Universities Must Rethink Learning Itself to Deliver Sustainability, Landmark Review Warns

Universities have spent two decades adding sustainability to their mission statements, their curricula and their campus waste-management plans. Yet according to a review published on 13 February 2026 in the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, most of these efforts remain superficial, because the deeper learning that sustainability actually requires—learning that changes worldviews rather than merely transmitting content—is systematically squeezed out of higher education by the very structures that host it. The review, by Ljiljana Rogač Mijatović of the University of Arts in Belgrade, argues that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) can only fulfil its promise if it is fused with transformative learning theory, and it offers a new analytical framework for doing exactly that.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the last decade, the world has faced unprecedented social, environmental and economic crises, and many nations have adopted green deal agendas that seek to reconcile economic growth with environmental limits. Education has been increasingly recognized as a crucial driver of societal transformation within this broader transition, equipping individuals and communities with the knowledge, skills and values necessary for sustainability. But the review identifies a profound tension: while education is expected to empower citizens and foster transformative learning, many higher education systems continue to reproduce neoliberal logics, reinforce marketization and sustain existing inequities. Without substantive change, educational systems risk remaining maladaptive agents of business as usual, perpetuating what the literature warns is a dystopian future that nobody wants.

ESD has evolved over several decades as a fundamental component of international education policy, with UNESCO as its principal advocacy actor. Its conceptual roots reach back to the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and the 1977 Tbilisi Conference, which articulated foundational principles of environmental education emphasizing interdisciplinary learning, ethical responsibility and action orientation. The 1987 report Our Common Future framed sustainable development as intergenerational responsibility, and the 1992 Earth Summit formalized education’s role through Agenda 21, Chapter 36, calling for the integration of sustainability across educational systems, teacher training reform, public awareness efforts and cross-sectoral cooperation. The 2002 Johannesburg Summit then established the UN Decade of ESD (2005–2014) under UNESCO leadership, followed by the Global Action Programme (2015–2019) and the ESD for 2030 Framework (2020–2030) as part of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The quantitative record of these initiatives is striking. The Global Action Programme Key Partners’ Report (2015–2018) documented 959 policy documents and 1,486 programmes supported in policy integration; over 150,000 schools and institutions integrated in transforming learning environments, reaching more than 26 million learners; 48,000 teacher-training institutions supported in educator capacity building; 3.4 million individuals engaged in youth empowerment; and 5,685 stakeholders and 2,390 initiatives identified for local solutions. The Higher Education Sustainability Initiative, launched at the Rio+20 Conference in 2012, received commitments from nearly 300 universities to integrate sustainability into teaching, research, operations and community engagement. In October 2022, UNESCO launched the ESD-Net 2030 Global Network with more than 80 Member States and 50 international partners to coordinate national implementation efforts.

Yet the review shows that progress toward achieving SDG Target 4.7, which positions ESD as fundamental to achieving sustainable, peaceful and equitable societies, faces persistent challenges. UNESCO’s latest reports identify limited cross-sectoral coordination, slow curriculum integration, insufficient educator preparation, dominance of transmissive pedagogies, neoliberal institutional pressures and Eurocentric epistemic frameworks. The Berlin Declaration of May 2021 was the first UNESCO document to explicitly emphasize transformative learning as essential for addressing global crises, but the gap between policy aspiration and classroom practice remains wide. Effective ESD policy, the review argues, demands cultural awareness, historical consciousness and long-term responsibility; without these, policy risks perpetuating short-term, Eurocentric or technocratic approaches.

The theoretical core of the review lies in transformative learning, a theory grounded in the principles of creative and deep learning. Mezirow’s theory positions learning as a process of critically examining assumptions, experiencing disorienting dilemmas and developing more inclusive and integrative perspectives, emphasizing the need to uncover and challenge hidden assumptions that shape mindsets, values and goals, as well as critical understanding of power structures. Transformative learning has been referred to as a holistic approach involving intellectual, emotional and intuitive ways of knowing and acting in the world, and it involves the development of key competencies such as critical thinking, creativity, self-reflexivity and individual awareness. Critical reflection enables learners to interrogate assumptions and power relations—conditions necessary for transformative and emancipatory learning.

The review builds its framework around Wals’s four dimensions of transformative learning, described as Gestaltswitching or mind-set shifts. The transcultural dimension refers to shifts between multiple cultural mindsets and the notion of otherness; the transgenerational dimension refers to shifts between now and then; the transdisciplinary dimension refers to movement across the range of social science and natural science, beyond disciplinary silos; and the transgeographical dimension refers to spatial relations such as global-local, North-South and East-West. These dimensions support both cognitive flexibility and ethical awareness, and the review cross-references them with UNESCO’s five ESD priority action areas: advancing policy integration, transforming learning environments, building educator capacity, empowering and mobilizing youth, and accelerating sustainable solutions at the local level.

