Conference Agenda

This session will focus on the ways that educational research in the field of environmental sustainability can engage with policy. In today’s geopolitical turmoil, international institutions, including the United Nations and UNESCO, are under severe pressure. Influential is the position of the current United States administration, having withdrawn the nation from several UN-related bodies, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the International Criminal Court, and UNESCO. These institutions all encourage multilateral cooperation, solidarity and commitment between people and nations. Education is a vital aspect of such initiatives, including UNESCO’s global education policies, where the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, 1972, is often conceived of as a starting point (Macintyre, Tilbury, and Wals, 2025).

One way to respond to this situation as a research network within Environmental and Sustainability Education is to give the policy field, often implicitly premised and taken for granted (Rickinson and McKenzie, 2021), due attention. This is the central interest of this session. We adopt a historical framing, noting that it is fifty years since environmental education was established as a global education policy, with consequences for national policies and curricula around the world and for environmental education as a research field.

Education policy is messy, blurred, contentious and most of all normative. The normativity is distinctly expressed in Rizvi and Lingard’s (2010) designation of education policy as the authoritarian allocation of values (p.11), following David Easton’s (1965) famous definition of political systems. There are numerous research approaches to ESE policy. Van Poeck, Lysgaard, and Reid (2016) particularly emphasize the critical role of the researcher, “we want to make out a case for letting ESE researchers be researchers instead of forcing them to take up the role of an expert” (p. 315). The relationship can also be described as an interface between research and policy, addressing how researchers and policymakers are constructively involved in evaluating policy (Stratford & Wals, 2020) and in developing policy (Rickinson & McKenzie, 2021).

The purpose of this session is, from a research perspective, to let reading the fifty-year-old documents anew prompt a dialogue on possible directions for environmental and sustainability education research today. We call these readings ‘critical appreciations’, focusing on both significant achievements and limitations. In this session, foundational ESE policy from the 70s (Dorn, 2020) serves as an entry point for the discussion, namely the Belgrade Charter (UNESCO; 1975) and the Tbilisi Declaration from the first intergovernmental environmental education conference in 1977 (Payne, 2022; Scott, 2009; UNEP, 1978). To kick start this dialogue, the panellists, together with members of the NW30, will be invited to a digital workshop in May 2026. In the online workshop, this foundational ESE policy from the 70s forms a starting point for discussing the interface between research and policy today, addressing challenges, tensions, and possibilities. The session in Tampere will begin by introducing this dialogue, with contributions from all panellists, lasting 30 minutes, followed by a 45-minute participatory workshop that opens the discussion to the audience.

A specific background for this session is the opening event at ECER 2025 in Belgrade, organised by NW30 Environmental and Sustainability Research, focusing on the Belgrade Charter. Alan Reid, the editor of Environmental Education Research, together with Martha Monroe, provided an orientation note with a historical background for the Belgrade Charter and also gathered responses from experienced researchers within the field. The presentations from this event were documented digitally and artistically. These documentations will be included in the panel, alongside a discussion of the potential for art to engage in critical appreciation, and what this might look like at the policy-practice nexus.