hoang Vuong, Minh-Phuong Thi Duong, Viet-Phuong La and Dan Li (Reference Nguyen, Vuong, Duong, La and Li2026) examine how school and family environmental education can enhance environmental knowledge, willingness to act and pro-environmental behaviours among children and young people to counter this threat. Bayesian Mind-sponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a nationally representative dataset of Vietnamese school students identified how school-and family-based environmental education is beneficial for improving students’ environmental knowledge and willingness to take environmental action, and reinforced by family education with its impact on raising students’ willingness to act, students became more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviours. They accordingly advocate for coordinated educational efforts between schools and families to strengthen students’ environmental knowledge, pro-environmental intentions and behaviours.
Environmental education in schools equips students with the knowledge and skills and critical environmental consciousness. Transmission of norms in the family through parenting styles, parent–child relationships and parental guidance convey knowledge, worldviews, beliefs, values and behaviours within families that in turn shape children’s environmental consciousness and practices. There is significant potential value for fostering environmental awareness in encouraging parents to engage in outdoor and experiential learning activities with their children through practices such as nature walks, household sustainability projects and community-based initiatives.
Running along similar lines to this argument for addressing global environmental crises through policy-led bottom-up local intervention is Meeting Global Challenges through Families and Community Environmental and Sustainability Education: Generating Action Competence by Raja Bahar Khan Soomro (Reference Soomro2026). Environmental vulnerability intersects with social and cultural inequalities and pressures that shape the everyday livelihoods and community practices through which environmental knowledge is transmitted across generations, but is overlooked usually in formal environmental education. This article examines how to challenge this through family and community-based environmental and sustainability education (ESE) for cultivating action competence and integrating knowledge, motivation and action skills in a non-Western non-industrial agrarian context. It identified action skills as constrained by infrastructural and rural–urban disparities. Family-based ESE emerged as a central driver of environmental learning and motivation. Intergenerational storytelling, lived experiences of climate variability and everyday household environmental practices strengthened ecological understanding while also deepening emotional connections to place.
By addressing a gap in ESE/ESD research and analysing how informal support both enables and constrains sustainability-oriented action competence beyond schooling, Intergenerational Solidarity and Economic Resilience in Times of Crisis: Evidence from Moroccan Families by Fouad Annaki, Yassine Annaki, Saadeddine Igamane and Abdelah Nouib (Reference Annaki, Annaki, Igamane and Nouib2026) provides a further example along these lines of the family and family life as a key site of informal ESE. The focus is on Moroccan households and how they mobilise intergenerational solidarity. Using data from 65 semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations and household document analysis across 28 urban and rural families and a grounded theory methodology it identifies three dominant solidarity configurations. Namely; extended parental support to adult children, reciprocal cohabitation shaped by gendered expectations and remittance transfers from young migrants to older relatives; that function as informal pedagogies of sustainability that can strengthen household resilience. However, this is not a given outcome.
Emotional fatigue from uneven caregiving burdens and gender inequalities can intervene. Solidarity capability conversion interacts with other influence along gender lines and this has implications for actors and policy makers to support family-based learning ecologies while advancing care justice and equitable role redistribution for an “intergenerational solidarity resilience” that bridges generational divides to preserve cultural heritage and tackle systemic crises from climate change and economic instability through the energy of youth and the wisdom of elders. But solidarity can only function as a capability enhancing infrastructure if the mechanisms of reproduction of unequal domestic burden and voice are disturbed. Without disrupting these mechanisms of reproduction, mutual support risks sustaining the very systems of exploitation it seeks to alleviate. For ESE/ESD practitioners and curriculum designers, the implication is to recognise family-based learning ecologies and design, test and develop bridges between home–community initiatives and educational programmes, to foreground care justice so that the cultivation of action competence does not depend on invisible, gendered labour.
