Effectiveness of community education on enhancing environmental value towards a sustainable food system in Hong Kong

Education for sustainable development (ESD) plays a vital part in building urban community resilience and adaptive capacity (McFarlane & Ogazon, 2011) by constructing individuals’ environmental values, including knowledge, attitude, and behaviour (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002) in light of the global food challenges. In recent decades, bottom-up community education has become more prominent for its potential to raise awareness, enhance social cohesion and thus engage people in driving sustainable food transitions that are less effective in formal education settings (Tilbury & Wortman, 2008). Nonetheless, conventional community education still faces challenges in scaling up its long-term impact (Fraser et al., 2006; Tilbury & Wortman, 2008). In Hong Kong, despite pro-environmental values being positively expressed by the general public, a wide value-action gap is still prominent (Chung & Leung, 2007a). To bridge this gap, School of Everyday Life (SOEL) (生活書院), a local-level non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Hong Kong, has designed a community education model adopting various learning approaches to drive ESD in the past 8 years. In particular, empowering learners to acquire knowledge and nurture long-term behavioural change towards a sustainable food system (SFS), through hands-on co-creation processes (Choi, 2015). This paper therefore aims to evaluate the effectiveness of SOEL’s community education model on enhancing individuals’ environmental values in driving a SFS, in addition, existing challenges and opportunities to scale up development of community education in the local context for sustainability transition in the long-run. The method adapted is a qualitative case study approach, coupled with document analysis and qualitative interviews with SOEL’s volunteer, employees and founders. The analysis showed that SOEL’s community education model is highly effective in enhancing individuals’ environmental values towards SFS in the long-run with the key adoption of social learning, transformative learning, experiential learning and empowerment through volunteering learning processes. The extent of effectiveness in individuals’ environmental values varies based on personal and external factors, which also imply challenges or barriers to adopt community education in driving food transitions. The result provides valuable insight on the enabling conditions of an effective learning model for nurturing community’s environmental values, also challenges and opportunities of scaling up the impact of community education to co-create a SFS. Future research is recommended to study community education models of different cultural and social context for different target audience, also to explore the potentials of joint-effort amongst interested and relevant stakeholders to co-create a SFS, driving sustainability transition collectively.