Sustainability Learning in Education for Sustainable Development for 2030: An Observational Study Regarding Environmental Psychology and Responsible Behavior through Rural Community Travel

Abstract

This study explores how rural community travel can be an eco-innovation approach to enhance education for sustainable development (ESD) for 2030. The goal of ESD is to enable all-age learners to meet the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4); therefore, effective education related to sustainability with respect to the local cultural context has become an urgent issue. Sustainability is not a specific problem, but concerns all living stakeholders, what they think, and how they work for sustainable community development. However, the intrinsic mechanism regarding the psychological process of outside responsible behavior change is still ignored. Therefore, we conducted a case study, wherein we selected a local cocoa cultural industry festival in southern Taiwan to understand the role of sustainability learning to explain this mechanism. The findings revealed that, in general, sustainability learning is a complex and reflexive process interlinked with different learners (stakeholders); it combines individual psychology and behavior, e.g., in positive psychology, learners care about the low-carbon services provided to tourists, and in negative psychology, they care more about finances. Notably, positive psychology affects responsible behavior, thus, promoting the preservation of the living environment. Additionally, we deduced that ESD can be enhanced by involving human senses and positive psychology.