Counselling-informed environmental education in Nigerian Universities: A theory-based mixed-methods program...

Counselling-informed pedagogical strategies are being incorporated in environmental education programmes in post-secondary education to enhance environmental awareness, attitudes, and pro-environmental behaviour. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding their usefulness and application especially in Global South settings. This paper appraises an intervention based on counselling-informed environmental education implemented in Nigerian universities in terms of outcome effectiveness and implementation dynamics. The outcomes of a convergenarallel mixed-method design were the collection of quantitative data (274 undergraduate students in five public universities), survey and interview data (100 lecturers and student counsellors). When counselling-informed pedagogies were included in the multiple regression equation predicting pro-environmental behaviour, the overall model was significant (R² =.454, F (3, 270) = 74.709, p < .001), but the overall regression results indicated that the integration of counselling-informed pedagogies negatively predicted pro-environmental behaviour (R² =.093, F (3, 270) = 28.051, p < .001; β = -.283, p < .001), suggesting an implementation-context constraint rather than direct behavioural enhancement effect. The qualitative results are used to account for the presence of behaviour gap in awareness, caused by the institutional constraint, which could be a lack of policy support, insufficient training, ineffective lecturer counsellor cooperation, and structural issues regarding the enactment of the behaviour. The results indicate that environmental education based on counselling enhances psychological preparedness, attitudinal orientation but needs greater institutional integration and implementation faithfulness so as to convert the gains into lasting behavioural effects. Besides, the study is linked to the literature on programme evaluation as it shows the effectiveness of the educational interventions in the context of higher education, while taking into account the mediation of contextual and implementation conditions empirically.