Rethinking Water Education in Saudi Arabia: Integrating Environmental Values and Governance Literacy for Sustainability

Water scarcity presents a significant sustainability challenge in Saudi Arabia, creating opportunities to connect water education with environmental responsibility, systems understanding, and governance literacy. This study develops a five-dimensional conceptual framework for water education and examines its representation across selected Saudi national policy sources. An integrative synthesis of relevant literature informed a deductive, interpretive qualitative analysis of four purposively selected official sources covering water policy, environmental sustainability, educational sustainability, and national strategic implementation. The framework comprises water knowledge, environmental values, conservation practices, systems literacy, and governance literacy. The findings reveal complementary but differentiated representations of these dimensions, reflecting the distinct institutional mandates and purposes of the analyzed sources. Water-sector and national implementation documents articulate resource-management relationships and institutional responsibilities, while environmental and educational sustainability sources contribute complementary perspectives on stewardship, responsible resource use, and participation. These findings identify opportunities to translate policy-relevant concepts into integrated, developmentally appropriate educational experiences. The framework offers a conceptual basis for cross-curricular development and future empirical research, without establishing how these dimensions are currently represented in Saudi curricula or whether their integration improves student learning outcomes.