2026 年 35 巻 4 号 p. 4_19-30
Biodiversity loss and environmental crises are systemic, driven by entrenched inequalities, colonial histories, and governance structures that conventional environmental education (EE) often does not address. EE approaches focused on individual awareness or behaviour change are insufficient for the transformative change that the scale and complexity of these crises demand. This commentary argues that EE must be understood and designed as infrastructure for transformative change: the interconnected social, educational, and relational systems that create the enabling conditions for learning to translate into collective action, beyond individual behaviour.
Drawing on eight years of experience founding and leading the Global Youth Biodiversity Network Southeast Asia (GYBN SEA), we examine how EE can be designed to support meaningful youth participation in biodiversity governance in a region of acute ecological pressures and hierarchical governance cultures where youth are not accustomed to, and do not always find themselves welcomed as, equal partners in decision-making. We describe an infrastructure of transformative EE built through five interrelated components: capacity building for systems thinking and political agency; interdisciplinary and inclusive learning by design; relational and care-centred pedagogies; institutionalised pathways from learning to action; and parallel engagement of elders and decision-makers to shift institutional receptivity alongside youth capacity.
Transformative EE is not a matter of better programme design alone, but of constructing the enabling environment in which learning becomes sustained, collective participation in governance. Observable outcomes from GYBN SEA’s operations, including institutional recognition of youth in national biodiversity policy and substantive youth contributions to CBD decisions, reflect the cumulative effects of this approach. The framework offered here contributes to the field by reframing EE’s unit of analysis from individual interventions to enabling conditions, and by identifying the dimensions such an approach must address simultaneously, from learning spaces to the institutions that must be ready to receive youth as genuine partners.