The resulting matrix reveals what has been missing from mainstream sustainability education. For policy integration, it calls for moving beyond Western-dominated sustainability paradigms towards holistic, eco-social and justice-oriented participatory governance, incorporating intergenerational justice principles and Indigenous long-term thinking models like the seventh generation principle, and recognizing decolonizing policies beyond Eurocentric frameworks to include local, Indigenous and Global South perspectives. For learning environments, it proposes transforming campuses into living sustainability labs—zero waste, renewable energy, food sovereignty—while creating safe spaces for experiential learning that encourage marginalized voices. For educator capacity, it urges challenging hegemonic pedagogies in favour of emancipatory teaching, restructuring curricula to integrate sustainability through storytelling, arts-based methods and oral traditions, and facilitating cross-border knowledge exchange with equitable distribution of pedagogical resources.

The framework is equally concrete about youth and communities. Genuine youth empowerment, the review argues, involves supporting political agency, leadership and the capacity to critique institutional norms—not merely participation in predefined sustainability activities. It calls for supporting student-led initiatives and activism that challenge institutional and societal unsustainability beyond academia, fostering intergenerational dialogue so young people have a voice in education system sustainability governance, and building cross-border youth networks that link higher education with grassroots movements. At the local level, universities must reconceive their civic role by co-creating sustainability solutions with communities, embedding action-oriented and experiential learning into curriculum and research, and acknowledging diverse values and knowledge systems to strengthen bottom-up sustainability education models.

None of this will be easy, because higher education institutions face persistent structural barriers that constrain transformative ESD: disciplinary fragmentation, neoliberal policy pressures prioritizing employability, competitiveness and quantifiable outputs, lack of institutional sustainability planning, audit cultures limiting pedagogical experimentation, Western epistemic dominance and limited funding for participatory or community-based learning. Transformative learning often disappears in systems dominated by standardization, managerialism and market pressures, and neoliberal governance further constrains dialogic, participatory and critically oriented pedagogies. Some scholars advocate transgressive learning, which challenges normative assumptions and institutional boundaries, because sustainability challenges require systemic disruption rather than incremental adaptation. Sustainability education, as Wals and Jickling noted, requires the creation of space for alternative ways of thinking, valuing, imagining and acting.

The review also insists that the social sciences, humanities and arts are essential for addressing sustainability’s cultural, ethical, political and affective dimensions, despite their historic marginalization in ESD discourses dominated by natural-science paradigms focused on environmental knowledge, resource management and technological innovation. For ESD to become genuinely transformative rather than merely adaptive, it must incorporate perspectives that foreground meaning-making, imagination, values, identity and the critique of power structures. Decolonizing sustainability learning requires recognizing Indigenous and subaltern epistemologies, which expand the conceptual and ethical horizons of ESD while challenging dominant paradigms. Universities must cultivate dialogic supportive pedagogical environments, inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration, and institutional cultures that treat higher education as a public good.

The implications for policy and practice are far-reaching: pluralize knowledge systems, reimagine learning environments, strengthen educator capacities, expand youth empowerment and embed community-engaged learning. Higher education institutions should broaden epistemic horizons by incorporating Indigenous, community-based and intercultural perspectives alongside principles of intergenerational justice. Learning environments should be modelled as safe, experiential spaces that function as hubs for dialogue, reflexivity, co-creation and emotional engagement. Educators require institutional support to enact critical pedagogies, systems thinking and collaborative learning practices. Youth empowerment should move beyond formal participation toward sustained support for student-led initiatives, activism and grassroots movements, and education models grounded in subaltern and bottom-up approaches to sustainability should be formally recognized and valued within policy and practice frameworks.

Ultimately, the review argues that transformative ESD requires viewing higher education as a public good committed to justice, dignity and responsibility. Universities are not only higher education institutions but also cultural institutions that shape societal values, norms and knowledge systems, playing a critical role in promoting or hindering sustainability-oriented transformative learning. By cultivating imagination and collective agency, higher education can meaningfully contribute to the world we want—a future in which sustainability is not merely taught but lived, contested and continually reimagined. As the manifesto The Education We Need for the World We Want called for paradigms that surpass human-capital frameworks and cultivate critical, reflective and transformative learning, that call resonates even stronger today.

Subject of Research: Education for Sustainable Development

Article Title: Integrating transformative learning approaches in higher education for sustainable development

Article References: Rogač Mijatović, L. (2026). Integrating transformative learning approaches in higher education for sustainable development. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 14705. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.14705

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.14705

Keywords: transformative learning, higher education, sustainable development, UNESCO, ESD, pedagogy, SDGs, education policy, Integrating, transformative, learning, approaches