Identity-based pathways to sustainability across educational, organizational, and cultural contexts

The intersection of identity and environmental behavior has become an increasingly salient focus in environmental psychological research, reflecting urgent societal demands for sustainable development across educational, organizational, and cultural contexts. This doctoral project examines how environmental and social identities shape pro-environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, drawing on evidence from multiple meta-analyses, longitudinal interventions, and large-scale empirical studies. To establish a comprehensive foundation, three meta-analyses were conducted: the first synthesized evidence on the impact of school outdoor education interventions on students’ environmental knowledge, the second focused on environmental attitudes, and the third identified antecedents and outcomes of environmental identity. Building on these findings, a six-wave longitudinal study within an Italian PRIN project (N = 203) examined how outdoor education interventions shape social identity, civic engagement, and vitality among secondary school students. Results showed that earlier social identity predicted later civic engagement, which in turn enhanced vitality, suggesting that identity serves as a mechanism linking outdoor experiences to sustained prosocial and environmental action. Together, these findings motivated a broader inquiry into whether similar identity-based mechanisms would operate in markedly different life domains and sociocultural settings. Extending this inquiry to the organizational context, a large-scale study with employees of a major Chinese energy company (N = 1,528) investigated how green training fosters pro-environmental behaviors through identity-based mechanisms. Finally, a three-wave longitudinal study in the United Kingdom (N = 193) explored how social identity complexity predicts pro-environmental behavior over time, highlighting context-specific intergroup processes rather than making direct cross-cultural claims. Together, these studies advance theoretical understanding of identity as a central psychological construct linking education, organizational practices, and cultural contexts to environmental outcomes. By integrating meta-analytic synthesis with longitudinal and contextually diverse empirical evidence, this research offers critical contributions to identity theory, environmental psychology, and applied sustainability initiatives.