Environmental and Sustainability Education Policy

International Trends, Priorities and Challenges

Katrien Van Poeck, Jonas A. Lysgaard, Alan Reid, Katrien Van Poeck, Jonas A. Lysgaard, Alan Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351401388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This timely collection surveys and critiques studies of environmental and sustainability education (ESE) policy since the mid-1990s. The volume draws on a wide range of policy studies and syntheses to provide readers with insights into the international genealogy and priorities of ESE policy. Editors and contributors call for renewed attention to the possibilities for future directions in light of previously published work and innovations in scholarship. They also offer critical commentary on the evolution of research trends, approaches and findings.

Including a wide range of examples of ESE policy and policy research, the book draws on studies of educational initiatives and legislation, policy making processes and rhetoric, ideological orthodoxy and critique, curriculum making and educational theory, globalisation and neoliberalism, climate change and environmental worldviews, and much more.

In addition, introductory commentary from the editors traces how ESE researchers have dealt with key trends, complexities and issues in the policy-practice-research nexus both conceptually and empirically. Throughout the collection, contributions illustrate how researchers might reimagine and reinvigorate policy research on ESE, including how working with other fields and diverse perspectives, ideas and expertise will aid the cross-fertilisation of a complex terrain of ideas, policy and practice. This book is based on a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

The roots and routes of environmental and sustainability education policy research

Jonas A. Lysgaard, Alan Reid and Katrien Van Poeck

This article introduces the themes of a virtual special issue (VSI) of Environmental Education Research (http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/ed/ceer-vsi) focused on policy research in environmental and sustainability education (ESE). The broad purpose behind preparing the VSI was to consider the challenges involved in linking particular concepts of environment and sustainability with key themes in educational policy, and how this remains a heavily contested practice. Examples drawn from two decades of studies published in the journal show how these might be illustrated, addressed, problematized and possibly transcended. The introduction traces how ESE researchers have dealt with key trends, complexities and issues in the policy-practice-research nexus both conceptually and empirically. It also illustrates how researchers within the field might reimagine and reinvigorate policy research on ESE, and how working with researchers from other fields who offer different perspectives, ideas and expertise might aid the cross-fertilisation of a complex terrain of ideas, policy and practice. In so doing, we hope the accompanying VSI inspires renewed interest into the (at times, fickle) relationship between ESE, and the dual worlds of possibility and tension that take place both within, and surrounding, their fields of policy and research.

Why a VSI about environmental and sustainability education policy research?

Linking particular concepts of environment and sustainability with key themes in educational policy remains a heavily contested practice. Whether it is carried out in relation to curriculum and pedagogy in schools or the public realm (Reid 2015), education on its own appears to create more than enough debate (Ozga 2007), while adding environmental perspectives and then the troublesome idea of sustainability (as with the Sustainable Development Goals), has made for neither clear waters nor smooth sailing, particularly in policy circles.

Practitioners, policy actors and researchers working with and across diverse levels of decision-making, of course, continue to face various shifts and combinations of intention, practice and claims as to what counts as ‘useful knowledge’. Are they each to show awareness of research findings, for example? Or that they ‘accept’ them? Work out how they are locally applicable? Or expect that they are something they can act on, adopt or adhere to, for example? Keeping up, let alone knowing what to expect is on the horizon in policy, research and practice remains a perennial challenge (Nutley, Walter, and Davies 2007). So we might wonder, is there a way out of this, or even beyond, for all concerned? Must practitioners, policymakers and researchers, for example, remain locked in battle on these topics – be that through offensives, rear-guard actions, guerrilla tactics, and so on (Lingard 2013) – particularly given such a dynamic terrain for, and populace working in, environmental and sustainability education (ESE) policy, practice and their research?

The broad purpose behind this virtual special issue (VSI) is to press these concerns well beyond any sense of existential angst let alone rhetorical flourish. Our aim in preparing it has been to consider how such challenges might be illustrated, addressed, problematized and possibly transcended, by considering examples drawn from the last two decades of ESE policy research found within Environmental Education Research.