CCE in the Home–School–Community Nexus: Intergenerational Learning, Youth Agency, and Action Competence in Philippine Basic Education by Allen A. Espinosa, Ma Arsenia C. Gomez, Praksis A. Miranda, Nikolee Marie A. Serafico-Reyes, Marie Grace Pamela G. Faylona, Adonis P. David, Leah Amor S. Cortez, Ryan V. Lansangan, Arlon P. Cadiz, Joefrey R. Chan and Joanna Marie A. de Borja (Reference Espinosa, Gomez, Miranda, Serafico-Reyes, Faylona, David, Cortez, Lansangan, Cadiz, Chan and de Borja2026) examines how CCE initiatives in Philippine basic education shape learners’ climate-related knowledge, awareness, behaviours and perceptions of environmental well-being through the interconnected influences of families, schools and communities and how environmental practices are sustained across everyday socioecological contexts. Analysing Department of Education initiatives comparatively with key informant interviews involving teachers and school-level programme implementers it shows the dependency of initiatives - as critical entry points for environmental engagement - on alignment across school, home and community systems for sustained behavioural change.
The article advances a socioecological alignment framework that conceptualises CCE as a relational and multi-level process shaped by structural, cultural and institutional conditions and argues that strengthening intergenerational learning, community engagement and governance continuity are all essential for cultivating sustained climate action. The article stresses the importance therefore of rethinking climate education in the Philippines and other climate-vulnerable and resource-constrained contexts and highlights the family as a critical site where environmental learning is reinforced, negotiated or constrained. CCE should be reconceptualised as a whole-of-community endeavour according to the article that integrates families, schools and local institutions within a coherent and supportive socioecological educational ecosystem for climate education as a transformative and justice-oriented process. Its message is that the adoption of ecologically sustainable practices are not a given outcome from national or regional government initiatives and policy.
Interdisciplinary approaches to education for building resilience in the face of environmental complexity and uncertainty
Other articles in the special issue pick up on this notion of the potential of parental involvement. In Teaching for Community Sustainability: Opportunities and Limitations as Seen from a Cross-analysis of Teachers Teaching in Schools in Rural Areas in Spain and Sweden, Begoña Vigo-Arrazola, Dennis Beach and Elisabet Öhrn (Reference Vigo-Arrazola, Beach and Öhrn2026) identify it alongside and as valuable for reinforcing other features of environmental sustainability goal realisation. Among these features are the presence of and attention to rural natural and cultural environmental heritage, having local access and giving curriculum attention to local employment and sustainable vocations and professions, and having support from the local community and engagement of the school in the community. Obstacles included global epistemic rural marginalisation, performative curriculum relations and tepid community involvement in socially isolated schools insulated from the local community.
Education policy, practices and research are always at risk of working at cross-purposes, particularly if research, policy and day-to-day practice operate in silos and through conflicting goals. Generating a curriculum that focuses the rebuilding and sustainability of communities based on community integration and heightened flexibility on the part of the education administration regarding curriculum performativity may contribute to the sustainability of rural schools and the local communities they should serve. Paired with flexible administrative policies, this approach transforms rural schools into vibrant, resilient community hubs that drive sustainable local development.
This is also a theme present in Village Leadership and Community-Centric Environmental Education: Enhancing Action Competence for Sustainable Rural Development in India by Sheeba Khalid, Malobika Bose, Deepti Rana Pandey and Aradhana Yadav (Reference Khalid, Bose, Rana Pandey and Yadav2026), which explores why, despite increased awareness and policy support, rural individuals in India may continue to struggle to live in harmony with environmental sustainability goals. It examines the impact of village leaders’ emotional intelligence (EI) on promoting community-focused environmental education and enhancing action competence for sustainable rural development and indicates that villages led by individuals with elevated EI excel in water conservation, waste management, community engagement and the development of sustainable infrastructure compared to others.
The key point here is that when leaders exhibit heightened motivation, empathy and social acumen and are able to facilitate collaboration and participatory governance for linking environmental consciousness with/in sustainable community practices as a foundation for transformative environmental action. By leveraging these EI traits, communities can build inclusive, collaborative governance models that successfully embed ecological consciousness into everyday sustainable practices. Rather than depending on infrastructure or regulatory measures, incorporating EI into rural government can markedly improve environmental results and community resilience.
