0000-0002-0717-8253Human societies are embedded within a complex, tightly coupled planetary system in which biophysical, ecological, and social processes are fundamentally interdependent. Earth system science—particularly the planetary boundaries framework—shows that human activity has become a dominant force shaping planetary dynamics (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015; Richardson et al., 2023). Climate regulation, biosphere integrity, and land-system change interact in nonlinear ways, allowing disruption in one domain to cascade across others. Human wellbeing is inseparable from these dynamics: it depends on social foundations—including health, education, equality, political voice, and access to essential resources—whose provision and distribution both shape and are shaped by ecological pressures (O’Neill et al., 2018). With seven of nine planetary boundaries already breached (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2025), strengthening societal understanding of these ecological and social interdependencies has become urgent—and education has a central role to play.
Yet formal education systems have been slow to respond to this growing understanding of systemic interdependence, even as interdependence continues to be learned and sustained beyond formal institutions—in families, communities, and social movements. Many formal systems remain locked into 20th-century paradigms that privilege individualism, competition, disciplinary silos, and assumptions of unbounded economic growth (Silova et al., 2025; Sterling, 2024; Orr, 2023). These structures can detach learning from ecological realities and reinforce a view of the learner as autonomous and separate from the systems that sustain life. They can also constrain learners’ ability to understand and respond to complex socio-ecological challenges, including climate disruption, biodiversity loss, and cascading risks across sectors and scales. The report by Future Earth et al. (2024) documents the interconnected character of these risks.
Empirical research underscores the depth of this misalignment. Cross-national studies reveal that countries with higher levels of educational attainment—measured by secondary completion rates and proficiency scores—also tend to report higher per capita CO₂ emissions (Komatsu et al., 2019, 2020; Rappleye et al., 2024). While this relationship does not establish that education itself causes ecological harm, it challenges the assumption that expanding education under prevailing models necessarily produces more sustainable societies. Related research shows that countries achieving high levels of human development often do so at the expense of ecological sustainability, highlighting the structural trade-offs embedded in prevailing development systems (O’Neill et al., 2018).
Rather than consistently preparing societies to live within planetary boundaries, many education systems continue to reproduce cultural ideals of autonomous individualism, self-reliance, mastery, and control that are difficult to reconcile with conditions of ecological interdependence. At the same time, research in cultural psychology finds associations between interdependent self-construals—understanding oneself in relation to others and the natural world—and stronger environmental concern and values, as well as more frequent pro-environmental behaviour (Tam, 2025; Bretter & Schulz, 2025; Duff et al., 2022). Together, these findings point to a deeper tension within dominant education systems: they continue to cultivate values associated with industrial-era notions of progress while giving less attention to the relational orientations and collective forms of agency needed for planetary resilience. Unless education reexamines its core assumptions about who we are and how we relate to one another and the Earth, it risks reproducing some of the very logics implicated in the ecological crisis.
Education that centers interdependence offers an alternative—one that prepares learners to live well within planetary boundaries while realigning human development with Earth system stability and justice (Rockström et al., 2021). A growing body of research and scholarship suggests that pedagogies grounded in relationality—including place-based, food-systems, multispecies, and experiential approaches—can foster ecological literacy, systems thinking, relational awareness, and pro-environmental orientations (Rappleye et al., 2024; Rappleye & Komatsu, 2026; Bustillos Morales & Zarabadi, 2024; Ardoin et al., 2023; Verlie, 2021; Fu & Komatsu, 2024; Gravett et al., 2024; Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020). Complementing these approaches, research on transformative skills highlights systems thinking, anticipatory thinking, empathy, reflexivity, and relational responsibility as essential foundations for navigating complex societal transitions (Redman & Wiek, 2021; Barron et al., 2021; Kwauk & Casey, 2022). Together, these approaches cultivate not only cognitive understanding but also the capacity to recognize, sustain, and act within webs of relation, fostering collective flourishing within Earth's limits.
Contemporary efforts to center interdependence in education do not begin on new ground. Indigenous, land-based, community-rooted, and other relational knowledge traditions have long placed relationships, reciprocity, and responsibility at the heart of life and learning, despite their historical marginalization within dominant educational paradigms. Education can learn with and from these traditions only by respecting their differences, the contexts from which they arise, and the authority of the communities that sustain them. Their knowledge cannot be detached from particular places, histories, relationships, and responsibilities or collapsed into a single framework of relationality. This contextual grounding is central to many Indigenous, land-based, and community-rooted traditions, in which knowledge is understood as co-produced through reciprocal relationships with land, ancestors, and more-than-human kin (e.g., Kimmerer, 2020; Styres, 2019; Smith et al., 2019; Bawaka Country, 2016; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015).
Distinct relational understandings are also articulated across African philosophies of Ubuntu, which emphasize personhood through relationships (e.g., Cossa, 2020; Le Grange, 2018); Confucian and Buddhist thought, which highlight reciprocity, harmony, and the interdependence of human and more-than-human worlds (e.g., Abe, 2014; Komatsu & Rappleye, 2020; Sevilla, 2016); and Latin American knowledge systems and decolonial thought, which foreground relational ontologies and pluriversal politics (e.g., Escobar et al., 2024; de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018). Relational thinking also has deep roots within Western philosophical traditions, where the interconnection of thought, matter, and experience has long been a central concern (e.g., Spinoza, 1677/1996; Wittgenstein, 1953/2001; Bateson, 1972; Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Latour, 2018). These traditions are not equivalent, but in different ways they challenge the assumption of an autonomous, separable human subject. Together, they demonstrate that relationality is neither new nor singular and broaden the conceptual resources available for reimagining education.
Taken together, this evidence suggests that centering interdependence does more than add ecological content to existing curricula. It reshapes learning across multiple, interacting levels. For individuals, it changes how learners understand themselves in relation to other people, places, and living systems. Within groups and communities, it supports shared inquiry, reciprocal responsibility, and collective action. Within institutions and education systems, it directs attention to the relationships among actors, structures, functions, and feedback processes that shape how knowledge is produced, decisions are made, and connections with communities and places are sustained (Faul & Savage, 2023). At the societal level, it supports collective learning across differences, sectors, scales, and generations. Research suggests that relational and participatory approaches can support civic engagement (Ardoin et al., 2023), psychosocial resilience in climate change education (Ojala, 2016), and transformative agency in community-based learning for sustainability (Macintyre et al., 2018). Cross-national analyses also find associations between more interdependent cultural orientations and lower ecological footprints and per capita CO₂ emissions (Komatsu et al., 2019, 2020). Centering interdependence, then, is not simply about what learners know, but about how education situates people, communities, and institutions within the relationships through which collective life and planetary futures are made.
