Environmental Orientation and Environmental Prioritization Among Youth in China and Malaysia: An Education for Sustainable Development Perspective

Understanding how environmental values translate into sustainability-related decision-making is central to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Much of the existing literature, however, implicitly assumes that this translation operates uniformly once environmental values are present, and this assumption has rarely been tested comparatively across culturally and institutionally distinct, non-Western national contexts. Drawing on the value stage of Value–Belief–Norm theory as a conceptual background, rather than testing the full VBN mediational framework, this study examines whether environmental orientation is associated with environmental prioritization among young adults and whether this relationship varies across cultural contexts. Using data from the nationally representative World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017–2022), the study analyzes an age-restricted analytic sample of 919 respondents aged 18–29 from China and Malaysia with valid environmental-prioritization responses. Environmental orientation is operationalized as a theoretically motivated multidimensional composite integrating environmental institutional confidence, organizational engagement, and post-materialist value orientation. Binary logistic regression, interaction models, subgroup analyses, and bootstrap estimation are employed. The findings reveal significant cross-national differences in environmental prioritization, with Chinese youth showing stronger preferences for environmental protection over economic growth. Environmental orientation does not significantly predict environmental prioritization in the pooled sample; however, national context significantly moderates this relationship. Environmental orientation positively predicts environmental prioritization among Chinese youth but not Malaysian youth. This moderation holds under the linear specification used in the primary models and is driven primarily by post-materialist values, but it is not robust to an alternative specification that allows for curvature in the EOI–prioritization relationship; a direct test of whether educational attainment moderates the association was not statistically significant. With only two countries compared, the country variable absorbs every difference between them, so these findings indicate that the association differs between these two national samples without identifying the specific institutional, cultural, or educational mechanisms responsible.