According to Ó Riada et al. in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation (published 18 August 2026), Spain’s recent education law (LOMLOE) opens discursive space for transformative sustainability education while remaining constrained by entrenched neoliberal governance. This post explains the Spanish case and shows how AI-enabled qualitative research can accelerate reproducible mapping of discursive shifts and implementation gaps for researchers and policy teams. The primary keyword for this article is transformative sustainability education policy analysis, and the analysis below uses the authors’ data points (seven interviews conducted February–September 2025 and a longitudinal document corpus covering 1975–present) to give concrete next steps.
Key Takeaways
According to Ó Riada et al. in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation (published 18 August 2026), Spain’s policy discourse shifted through three periods (1975–1990, 1990–2018, 2019–present), and the 2020 LOMLOE law (rolled out 2021–2024) institutionalised sustainability as a central signifier but left implementation constrained by neoliberal logics.
- Ó Riada et al. analysed Spain’s education laws plus seven interviews carried out between February and September 2025, as reported in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation on 18 August 2026.
- Ó Riada et al. identify three periods: emancipatory renewal (1975–1990), OECD-shaped neoliberal consolidation (1990–2018), and a partial opening for TSE from 2019 to present (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
- Ó Riada et al. report that LOMLOE (introduced 2020, implemented 2021–2024) “gives sustainability a central role” but that teacher training targets set for 2025 were not met (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
- Ó Riada et al. document concrete implementation barriers highlighted by interviewees, including higher teaching loads and bureaucratic evaluation demands that limit time for transdisciplinary TSE activities (seven interviews, Feb–Sep 2025).
What happened: Spain’s discursive shifts in TSE policy
Spain’s education discourse moved from an emancipatory renewal in 1975–1990 to an OECD-driven neoliberal frame from 1990–2018, and then toward openings for transformative sustainability education from 2019 onward, according to Ó Riada et al. in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation (18 August 2026).
Ó Riada et al. explain that the democratic transition (1975–1990) enabled pedagogical renewal movements to push values, experiential learning and community-oriented schooling into law, while the OECD-era (1990–2018) emphasized measurable outcomes, benchmarking and PISA-driven accountability (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Ó Riada et al. show that the 2020 LOMLOE law, influenced by the 2019 climate mobilisations and advocacy groups, explicitly states that “schools must become a place of stewardship and care for our environment” (LOMLOE preamble quoted in Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Ó Riada et al. report persistent continuities: neoliberal metrics and competitive accountability persisted in LOMLOE via school-level evaluation, outsourcing, and managerial language, limiting the transformative potential in everyday practice (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Snapshot table: key dates and numeric facts
| Date | Metric | Value | Implication |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 August 2026 | Article publication | Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation | Provides the primary discourse analysis and interview data used here |
| Feb–Sep 2025 | Interviews | 7 in-depth interviews | Triangulates document analysis with actor perspectives (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation) |
| 1975–1990 | Period 1 | Emancipatory/pedagogical renewal | Paved early openings for relational and experiential pedagogy (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation) |
| 1990–2018 | Period 2 | OECD-shaped neoliberal consolidation | Standardisation and PISA metrics became dominant (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation) |
| 2019–present | Period 3 | Discursive openings for TSE | LOMLOE (2020) incorporates sustainability but faces implementation constraints (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation) |
| 2021–2024 | LOMLOE rollout | Progressive implementation period | Policy window for teacher training and curricular change that Ó Riada et al. find only partially realised |
Implications for researchers and education policymakers
Researchers should treat sustainability as a contested signifier and explicitly map competing articulations when analysing policy texts, as recommended by Ó Riada et al. in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation (18 August 2026).
Ó Riada et al. indicate three practical implications for policymakers: invest in teacher training timed to law rollout (LOMLOE targets for 2025 were unmet), align evaluation systems with transdisciplinary assessment, and guard against co-optation of sustainability by private actors (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Ó Riada et al. highlight that coalitions between grassroots movements and supportive parties enabled legislative uptake of TSE elements, suggesting advocacy-research partnerships are an effective lever for change (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
How Evidano helps: from transcripts to policy-ready findings
Problem: Long, manual qualitative workflows slow insight
Evidano is an AI-powered qualitative data analysis platform that helps researchers analyze interviews, open-ended surveys, and documents.
