Sustainability as ability-to-sustain: A relational reorientation for education and environmental justice

We critically examine how “sustainability” and “justice” are conceptualized within environmental education (EE). We interrogate the onto-epistemological assumptions and exclusions embedded within dominant sustainability discourse, and consider how these shape educational futures. Our analysis traces dominant epistemic patterns within particular strands of current EE discourse, showing how they reinforce colonial, neoliberal, and technocratic logics that limit how sustainability and justice are understood. We then engage in diffractive readings across feminist, decolonial, and techno-critical EE scholarship to argue that what we know, how we are, and how we relate are mutually co-constituted. These pluriversal and relational onto-epistemologies reconceptualize sustainability as a situated and ethical practice grounded in accountability to human and more-than-human worlds. Through this lens, we offer ability-to-sustain as an orientation for thinking differently about EE, inviting educators and researchers to consider the relational capacities that enable us to sustain just and livable futures.