The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently deepened its engagement with environmental issues, introducing a new vision in The Agency in the Anthropocene report. This vision underpins the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 framework. This study critically examines the new vision, identifying three key advancements: (1) the centrality of the environment, (2) a call for radical societal change, and (3) a proposed shift in worldviews. Notably, this marks the first time the OECD has challenged the dominant worldview rooted in Western individualism. However, a critical omission remains: the lack of measurement tools for assessing students’ worldviews. Despite the availability of established instruments, such as nature connectedness scales, the OECD has yet to incorporate them. Addressing this gap is essential to sustaining the shift in worldviews and refining the new vision’s implementation.

In the face of escalating environmental challenges, including climate change, formal education systems worldwide have increasingly incorporated environmental science and prioritized fostering sustainable lifestyles and pro-environmental mindsets. However, significant gaps persist in addressing environmental education within adult and non-formal learning contexts. This paper critically examines current lifelong learning (LLL) frameworks as articulated in policy documents from international organizations, identifying a disproportionate focus on environmental adaptation in the Global South and a technocentric emphasis in the Global North. To address these shortcomings, the paper turns to an alternative model of LLL: Japan’s food education program, which emphasizes shifting mindsets and behaviors as a strategy to confront environmental challenges in the Global North. While we do not propose Japan’s food education program as a universal solution, it serves as a valuable reference point for reimagining mainstream LLL frameworks.

Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD's education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure 'students' feelings'. However, analyses of the OECD's affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinned by an innovative analytical strategy: comparing PISA 2018 student questionnaire translations across different 'economies' that use the same written language (China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). Our analyses confirm that the OECD imagines a cultural and context-free world, one in which translation and measurements are simply technical problems to be engineered, rather than deeper 'problems' of worldviews that require attunement. To encourage the OECD to recognise these differences in its future assessments, we offer starting points from recent research in cultural psychology.

As the sustainability imperative looms, mainstream educational research in the English-speaking world continues a long tradition of failing to see food as integral to education. Japan's tradition of Shokuiku (food education) stands in stark contrast, providing an external reference point to direct critical attention on Anglo-American school food philosophies, policy, and practice. This article analyses Shokuiku, tracing the genealogy of Japan's 2005 Basic Law on Shokuiku, a landmark education policy that shifted the 1954 School Lunch Act away from the scientific and nutritional discourses of the mid-20(th) century and back to Japan's school food cultural traditions. While still teaching nutrition, Japan's Shokuiku emerges as distinctive in its broader goals of interdependence, gratitude towards nature, emphasis on culture, and awareness of relations between production, consumption, and sustainability. From a pragmatic perspective, Shokuiku may offer new ways to combat rising obesity worldwide, lessen meat consumption, and reduce humanity's unsustainable ecological footprint.

The overarching assumption of SDG 4, that progress towards ‘quality education’ will lead to greater sustainability, is not rooted in evidence but instead in ideology. From the outset, a wider set of sustainability indicators (such as ecological footprint) were excluded, and even today, after a decade of work, there exists no indicator to capture ‘sustainability’. Instead SDG 4 discussions remain a mixed bag of routine monitoring of outcomes, advocacy for more funding, and banal policy recommendations. The development ‘specialists’ leading all of this have turned a blind eye to this obvious fact, and shown strikingly little willingness to think differently – a position that is intellectually irresponsible, politically unaccountable, and deeply unethical in the context of an accelerating climate crisis. The next 7 years should be refocused on highlighting alternatives and developing evidence for the post-2030 agenda.

Despite the growing popularity of organic farming, persistent questions surround its environmental effects.A 2017 meta-analysis suggested elevated acidification and eutrophication potentials per unit of agricultural production for organic farming relative to conventional farming.However, a recent 2023 meta-analysis contradicted these findings.This brief communication article reveals that the disparities between these meta-analyses stem from differences in averaging methods and sample sizes.The 2023 meta-analysis, employing a more robust averaging method and a larger sample size, suggests that researchers should incorporate the 2023 findings into their investigations, potentially necessitating a reconsideration of agricultural policies and dietary choices to align with updated environmental impact assessments.