Ó Riada et al. used document coding and seven interviews to trace discursive change (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026); Evidano accelerates the same workflow by ingesting policy texts, parliamentary minutes and interview transcripts, then producing thematic and frequency analyses to reproduce and extend that work.
Use case mapping: replicate Ó Riada et al.'s coding schema at scale, then pivot to compare regional translations of LOMLOE to detect where conservative governments remove sustainability signifiers (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Problem: Tracing contested signifiers across time
Evidano offers chronological document ingestion and co-occurrence visualizations to show how terms like "quality", "sustainability", and "competence" shift their associations across laws, matching Ó Riada et al.’s longitudinal approach (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Feature link: learn more about these capabilities on the Evidano features page.
Problem: Laborious transcription and multilingual sources
Evidano provides accurate transcription and translation services with custom dictionaries and PII redaction, which is useful when reproducing Ó Riada et al.’s mixed-language document and interview corpus (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Feature link: see Evidano speech-to-text and translation pages.
Problem: Communicating findings to policymakers
Evidano generates extractable timelines, illustrative quotations, and stakeholder matrices that match the needs Ó Riada et al. identify for advocacy–policy coalitions (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
You can export coded quotations and frequency tables directly into policy briefs or slide decks to show, for example, how LOMLOE’s sustainability language varies across autonomous communities.
FAQ: transformative sustainability education policy analysis
What is transformative sustainability education policy analysis?
Answer: Transformative sustainability education policy analysis maps how policy texts and actor narratives enable or hinder education that fosters agency, futures literacy and systemic change.
Supporting detail: Ó Riada et al. define the tension between a modernist, human-capital paradigm and a transformative paradigm and apply discourse analysis to Spain’s laws and seven interviews to show how those paradigms are articulated (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
How do I reproduce the Ó Riada et al. study with my own corpus?
Answer: Reproduce their approach by building a longitudinal corpus of legal texts, coding preambles and policy articles, and triangulating with purposive interviews.
Supporting detail: Ó Riada et al. used NVivo-based iterative coding plus seven interviews conducted Feb–Sep 2025 to reach saturation; an AI-enabled pipeline can speed coding, surface co-occurrence networks, and quantify signifier shifts over time (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Can AI qualitative tools bias the analysis of contested terms like sustainability?
Answer: AI tools can both surface patterns and replicate biases, so combine automated coding with manual validation and named-source attributions.
Supporting detail: Ó Riada et al. stress the importance of positionality and triangulation in discourse analysis, recommending iterative coding and interview-based validation to mitigate bias (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
What immediate metrics should researchers extract to inform policy action?
Answer: Extract frequency of signifiers over time, co-occurrence with evaluative terms (e.g., quality, accountability), and counts of agency-related competencies references.
Supporting detail: Ó Riada et al. demonstrate that tracking how "quality" is articulated (instrumental vs relational) across laws reveals how neoliberal logics persist even when sustainability language appears (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Conclusion & Next Steps
Ó Riada et al. in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation (18 August 2026) show that Spain’s LOMLOE law opens discursive room for transformative sustainability education but that implementation barriers and neoliberal continuities remain.
Researchers and policymakers can use AI-enabled qualitative pipelines to make this contested signifier legible across texts, regions and actor statements and to prioritise teacher training, evaluation reform, and resource allocation where the law’s ambitions are weakest.
If you want to operationalise reproducible, document-centered TSE policy analysis today, Try Evidano for free.
Ethics note: this post summarises research findings for policy and research audiences and is not clinical or diagnostic advice; for original methods and transcripts see Ó Riada et al. and their Harvard Dataverse deposit (Ó Riada et al., PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 18 August 2026).
Topics
- transformative sustainability education policy analysis
- transformative education Spain
- TSE policy analysis with AI
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