From Sustainability to Ecological Civilization: Ecopedagogy as a Pathway to Socio-ecological Transformation

The concept of sustainability, despite its global prominence, has failed to address accelerating ecological collapse due to its entanglement in growth-oriented paradigms, neoliberal depoliticization, and epistemic erasure of non-Western knowledge. This chapter argues that sustainability’s structural limitations call for a dual reconfiguration: ecological civilization as a postanthropocentric ethical horizon and ecopedagogy as a critical pedagogical praxis. China’s ecological civilization model transcends sustainability’s incrementalism by teaching to the goal of centering ecological reciprocity and pluriversal epistemologies, while ecopedagogues dismantle the colonial and capitalist foundations of ecological exploitation through transformative education. Together with sustainability as a contested transitional layer, these frameworks form an interdependent tripartite model that challenges neoliberal hegemony and reimagines socio-ecological governance. The chapter contends that only through such radical integration of ethics, policy, and pedagogy can socio-ecological justice be realized amid planetary boundary transgressions and escalating climate crises.