Environmental and Sustainability Education Policy ― International Trends, Priorities and Challenges

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.

Katrien Van Poeck is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University's Centre for Sustainable Development. She conducts and supervises research projects on experiential learning in the context of urban sustainability transitions and on sustainability in higher education, and coordinates the international research networks SEDwise ('Sustainability Education – Teaching and learning in the face of wicked socio-ecological problems') and 'Public pedagogy and sustainability challenges'. Empirically and theoretically examining education's role in building a more sustainable world, she aims to contribute to progressing scholarship on the relation between educative and political spaces.

Jonas A. Lysgaard is Associate Professor in the Danish School of Education at Aarhus University, Denmark. He conducts research on environmental and sustainability education that draws on theoretical perspectives inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary perspectives on materiality. His recent studies include work on educational ideals and philosophies of education, nature and realism as these apply to climate change, sustainable schools initiatives and health promotion.

Alan Reid is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. He is the editor of the research journal, Environmental Education Research. He conducts a range of studies focused on teachers’ thinking and practice in environmental and sustainability education, and associated traditions, capacities and issues in theory, research and practice. He is particularly interested in the history and possible future of the field.