Conference Program

Today’s world faces socio-ecological challenges of global magnitude that require coordinated international responses, as outlined in the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015). Although a global perspective is more urgent than ever to address systemic inequalities, climate change, and widespread violence, educational contexts often reveal the need to translate these global priorities into meaningful and operational local processes. Such an “interscalar” approach (Magnaghi, 2020) calls for situated educational processes capable of connecting global visions with concrete community practices (European Commission, 2024).

This centrifugal movement – from the local to the global – requires the active involvement of communities, with particular attention to youth engagement to ensure the continuity of civic commitment in the future (UNESCO, 2021). However, their involvement, often more formal than substantive, demands serious commitment at both educational and political levels, as well as their recognition as co-protagonists in territorial decision-making processes (Gallina & Zamengo, 2022). Pedagogical models grounded in community education are especially relevant in this regard, as they foster democratic participation through collective learning and co-construction of knowledge, within a rhizomatic organisation that transcends the boundaries between formal and informal education (UNESCO, 2014).

The Alpine context can serve as a laboratory for observing dynamics of community learning. It is a transnational socio-ecological system characterised by urgent environmental challenges, depopulation, and territorial marginalisation, but also by remarkable natural continuity (Alpine Convention, 1991). Within this scenario, young people are the primary actors in out-migration towards urban areas, yet they are also the only ones capable of ensuring the demographic, cultural, and economic survival of local communities (Membretti, 2023), as well as contributing to the development of cross-border strategies for sustainable territorial management in response to global crises (Durand & Decoville, 2019).

This contribution presents preliminary findings from an exploratory qualitative study conducted within the framework of the European cross-border project PITER+ Terres Monviso, in the Monviso area between Italy and France. The research involved young people and youth policy practitioners through focus groups and in-depth interviews, investigating – through narrative inquiry (Clandinin et al., 2016)—their educational relationship with the territory, their role within local communities, their sense of belonging to a cross-border space, and the social imaginaries that animate them (Taylor, 2005). The exploratory research also included the active involvement not only of project partners and interview participants, but also of mayors and local administrators, in a perspective of co-construction of research data and complementarity between local actors and researchers (Flick, 2024). In this sense, the territory as a whole becomes attentive to young people, aiming to create a shared approach to cross-border youth policies and overcome the fragmentation of interventions.

By situating learning communities within a socio-ecological and territorial perspective, the study contributes to the debate on democratic community education, showing how collective educational processes can connect local action with global challenges in cross-border Alpine regions.