First, the contributions to the VSI illustrate how researchers have understood and dealt with policy issues in relation to the field, both conceptually and empirically. These illustrate a range of possible stances of researchers to influencing public policy, such as those described by Nutley, Walter, and Davies (2007, 11–12), as the consensual, contentious, and paradigm-challenging. An important (and of course, debated) argument within ESE research illustrates these distinctions well. It concerns whether the systemic and holistic demands associated with key environment and sustainability systems concepts can, do or should (not) comprise an isolated field of concern, particularly when it comes to education, or is some other form, configuration or relation to the wider world required, if not avoided to address these matters well?

In practical terms, such as in schools, this translates to questions such as: should ESE be hidden in corners of existing curricula, if not dusted down for special events or celebrations, for example, an Environment Day or Sustainability Festival, particularly so that it only ever amounts to the ‘greenwashing’ of education? Or, it is argued, mustn’t ESE become (if not remain) core throughout curricula in general – and an education more generously conceived – so that the ‘grand challenges’ of the world can actually be addressed by society and by those wider social movements seeking to shape the focus and sense of what education is, and what it means to be educated in these times (Sund and Öhman 2014)?

Second, and relatedly, any claims to bold and vital ideas hitched to associated priorities in policy-making and practice cannot be dealt with, or researched, solely from inside one field alone. This is because any complex social problem always demands that those wider deliberative frames that create and position the notion of a field are engaged too, particularly if communities of research, policy and practice are to be able to pursue, test and refine the importance of the arguments advanced therein (Saunders 2007). With such a perspective, the environmental and sustainability and education, as well as their core concepts and contentions, can be seen to be not significantly different in importance to those of other fields made familiar through a shared labelling as ‘adjectival educations’. Here, education as a public good, and thus as a way of wanting something for others – for example, health, justice, welfare, opportunity – demands explicit public policy and justification. It simply can’t rely on ‘policy fiat’ or ‘policy borrowing’ to have traction. Equally, in recognising that processes of contextualisation, decontextualisation and recontextualisation are at work here too, to differing degrees, Lingard (2013, 118), relaying the words of Orland (2009, 115), notes:

we can also see that research is and perhaps can only ever be one contributing factor for shaping education policy. … ‘Even the most compelling and relevant research findings may fail to penetrate the policymaking process and, where research influences are manifest, their contributions are likely to be both indirect and incremental’.

What is at stake, it would appear, in such contexts and spheres for policy-making and its practice implications, is how to shape, govern, direct, and critique activities and actions in a contested space for education, be that for ESE or other matters of concern. This is because such spaces are always (to a certain extent) limited, contingent and fragile, particularly because of being subjected to various political forces at play in the ‘(eco)culture wars’ of education – that is, understood as referring to the economic and ecological (Connolly 2013). Thus compelling critiques of the status quo about education, environment and sustainability also demand engagement with neighbouring, and often more powerful fields and demands on what should constitute educational priorities, and education itself (e.g. subjects, disciplines, fields of experience, and so forth). And in this, most crucially, a rich and critical research field is argued to be needed, to help develop, sustain, challenge and innovate it (see McKenzie, Bieler, and McNeil 2015). Why? Because it is simply naïve to believe that ESE research is to be used in a simple, linear and direct application, such that specific findings get channelled to a specific policy or practice, particularly when each component can act in parallel and interact dynamically, depending on the context and history of policy/innovation to hand.

So third, by way of a VSI, we use its contributions, introductions and editorial to trace how ESE researchers have actually dealt with trends, complexities and issues in the policy-practice-research nexus through specific examples drawn from the back catalogue and forthcoming contributions of the journal (e.g. Aikens, McKenzie, and Vaughter, forthcoming). There is a classic distinction to be recognised here in such papers: between research of/for policy (Gordon, Lewis, and Young 1977), and thus between the ends-in-view that contrast enlightenment with engineering.

