Regenerating Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development: Intradisciplinary Pathways and Sociocultural Commitments

Dear Colleagues, 

What does it mean that, amid an accelerating climate catastrophe, educational systems continue to privilege technical fixes over sociocultural understanding? Why do so many climate change education (CCE) initiatives remain anchored in frameworks that marginalize the very communities most affected by environmental degradation? This Special Issue begins from these questions, interrogating the assumptions that shape climate education and challenging the belief that sustainability can advance without confronting power, history, and inequity.

Borderlands, Contextual Mitigating Factors, and the Sociocultural Politics of Climate Education

A borderlands lens offers a critical vantage point for understanding how intersecting histories of power, identity, and epistemic hierarchy shape CCE. It foregrounds the contested spaces where multiple knowledge systems meet, often unequally, and reveals how dominant paradigms privilege Western scientific rationalities while relegating Indigenous, local, and community‑rooted epistemologies to the margins. Relegation is a form of displacement sustained by contextual mitigating factors (CMFs): structural, cultural, and institutional conditions that constrain equitable participation in climate learning.

CMFs appear in curriculum standards that universalize climate science while erasing place‑based ecological histories; in assessments that reward decontextualized technical proficiency over relational stewardship; and in teacher preparation models that overlook the sociocultural dimensions of climate justice. A borderlands perspective exposes how these mechanisms shape not only what is taught but whose experiences and worldviews are rendered intelligible.

Centering the lived realities of communities who inhabit the margins reframes CCE as a sociopolitical struggle rather than a technical domain. It highlights how students and educators negotiate linguistic hybridity, cultural identity, and historical memory in their encounters with climate content, challenging the assumption that sustainability can be pursued without addressing colonial, extractive, and racialized logics.

Meaningful climate education must be regenerated from these border spaces. Regenerating CCE requires re‑envisioning it as a relational, justice‑oriented practice, one that treats Indigenous and community‑rooted knowledge as foundational; cultivates multilingual, place‑based, and culturally sustaining pedagogies; and positions learners as ethical agents capable of interrogating and transforming the systems that produce climate vulnerability.

Despite global efforts to integrate climate content into curricula, dominant approaches continue to reproduce technocratic logics that obscure lived experience and reinforce CMFs. A borderlands lens makes visible how these paradigms position community knowledge as peripheral or enriching rather than central to sustainability. Reimagining climate education through a regenerative lens, therefore, demands systemic transformation: legitimizing diverse epistemologies, reshaping assessment practices, and supporting professional learning that prepares educators to navigate identity, power, and planetary responsibility.

We invite contributions that reconceptualize CCE as a vehicle for justice‑oriented sustainable development. Grounded in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4.7, this Special Issue seeks scholarship, case studies, and theoretical reflections that position CCE as both a space of resistance and a platform for systemic transformation.

Submissions may address:

• Sociocultural perspectives on environmental literacy and community resilience;
• Critical pedagogy and decolonial approaches to CCE;
• Integrating Indigenous and local knowledge into sustainability education;
• Intersectional analyses of environmental justice and access to education;
• Arts‑based, experiential, or place‑based learning for ecological consciousness;
• Methodological bricolage and interdisciplinary frameworks for climate research in education.

We especially welcome work that bridges theory and practice, illuminating how policy, curriculum, teacher preparation, and community engagement can coalesce to foster empowered, climate‑literate citizens. Ultimately, this Special Issue seeks to amplify voices that challenge extractive logics and reimagine education as a regenerative, relational practice, one that cultivates not only knowledge about climate change but also deep responsibility and capacity for collective action. To ensure alignment with this vision, submissions must be clearly grounded in sociocultural frameworks.

Prof. Dr. Alejandro Gallard
Prof. Dr. Silvia Lizette Ramos de Robles
Dr. Juan Alberto Gran Castro
Guest Editors

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• climate change education
• social vulnerability
• collective action
• sociocultural commitments