In the intensifying debate between degrowth and green growth, many recognize that degrowth is more effective. However, concerns about degrowth persist in regard to public acceptance of declining economic standards. Analyzing the experience of Greece during a long-term economic decline, this study finds that subjective wellbeing temporarily decreased but eventually rebounded to pre-decline levels. This indicates that a decline in economic standards does not necessarily result in a long-term wellbeing decline. Furthermore, Greece outperformed other European countries that pursued green growth policies in environmental reductions. Greece highlights the feasibility and effectiveness of degrowth for sustainability.

As the need for shifting dominant worldviews to address environmental sustainability becomes more urgent, animism is increasingly recognized as a valuable cultural resource. While scholars are exploring how to incorporate animism into modern education, Japan began incorporating Indigenous animistic stories into its elementary language curriculum over a half century ago in response to domestic environmental challenges. Today, these animistic stories constitute a major pillar Japan’s school curriculum. The major themes of these stories are rejection of human superiority and encouragement of human-nature interdependence. In highlighting the Japanese case and exploring these stories for the first time in the English language, this piece intends to (i) inspire those seeking to integrate similar methods into formal education curricula in other contexts, and (ii) promote, on a worldwide scale, greater sensitivity to how the underlying meanings and messages found in language curriculum and textbooks connect (or fail to connect) to environmental concerns. This work also connects to recent theoretical appeals to ‘reclaim Animism’ and re-story the world: alternative approaches to education in the Anthropocene that go beyond scientific solutionism and focus on cultural change.

CONTEXT: In the midst of the growing popularity of organic farming, persistent questions surround its environmental effects. A 2017 meta-analysis suggested elevated acidification and eutrophication potentials per land area for organic farming relative to conventional farming, influencing policy and individual choices. However, a recent 2023 meta-analysis contradicted these findings, revealing reduced or comparable impacts across various environmental indicators, including acidification and eutrophication potentials. OBJECTIVE: These discrepant findings from these studies highlight the need for a comprehensive understanding of the underlying causes and implications. This study seeks to unravel the source of these disparities. METHODS: Initially, we scrutinized whether the differences in findings could be attributed to variations in the agricultural products selected for analysis. Subsequently, we explored the possibility that disparities were influenced by distinct averaging methods employed in the two studies. To address the impact of sample size, our investigation considered whether differences in findings could be attributed to varying sample sizes. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: This study reveals that the disparities between these meta-analyses stem from differences in averaging methods and sample sizes. The 2023 meta-analysis, employing a more robust averaging method and a larger sample size, emerges as a more reliable source of information. Researchers are encouraged to incorporate the 2023 findings into their investigations, potentially necessitating a reconsideration of agricultural policies and dietary choices to align with updated environmental impact assessments. SIGNIFICANCE: By resolving inconsistencies in environmental impact assessments of organic farming, this study facilitates more effective societal and individual decision-making for greater sustainability.

In the 50 years since the stark warnings put forth in classical works like The Limits of Growth (1972), we have failed to achieve environmental sustainability. This underscores the inadequacies of cognitive, behaviorist, and technological solutions that have been pursued over the past three decades. Young people are most acutely aware of this failure and our precarious future, as evidenced in the School Strikes for Climate movement. And yet, despite the catastrophic severity of the problem, the ways educational scholars and practitioners alike attempt to (re)imagine the future remain limited. Much scholarly work is still aimed at raising awareness, incentivizing certain behaviors, searching for technological breakthroughs, or calls to greater “agency.” Meanwhile, concerned teachers add climate-related topics and encourage paper bags, shorter showers, meatless Mondays, and student activism. Missing from our current imagination is culture, in particular how changing our dominant modes of self (self-construal) is a prerequisite for any significant, lasting move toward sustainability. In this chapter, we sketch out a body of emerging work – both theoretical and empirical – suggesting the necessity of a cultural shift for achieving sustainability. Our argument is that the on-going inability to limit climate change suggests that the problem is primarily cultural, and given that it is cultural, one important way to address it is through education, albeit through educational ideas that differ from the contemporary mainstream.

