Sustainability 2026, 18(11), 5326; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18115326 (registering DOI) - 25 May 2026
Abstract
Educational systems are increasingly required not only to innovate but to sustain innovation over time. While research on Change Laboratory (CL) interventions has extensively examined the development of new models and the emergence of transformative agency, less is known about how such agency
[...] Read more.
Educational systems are increasingly required not only to innovate but to sustain innovation over time. While research on Change Laboratory (CL) interventions has extensively examined the development of new models and the emergence of transformative agency, less is known about how such agency is enacted through concrete actions in everyday practice. This study addresses this gap by examining consequential actions as expressions of entrepreneurial agency in the implementation of open work in a kindergarten following a CL intervention. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 staff members, the study adopts a theoretically informed inductive approach to identify types of agentive actions and interpret them in relation to EntreComp competences and activity system components. The findings show that entrepreneurial agency is a distributed and situated process enacted through coordinated material, relational, and organizational actions toward the tools and community, highlighting the importance of environmental reconfiguration and collaboration in sustaining change. The study also shows that agency is unevenly distributed across roles and that newcomers participate differently in the implementation process. Overall, sustaining educational innovation appears to depend less on the design of models than on the collective capacity to continuously enact and transform them in practice.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Transformative Agency for Sustainability: Curriculum Design and Learning Landscape Design with Living Infrastructures)
►
Show Figures
Graphical abstract
