Building Capacity for Sustainable Education in Outdoor Campus Spaces

A Framework for Change

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_2How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Sustainable Education; Co-creation; Co-production; Reflexive Monitoring

Abstract

As the effects of the current poly-crisis for ecosystems, food security and human health become increasingly evident, a significant role can be played by higher educational institutes (HEIs) in addressing emerging challenges. While HEI campuses provide rich resources that can be adapted or repurposed to address evolving needs, this is not without obstacles, and HEIs as organisations can be resistant to change. This paper examines the processes involved in re-imagining and re-creating outdoor campus learning spaces for sustainability, and the problems that may arise, with the aim of uncovering possibilities for addressing these. To this end, a case study of a pilot project to create an outdoor learning space for sustainability is provided. This adapted and drew guiding principles from the Connecting Nature Framework (Hölscher et al., 2021), a framework designed to address the governance problems involved in complex systems transition, when implementing nature-based solutions in cities. A collaborative, co-creative and reflexive approach was used to ensure the involvement of relevant stakeholders and allow possibilities for on-going learning.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Therese Hume
AU  - Fiona Britton
AU  - Dolores Byrne
AU  - Yvonne Lang
AU  - Susan Mc Donnell
AU  - Ruth Quinn
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/08/23
TI  - Building Capacity for Sustainable Education in Outdoor Campus Spaces
BT  - Proceedings of the Conference of Growing up the Future: Education for Sustainability (GROUFES 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 5
EP  - 18
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_2
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_2
ID  - Hume2026
ER  -