While some have argued these are a continuum or can be combined, such as in the work of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ (see Kingdon (1984) and Ball and Exley (2010) – on how individuals might advocate certain policy ideas or proposals and play a key role in bringing research to policy-making by championing a set of findings that support their position), we note there has been little traction with such notions in this research field until recently, looking as it does, to innovate what it researches, theoretically and empirically.

However, a strong case can be advanced that during the UN Decade of ESD, Professors Arjen Wals, John Fien, Chuck Hopkins and Daniella Tilbury, each dallied with such entrepreneurial roles and opportunities in their own ways. As a topic ripe for further inquiry then, we will return to this in the editorial (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2015.1108393) when raising questions about the changing roles, responsibilities and careers of researchers, scholars, academics and ‘policy workers’ in this field. But before then, as Weiss (1999) has noted, interests, ideology, information, and institutions work as the key factors in shaping public policy and the use of research within this process. The policy actors here may include academics and researchers (as ‘policy entrepreneurs’ – as with the aforementioned professors in education), and from other fields. With the UN Decade, for example, information about the ‘state of the earth’ had been previously used to shape interests and ideologies about development at UN conferences in Stockholm, Rio and Johannesburg. It also appears in their agendas aimed at policy makers, with these being designed to change the practices and cultures of institutions, including those of education. Key policy mechanisms here included, Chapter 36 of Agenda 21, and establishing a UN Decade of ESD to continue efforts to re-orient teaching and teacher education towards sustainability, with an associated policy guidance, research and evaluation framework to support that.

Nutley, Walter, and Davies (2007, 108–109) regard such instances as ripe for research, given they are typical of attempts by policy entrepreneurs (and particularly researchers) to ‘soften up’ the system to their own ideas and proposals, and to act as brokers, negotiating amongst key stakeholders, on their own terms, or as part of research organisation (e.g. university or academic network), think tank, or peak body’s research wing, for example, an environmental education association or special interest group. These channels are manifold, direct or indirect and demonstrated in several of the papers put together in this VSI (e.g. Blewitt 2005; Læssøe, Feinstein, and Blum 2013). In this, researchers (sometimes acting as policy entrepreneurs) draw on personal contacts and interactions to shape perceptions and understandings of policy production and critique, using social media, conferences and campaigns to try to influence policy, practice or change (such as that allied to the 2015 World Environmental Education Congress). Or they might even dust off old studies to show their continued relevance to a contemporary problem or possible solution to a policy, political impasse or priority …

Our expectation then, rather self-consciously, is that in providing examples and commentary on such matters, the VSI and its editorial inspires renewed interest into the (at times, fickle) relationship between ESE and the dual worlds of possibility and tension that take place both within, and surrounding, their fields of policy and research. We also trust that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Editorial introduction
• 1. The roots and routes of environmental and sustainability education policy research
• 2. A Case Study of Dilemmas and Tensions: the writing and consultation process involved in developing a national guideline document for environmental education
• 3. Science: an unreliable friend to environmental education?
• 4. On the need to repoliticise environmental and sustainability education: rethinking the postpolitical consensus
• 5. Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times
• 6. The Quest for Holism in Education for Sustainable Development
• 7. Tensions and transitions in policy discourse: recontextualizing a decontextualized EE/ESD debate
• 8. Unsettling orthodoxies: education for the environment/for sustainability
• 9. Education for sustainable development (ESD): the turn away from ‘environment’ in environmental education?
• 10. Environmental Literacy: functional, cultural, critical. The case of the SCAA guidelines
• 11. Education for Sustainable Development, governmentality and Learning to Last
• 12. The action competence approach and the ‘new’ discourses of education for sustainable development, competence and quality criteria
• 13. Pluralism in practice – experiences from Swedish evaluation, school development and research
• 14. Environmental education policy research – challenges and ways research might cope with them
• 15. Taking stock of the UN Decade of education for sustainable development: the policy-making process in Flanders
• 16. Globalisation and education for sustainable development: exploring the global in motion
• 17. Environmental and sustainability education policy research: a systematic review of methodological and thematic trends
• Index