Navigating Constraints: Advancing Sustainability Education Through Decentralized Governance and Applied Pedagogy

Sustainability education in higher education is frequently framed through discrete pedagogical interventions or whole-institution approaches requiring strong central coordination. However, these models often align poorly with U.S. community colleges, where initiatives emerge under decentralized governance and institutional priorities centered on access and workforce preparation. In the absence of a national mandate for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), these institutions pursue sustainability education through voluntary, locally defined efforts. This study employs a qualitative case study approach to examine how sustainability education unfolds as a distributed, multi-initiative, and longitudinal process at Bronx Community College (BCC) of the City University of New York. The analysis covers diverse curricular and co-curricular spaces, including Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) coursework, climate science seminars, applied entrepreneurship initiatives, and the Associate of Applied Science (AAS) program in Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management (ESBM). Findings demonstrate that while sustainability education is organizationally dispersed, it achieves coherence when applied pedagogies recur across connected spaces and program-level pathways provide stable contexts for repeated student exposure. The study concludes by explaining how coherence is constructed under decentralization, clarifying the vital role of program-level structures in linking national policy non-alignment, system-level commitments, and local implementation. These results offer a scalable framework for integrating sustainability into vocational and technical education within decentralized academic systems.