When Farmers Teach and Teachers Farm: Community-Rooted Pedagogy in the Face of Environmental Crisis by Vishal Kumar, Sanjiv Kumar Choudhary and Devika Sangwan (Reference Kumar, Choudhary and Sangwan2026) focusses on the growing emphasis on socially responsible science education and the need to integrate socio-scientific issues (SSIs) into classroom practice. Recognising that in many Global South contexts environmental issues remain depoliticised and disconnected from students’ lived realities, using a reflexive qualitative case study design the article examines how middle-school science teachers from agrarian communities in Panipat, Haryana, understand and teach SSIs while negotiating dual roles as both educators and community stakeholders. Its findings reveal a clear disjunction between curricular representations and lived experience.
Textbooks will often frame issues in moral and decontextualised terms, but the local teachers interpret them as complexly shaped by economic constraints, policy pressures and community practices and create limited but meaningful openings to connect scientific concepts with local realities. Being members of farming households plays a central role in enabling these more empathetic and justice-oriented interpretations in the investigation, which consequentially argues for science education that is place based, politically informed and responsive to lived realities as a dialogic and justice-centred practice in sites of critical inquiry into and for community and environmental sustainability. The article provides empirical grounding for such a shift in contexts where environmental issues are inseparable, as they always are, from questions of livelihood, identity and justice.
Assessing Inequalities of Opportunity in Education in Morocco: An Econometric Analysis, by Fouzia Ejjanoui (Reference Ejjanoui2026) investigates how children’s social and family backgrounds shaped access to schooling and educational attainment in Morocco between 1998 and 2014. Drawing on data from the ENNVM 1998–1999 and the RGPH 2014, the article uses a probit model to examine school enrolment, and a right-censored ordered probit model to analyse levels of educational attainment. Indicating that educational opportunity in Morocco remained strongly patterned by social advantage, children from more privileged backgrounds were more likely to enter school and progress to higher levels of education, while children from disadvantaged backgrounds faced greater risks of non-enrolment, early dropout and limited educational progression. Although inequality has slightly declined over time, it remains structurally entrenched.
The article is important for this special issue because it links educational inequality directly to ESE. Unequal access to schooling may restrict environmental literacy, climate awareness and the capacity of vulnerable groups to engage in sustainable practices. In this sense, the study shows that action competence cannot be separated from educational justice. If access to education remains unequal, then access to environmental knowledge and sustainability-related capabilities will also remain unevenly distributed.
Assessing CCE in the UAE School and University Curricula: A Framework-Based Analysis by A. S. Mohammad Sayem Mozumder, Alanood Alnuaimi, Abdulla Alshamsi and Mariam Alsaad (Reference Mozumder, Alnuaimi, Alshamsi and Alsaad2026) looks at how CCE is built into formal education in the United Arab Emirates. The study examines university curricula as well as selected subjects in the national school curriculum offered by the Ministry of Education. It analyses course descriptions, syllabi, academic programmes, laboratory activities, projects and research components to see how far climate-related themes are addressed across major UAE universities. At school level, it traces climate education within English, Geography, Islamic Studies, Science and Social Studies at the high-school stage.
The findings suggest that UAE institutions have started to include sustainability and environmental themes, but CCE is still unevenly developed. In many cases, it remains concentrated in particular fields, especially environmental science and engineering, rather than being embedded across the curriculum as a whole. Pedagogical approaches also vary, with limited application of interdisciplinary, empirical or action-oriented learning models. The study provides a foundational overview of how UAE universities and the national school curriculum currently address CCE, while pointing to the need for curriculum design and teaching practices that move climate education beyond isolated content and towards more integrated, participatory and action-oriented models.
Integrating methodologies for researching and developing action competence for environmental and community sustainability through education
This concern with the conditions that enable or constrain action competence is also present in Misplaced Waste: The Importance of Community Education on Effective FOGO Waste Sorting Practices by Maria Estela Varua, Dorothea Bowyer and Aemar Sunga (Reference Varua, Bowyer and Sunga2026). Responding to New South Wales’ target of eliminating Food Organics and Garden Organics waste to landfill by 2050, the study investigates how environmental education shapes residents’ awareness and waste-sorting behaviours in multi-unit dwellings across Greater Western Sydney. Adopting an exploratory mixed-methods approach that integrates surveys, bin audits, interviews and infrastructure assessments, the article reveals persistent knowledge gaps and structural constraints, particularly among culturally and linguistically diverse households.
