Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in the formal sector is evolving rapidly across global contexts. Early Childhood settings are increasingly being seen as fertile grounds for promoting ESE values, attitudes and life-long pro-environmental behaviours. This article provides an in-depth understanding of the Early Childhood policy frameworks in India, China and Japan, focusing on how these support ESE implementation in Early Childhood settings. The study provides a comparative analysis of the key commonalities in the policy frameworks, the main enablers and vital challenges. It also offers a deep conversation on the convergences and divergences that bring together these three Asian countries in their goals of ESE implementation. Finally, the paper appeals to a global audience by offering a review of non-dominant approaches in these three countries, drawing upon their distinctive social, cultural and political contexts. The paper showcases the commonalities and divergences in Eastern cultures and also provides a lens to decipher key shifts from dominant Western philosophies. Overall, the paper responds to the call of this special issue to look at alternative perspectives and understand ESE in different contexts.

The COVID-19 crisis has posed unprecedented challenges to every aspect of lives across the globe. The cross-cultural collaboration project (UTFORSK) including Norwegian and Chinese early childhood education researchers and practitioners reported in this chapter is no exception. Although challenged, we grasped this opportunity to utilize digital platforms in an innovative way to keep the collaboration sustainable and resilient. We conducted digital workshops in addition to the traditional use of digital platforms for information sharing and communications. This practice has enabled a closer relationship between ongoing professional development and research on education for sustainability. Taking a departure from a project titled Our Neighborhood designed prior to the COVID-19 crisis, we hold a series of digital workshops to share stories, photos, plans, and other artifacts as well as to listen to each other and discuss different aims, conditions, and implementations of each local kindergarten’s project. This chapter aims to present how this cross-cultural collaboration worked through digitalization, especially through a series of digital workshops during the COVID-19 crisis when face-to-face meetings are impossible. It also aims to explore how digitally collected data are used to inform further action. Cultural-historical approach is used to guide the presentation of this chapter. The chapter ultimately aspires to illuminate how to integrate digitalization into internationalization for cross-cultural collaboration in the early childhood education context and beyond.