Climate protests have been recognized as a catalyst for large-scale social transformation. Previous studies focused on protests in Western countries where protests were abundant. Few studies paid attention to regions where protests were scarce. It has thus remained unknown why East Asia has few climate protests. To explore potential reasons, we conducted a comparative study. We examined factors correlated with climate protest significance in different countries. Protest significance was correlated with the following four factors: (1) the density of non-governmental organizations (_r_ = 0.498), (2) working hours (_r_ = -0.558), (3) trust in strangers (_r_ = 0.648), and (4) the priority of the environment over the economy (_r_ = 0.621). The former three factors were, in turn, associated with weak individualism in East Asia. Our study thus illustrates cultural dimensions to understand protest scarcity in East Asia. This study also highlights climate actions that are effective in East Asian cultural contexts.

Purpose Humans remain unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve environmental sustainability, despite decades of scientific awareness and political efforts toward that end. This paper suggests a fresh conceptualization, one that focuses on education, offers a fuller explanation for our lack of success and calls attention to alternatives. Design/methodology/approach The authors first critically review mainstream approaches that have been used to achieve environmental sustainability, then introduce an alternative that the authors call the cultural approach. The authors finally discuss how educational research should be re-articulated based on the cultural approach. Findings The authors identified three mainstream approaches – the technological, cognitive approach and behaviorist – all of which function to reproduce modern mainstream culture. In contrast, the cultural approach assumes modern mainstream culture as the root cause of environmental unsustainability and aims to rearticulate it. To elaborate a cultural approach, the authors recommend education scholars to (1) bring attention to the role of culture in sustainability and (2) identify education practices that are potentially useful for enacting a cultural shift, primarily developing richer synergies between qualitative and quantitative research. Originality/value Unlike many previous studies in the field of education, the authors’ account highlights how current mainstream approaches used for current global education policymaking often merely reproduces modern mainstream culture and accelerates the environmental crisis. It thus proposes to redirect educational research for a cultural shift, one that allows human society to move beyond the comforting rhetoric of sustainability and face the survivability imperative.

The spread of neoliberal policies across East Asia in the mid-1990s generated a counter-movement among East Asian scholars and practitioners centred on the 'School as Learning Community' (SLC). Today, thousands of schools across the region have joined the movement, spreading outward from Japan to Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Herein we review the philosophy and practice of SLC, highlighting how it replaces the independent individuals posited by Western liberalism - as foregrounded in both student-centred learning (SCL) and neoliberal accumulation of knowledge/skills - with the themes of interdependence, relationality, and 'listening', in the sublime Deweyan sense. Given that SLC has remained virtually invisible within the English-speaking research literature, it remains difficult to imagine practical pedagogical alternatives to liberalism and neoliberalism. However, SLC helps resuscitate the Anglo-American research imagination by providing an actual example of educational practice predicated on a different onto-epistemic basis. In analysing SLC we also gain a better sense of how philosophies of interdependence and relationality can be concretely operationalised in actual school settings, if we can somehow learn to 'listen' to East Asia.

Building on the scientific evidence and keeping in focus policy promises made over the decades, this report mobilizes the power of socially engaged art to bring together visions and voices of youth from across the globe in a collective effort to address the root causes of the climate crisis. It starts with the premise that education is directly implicated in the climate crisis and our failure to imagine alternatives. But it can also be the catalyst for radical change. Aiming to shift and shuffle the dominant knowledge systems and categories with the cards from the Turn It Around! deck, this report urges you to turn toward the reality of the climate crisis by capturing its devastating impacts from youth perspective in a way statistical data might not. It challenges existing education policies, practices, and patterns as no longer possible, tolerable, or even thinkable. With the powerful imagination and creativity of youth, the report activates a series of turning points — intergenerational, decolonial, methodological, and pedagogical — in order to turn around the environmental catastrophe, while reconfiguring the role of education toward ecologically just and sustainable futures.

