Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review | DOI: 10.13060/csr.2026.023

Participation as a Shared Lever for Civic and Environmental Education: Student Voice, Empowerment, and Perceived Control in the Czech Case and Central European Perspective

Roman Kroufek ORCID...¹, Petr Bláha ORCID...¹, Vladimír Naxera ORCID...²

¹ Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic

² University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic

Civic and environmental education are often institutionally separated, although many contemporary public challenges—including climate adaptation, land use, mobility, energy transitions, and local environmental conflicts—require both democratic deliberation and socio-environmental action. This article develops an integrative conceptual review of student participation as a shared mechanism that may connect these domains. Rather than treating participation as a universally beneficial educational practice, we conceptualise it as an institutional opportunity structure whose effects depend on its quality, consequentiality, equity, and legitimacy. We propose a mechanism whereby consequential participation in classroom, school, and community settings supports agency-related beliefs, particularly psychological empowerment, perceived control, action self-efficacy, civic and political efficacy, and collective efficacy. These beliefs may, in turn, increase the likelihood of both civic engagement and environmental action. We further argue that environmental engagement also depends on an affective pathway, particularly nature connectedness and place attachment, which complements—but cannot substitute for—agency-building forms of participation. Because the empirical evidence reviewed here is concentrated primarily in Czechia, the article treats the Czech case as an analytically useful Central European case rather than as representative of the region as a whole. We identify segmentation, tokenism,\\r\\ninequality, low institutional trust, and disputes concerning legitimacy as key boundary conditions. The article’s contribution lies in specifying how participation may bridge civic and environmental education, the conditions under which it may fail, and the implications of these dynamics for future sociological and educational research on youth agency in Central Europe.

Keywords: student participation, student voice, empowerment, perceived control, collective efficacy, civic education, environmental education, Czechia, Central Europe, inequality

Received: January 27, 2026; Revised: June 30, 2026; Accepted: July 1, 2026; Prepublished online: July 27, 2026