Beyond Awareness: Designing Environmental Education as Infrastructure for Youth Participation in Biodiversity Governance in Southeast Asia

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.