Guided by the Action Competence Framework, the article shows that effective FOGO participation is not driven by infrastructure alone. It depends on inclusive, participatory and culturally responsive education that fosters understanding, builds confidence and strengthens a sense of shared responsibility. Intergenerational learning emerges as a critical pathway, where everyday household interactions enable behavioural shifts and help reduce contamination at the source. The article therefore extends action competence into informal residential settings and gives local practical insight for governments into how community-based learning strategies can support long-term sustainability outcomes in high-density urban environments.
Finally, Integrating Entomology into Formal and Non-formal Education to Improve Adolescent Attitudes and Knowledge: A Case Study from Southern Mexico by Victor Aguirre-Hidalgo, Ricardo Clark-Tapia, Dhipnaidy Quiroz-Barrita, Florentino Méndez-Gijón, Cecilia Alfonso-Corrado and Miguel García-García (Reference Aguirre-Hidalgo, Clark-Tapia, Quiroz-Barrita, Méndez-Gijón, Alfonso-Corrado and García-García2026) demonstrates how environmental education can connect scientific learning, local ecological concern and non-formal public engagement. The study evaluates the use of insects as a pedagogical tool with secondary students living in areas with a high incidence of vector-borne diseases on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. A total of 118 students participated in theoretical, fieldwork and laboratory activities, as well as a public outreach event, the “Entomo-Expo.” Pre-and post-workshop questionnaires assessed changes in knowledge, perceptions and attitudes towards insects. At the end of the workshop, students identified 11 insect orders, communicated their knowledge using scientific terminology and showed decreased negative reactions towards insects, particularly killing behaviour, while responses associated with observation and release increased. Participants also recognised key ecological roles of insects, especially pollination. The article therefore shows how formal and non-formal environmental education can improve conceptual understanding and encourage more positive attitudes towards culturally stigmatised or feared animals. It also reinforces the special issue’s wider claim that action competence requires learning experiences that connect knowledge, responsibility, direct encounter and community communication.
Towards a broader educational imagination
The articles gathered here show how ESE takes shape across formal, non-formal and informal settings. They deal with school access and educational inequality in Morocco, community education for FOGO waste sorting in Greater Western Sydney, childhood and place-based environmental learning on the west coast of India, rural women’s leadership and traditional knowledge in Morocco, the framework-based analysis of CCE in the UAE school and university curricula, and formal and non-formal entomology education in southern Mexico. These are different contexts, but they point to a shared concern: environmental learning depends on much more than the delivery of information. It is connected to access, place, family life, community practice, curriculum, local knowledge, intergenerational exchange and the practical opportunities people have to act.
The articles in this special issue make it clear that people’s capacity to respond to environmental problems is shaped by the conditions around them. These conditions include access to schooling, family support, local infrastructure, community education that responds to cultural context, respect for traditional knowledge, institutional commitment to climate education and learning activities that connect formal knowledge with everyday life. Seen this way, action competence does not develop in isolation. It is shaped through the everyday relations between families, schools, communities, institutions and local environments and can be actively cultivated through democratic, participatory networks across institutions. The articles identify transforming schools into sustainability innovation hubs as important, where students, local authorities and teachers can collaborate on real-life issues like waste reduction and sanitation. Such actions bring together students, parents and community workers to address shared local challenges and build collective problem-solving and behavioural skills. Students work alongside school staff and local stakeholders to investigate problems and propose actionable measures.
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank the authors whose work makes up this special issue, for their commitment to a shared inquiry that brought together so many contexts and traditions, and for the patience and care with which they responded to successive rounds of review. We are equally grateful to the reviewers, whose generous and rigorous engagement strengthened every contribution and sustained the scholarly quality of the collection and to the editorial and production team of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education, whose support and guidance accompanied this issue from its first call through to publication.
Author Biographies
Laid Bouakaz is a Research Associate Professor in Educational Sciences and Sociology of Education with over 24 years of experience in teacher education, curriculum development, school leadership, multicultural education and AI in Education. He has worked extensively in Sweden and internationally, focusing on migration, integration, inclusive education and AI in education. He has held key roles in academic institutions, including Malmö University, Stockholm University, Birmingham City University and different Universities in the Gulf region.
Dennis Beach is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His main research field is the sociology of education and higher education policy and ethnography. Recent publications have been connected to community and sustainability issues in rural spaces, including articles on education.
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