0000-0002-8897-8016Planetary crises unfold across interconnected ecological, social, economic, and political systems. Climate disruption, ecological degradation, and social instability interact across regions, sectors, and scales, crossing political, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries and reshaping relationships between human societies and the more-than-human world (Meadows, 2008; Vossoughi et al., 2023). These dynamics do not stop at national borders or sectoral silos; disruption in one domain can reverberate through others, requiring coordinated responses across institutions and scales. The planetary boundaries framework makes the Earth-system dimensions of this challenge visible. According to the 2025 Planetary Health Check, seven of the nine planetary boundaries were assessed as transgressed (Sakschewski et al., 2025). These transgressions are systemic in their drivers and transboundary in their consequences, yet responsibility, vulnerability, and capacity to respond remain distributed unequally. Responding to them therefore requires forms of knowledge, learning, governance, and collective action capable of moving across the boundaries that have traditionally structured education.
Nevertheless, educational institutions and infrastructures remain fragmented along national, disciplinary, and institutional lines, often reproducing the idea that human societies exist apart from the living world. This fragmentation limits their capacity to respond to complex, systemic challenges (Sterling, 2001, 2004). To meet the planetary moment, education must become border-crossing by design, supporting learning, exchange, and cooperation across disciplinary, sectoral, geographic, political, generational, and species boundaries while recognizing that access to the sites and pathways of such crossings is profoundly unequal within and across social, political, and ecological systems.
The challenge is not only that planetary crises cross borders, but that the boundaries around which education systems have traditionally been organized do not adequately reflect the realities of an increasingly interconnected world. Educational institutions continue to separate disciplines, sectors, generations, and forms of knowledge into distinct domains, even as climate change, biodiversity loss, migration, and technological transformation unfold across them. These divisions are reinforced by reductionist assumptions that complex problems can be understood and addressed by separating them into discrete parts. As Meadows (2008) argues, the behavior of complex systems cannot be understood by examining their parts in isolation. Educational responses to planetary challenges therefore require forms of connection that:
bring scientific, Indigenous, local, and experiential knowledge traditions into dialogue without collapsing their differences;
connect research, policy, and practice;
enable physical and virtual mobility, exchange, and collaborative learning; and
recognize humanity as inseparably part of, rather than distinct from, the living systems on which societal social systems depend.
Responding to such complexity requires new forms of coordination and learning. Polycentric governance highlights the importance of distributed, interconnected decision-making across local, national, and global levels (Ostrom, 2010). Its effectiveness, however, depends on coordination, accountability, and meaningful participation by actors with unequal power and resources. Without reflexive dialogue and practices designed to address unequal power, polycentric governance can reproduce existing inequalities and structural rigidities. Similarly, transdisciplinary approaches bring academic disciplines into collaboration with communities, practitioners, policymakers, and other social actors, connecting research, policy, and practice (Jahn et al., 2012; Klein, 2017). Without such boundary-crossing capacities, knowledge co-production, learning, and decision-making can remain disconnected, limiting their contribution to coordinated action and systemic transformation (Cash et al., 2003).
Whole-institution and networked approaches provide practical pathways for turning border-crossing principles into institutional practice. Embedding sustainability across leadership, teaching, research, operations, and institutional culture creates coherent environments for deep learning and meaningful participation (Wals et al., 2024; UNESCO, 2024). Rather than treating sustainability as a discrete topic, whole-institution approaches position it as an organizing principle that connects governance, pedagogy, infrastructure, and community engagement in mutually reinforcing ways (Sterling, 2004). Such approaches depend on the professional autonomy, academic freedom, time, resources, and institutional support that enable educators and other institutional actors to sustain collaboration across boundaries—conditions that cannot be taken for granted. When institutions operate in isolation, interconnected priorities—such as climate education, global citizenship, and digital learning—can become fragmented, competing for time and attention and reinforcing the very silos they seek to address. By contrast, cross-institutional networks and collaborative learning communities enable knowledge to circulate, reduce duplication, and support reciprocal learning and shared innovation across formal, non-formal, and informal settings.
At the same time, borders are not only institutional but epistemic and political. Dominant reductionist worldviews fragment knowledge and reinforce separation across disciplines, sectors, and species. Long-standing relational and ecological traditions of thought offer ways of knowing that connect understanding across perspectives, places, and communities (Escobar, 2018; Le Grange, 2018). Bringing scientific knowledge into dialogue with distinct Indigenous, local, and Global South knowledge traditions—without absorbing them into a single framework—can expand what counts as evidence and who counts as an educator, strengthening collective responses to uncertainty (Smith et al., 2019; de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018). This requires attention to power, authority, reciprocity, and the rights of communities and knowledge holders to determine how their knowledge is represented, shared, and used.
Digital divides, language hierarchies, unequal funding, visa and migration regimes, displacement, and uneven recognition of qualifications continue to shape who can move, participate, and be heard, as well as whose knowledge circulates and whose remains marginalized. These asymmetries reflect broader inequalities in knowledge systems and governance, underscoring the need for more equitable infrastructures for physical and virtual mobility, multilingual participation, reciprocal exchange, and recognition across contexts (Cash et al., 2003). Addressing these structural barriers is essential if border-crossing education is to widen participation rather than reproduce existing inequities. Emerging technologies, including AI, further underscore the need for equitable digital systems and governance that enable meaningful participation, plural knowledge production, and greater community agency over how data and technologies are developed and used (BRIDGES et al., 2025).
In these and other ways, education can move from fragmentation toward connection, developing as a networked, relational system capable of learning and responding across places, institutions, and scales. Such a transformation requires changing how knowledge is organized, shared, and enacted across formal, non-formal, and informal settings, as well as across institutions, sectors, and societies. It aligns with systems thinking perspectives that emphasize attending to and transforming the relationships and structures through which systems operate, rather than adjusting individual components in isolation (Meadows, 2008; Sterling, 2001).
Ultimately, border-crossing education is not simply about connecting what has been separated or eliminating meaningful differences; it is about cultivating the capacities, relationships, and infrastructures through which societies can learn, govern, and flourish together while navigating difference, inequality, and interdependence in an increasingly interconnected world.
