0000-0002-8897-8016Planetary crises are commonly understood as failures of energy, economic, food, health, ecological, social, and political systems. Yet they also expose the limits of how societies organize knowledge, coordinate collective action, and imagine possible futures (Meadows, 2008). Scientific understanding about climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological degradation continues to expand, while the capacity to translate that knowledge into coordinated action remains limited. This paradox is increasingly recognized as one of the defining challenges of planetary crises (Glavovic et al., 2022). The widening gap between knowledge and action raises a fundamental question about collective learning: how societies interpret changing conditions, deliberate across differences, coordinate actions, and adapt over time. However, this gap is not primarily a failure of information. It is produced by how power and material interests shape which knowledges are acted upon: economic arrangements that reward extraction and short-term returns, actors with a stake in delaying change, unequal influence over public decision-making, and institutions designed to reproduce existing practices. This gap is also shaped by institutional inertia, conflicting interests, cultural assumptions, and the emotional and relational conditions that influence whether people engage with or retreat from what is known.
Bridging knowledge and action requires more than additional information. Learning can reproduce or even strengthen existing assumptions and harmful arrangements, but it can also become a force for transformation. Its transformative potential lies in bringing those assumptions into question and reshaping how problems, purposes, and possibilities are understood through reflection, dialogue, and action, including attention to the power relations that shape whose knowledge counts and whose realities become visible (Bateson, 1972; Freire, 1970; Quijano, 2000). What distinguishes transformative learning from critical questioning alone is not its radicalism but its responsibility and accountability: transformative learning examines its own assumptions, remains open to evidence and to those affected, and can be revised through exchange across different visions of what education for planetary futures requires. This kind of transformative learning builds collective capacity to question what is taken for granted, negotiate different understandings, and change what becomes imaginable and possible for collective action.
For such transformative learning to become consequential, the systems and conditions through which societies learn must also change. Practices and institutional arrangements matter, but so do the incentives, power relations, feedback processes, and underlying logics that organize them (Faul & Savage, 2023; McCowan, 2023, 2025; Meadows, 2008; Sterling, 2001, 2024). Reforms can alter visible practices while leaving deeper logics intact. Worldviews, purposes, policies, and practices shape one another recursively. Worldviews inform educational purposes; purposes shape policies and institutional arrangements; and these organize everyday practice. Yet change also travels in the other direction: new practices can expose the limits of existing policies, institutional experimentation can unsettle established purposes, and both can reshape how education itself is understood. Transformation is therefore less a sequence of reforms than an ongoing reorganization of relationships across different parts and depths of the system.
Established cultural norms, institutional logics, and incentives can absorb or redirect change, while new relationships and practices can open previously difficult-to-imagine possibilities. Transformation may involve simultaneous processes of decline, transition, and emergence as established arrangements lose legitimacy or capacity and locally grounded alternatives develop through relationships and collective action. Transformation therefore involves creating new possibilities while unlearning inherited assumptions and responsibly releasing practices and arrangements that no longer serve planetary futures, with care for those affected by their decline (Machado de Oliveira, 2021; Silova et al., 2025).
These transitions are also shaped by historically constituted relations of power that influence whose knowledge is recognized, whose interests carry weight, and whose ways of knowing are marginalized (Quijano, 2000). What emerges, what is sustained, and what is allowed to decline depend on whose knowledge and ideas receive recognition and support, whose interests and losses are taken seriously, how the interests of future generations and the more-than-human world enter decision-making, who controls resources and institutional authority, and who participates in deciding what comes next. Systems transformation is therefore not only a question of how change happens, but of who has the power to shape its direction.
Educational systems are constituted, sustained, and transformed by the people and relationships within them. Educators working across all levels, from early childhood to higher to higher and adult education, and across formal, non-formal, community-based, and digital or hybrid settings, bring essential knowledge of learners, institutions, communities, and everyday practice to processes of change. This includes teachers, teaching assistants, faculty in tenured and contingent positions, technical and vocational instructors, community and youth educators, and the support staff who make learning possible. Their capacity to shape transformation depends on secure employment, professional autonomy, academic freedom, collective voice, supportive working conditions, and meaningful participation in decision-making. Teacher unions and other organizations of educators and researchers can extend this agency through social dialogue and collective action. Adequate staffing, time, resources, professional learning, safe and climate-resilient learning environments, and sustained public financing provide the material conditions through which transformation can take root. Learners, families, communities, and knowledge holders must likewise participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives, institutions, and futures.
Participation, in turn, raises questions of knowledge and authority. Transforming educational systems requires learning with multiple ways of knowing, relating, and organizing, including those grounded in Indigenous, local, and relational knowledge traditions and relationships with land and the more-than-human world (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018; Escobar, 2018). Crucially, this means respecting the authority of communities and knowledge holders to determine how their knowledge is represented, shared, and used.
Ultimately, transforming education means changing the social, institutional, and ecological relationships and conditions through which societies learn. Doing so can expand collective capacity to imagine, negotiate, and sustain more peaceful, just, and regenerative planetary futures. Education is therefore not simply another sector requiring reform; it is part of the collective infrastructure through which societies navigate uncertainty, negotiate difference, and shape what futures become possible.