Microbial communities are found throughout the biosphere, from human guts to glaciers, from soil to activated sludge. Understanding the statistical properties of such diverse communities can pave the way to elucidate the common mechanisms ...Multiple ecological forces act together to shape the composition of microbial communities. Phyloecology approaches—which combine phylogenetic relationships between species with community ecology—have the potential to disentangle such forces but are often ...

University campus sustainability projects frequently aim to promote ecological behavior of their community members. However, these projects rarely consider the level of students' self-construal, the view of self held by members of the university community (i.e., whether the self is viewed as independent or interdependent with nature). This runs counter to the findings in psychology that people's behavior is strongly affected by their self-construal. We thus conducted an exploratory attempt to include self-construal measurements into a campus environmental sustainability project at National Taiwan University. We specifically examined whether the university had contributed to the transformation of students' self-construal for greater environmental sustainability. Toward this end, we first confirmed that a psychological scale for self-construal, the connectedness to nature scale (CNS) that had been mainly tested in Western contexts, successfully predicted the likelihood of students' ecological behaviors (e.g., reducing waste) in an East Asian context. We found only a small difference in the CNS between students for different academic years, which suggests that the university was unsuccessful in transforming students' self-construal for greater sustainability. This finding resonates with the practice of universities in the modern era to emphasize cognitive dimensions of learning rather than ontological dimensions. Our results thus suggest that mainstreaming ontological dimensions would be one potential way for universities to move toward campus sustainability.

OBJECTIVE. To elucidate whether mental health dimensions have already been included in disaster and climate change interventions in St. Lucia, a Caribbean island that is highly vulnerable to climate change. METHODS. We identified documents for national policy and implementation to analyze (1) the relative importance of health in the documents and (2) the conceptualization of health. These document analyzes were complemented by semi-structured interviews and questionnaires to key stakeholders. RESULTS. In national policy, there were very few instances where mental health dimensions were addressed in climate change documents. In documents related to disasters, mental health dimensions were mentioned occasionally. Of 218 projects implemented, only three were related to health. Two of them were unrelated to mental health dimensions. The remaining one explicitly considered these dimensions, but this project did not appear to be implemented according to our supplementary interview. CONCLUSION. This research revealed that mental health dimensions have yet to be included in disaster and climate change interventions in St. Lucia. To our best knowledge, this is the only study that addressed this point by analyzing key policy documents.

Degrowth, i.e., a planned reduction in environmental impacts and economic scale, is increasingly discussed as a viable option for achieving sustainability. Yet, opponents counter that degrowth entails declines in economic standards, which will, in turn, reduce individual happiness and collective wellbeing. Our study explores the existing theoretical debate empirically, examining the case of Japan. There long-term decline in economic standards has not led to long-term decline in subjective wellbeing, thus bolstering the case for degrowth.

Extending recent analyses using PISA data, the current study utilises the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to test the central claims of knowledge capital theory. PIAAC has a distinct advantage over PISA in that it more directly tests levels of purported 'knowledge capital' across an entire national workforce, rather than offering approximations based on the performance of 15-year-old students. Findings from our two original studies reported herein further refute the tight linkage between cognitive levels and GDP growth per capita envisaged by proponents of knowledge capital, most notably the OECD and World Bank. These results suggest that knowledge capital theory is now degenerate. If scholars are willing to extend this reporting of results refuting knowledge capital theory, this will likely accelerate the theory's loss of momentum in the coming years.

ABSTRACT The OECD’s PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its place. As such, we focus herein on strategies for rearticulating ILSAs such as PISA: the creative use of data to shift the exercise away from dissemination of one dominant worldview towards the recognition of alternatives. To do this, we discuss the approach and findings from our recent papers, and then suggest future directions. Rather than mere accommodation, re-articulation underscores an approach to critique that is generative for theory and practice, one that extends of the horizon of possibility beyond culturally saturated notions of ‘good’ education.