Conference Agenda

The current challenges of our time of multiple crises, including ecological destruction, climate justice, socioeconomic inequality, and geopolitical instability, are a central issue tackled by practitioners of environmental and sustainability education (ESE). In particular, educators need the competencies to create resilient and competent learning spaces in which they and their learners experience a resonance that enables learning that will enable them to face the challenges of the multiple crises and develop pedagogical professional identities to do so (Stein, 2019).

In the context of teacher training, this means that educators who educate prospective teachers, must position ourselves in such a way that we ourselves are and remain resilient. It also means that learners (and teachers alike) require to learn new ways of teaching and learning; ways that enable them to unlearn those practices that have contribute to education as “business as usual” (Huckle & Wals, 2015). Rather, ESE has the potential to engage learners with the abilities and the curiosity to transgress existing constraints in order to equip themselves and their future students with the ability to contribute to developing a more just and sustainable society (Kulundu et al., 2020; Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2015; Macintyre & Chaves, 2017). For us as teachers it also means that in our teaching we need to create safe enough spaces (Singer-Brodowski et al., 2022) in which learners, the teachers-to-be, may explore the causes of the crisis and how they, as future educators, can create such spaces themselves.

Education in the context of the poly-crisis cannot be conceived without its context of existing global inequalities (Castro Varela & Heinemann, 2016; Lotz-Sisitka, 2025). ESE for teacher training therefore needs to address the colonial continuities that shape the current system. This enables both teachers and learners to reflect on their own positionality in the current system, thus opening up new possibilities. Written from the perspective of a teacher educator based in the Global North, future teachers require this knowledge and understanding of the poly-crisis so they can open up learning spaces with their learners that aim at questioning existing power structures, thus enabling learners to contribute to societal transformations towards a more just and sustainable world (Sund & Pashby, 2020).

One main sphere of action is addressing colonial continuities as central patterns in our daily lives, including the educational system. An applied teaching tool for this is the pedagogy of ethical global issues (EGIP) (Pashby & Sund, 2022), based on Andreotti’s decolonial pedagogy of Critical Global Citizenship Education CGCE) (Andreotti, 2012, 2016).

The paper presents insights from a course for pre-service primary teachers at a German university who engaged with global inequalities from a decolonial perspective with the aim of exploring together with the how decolonial, justice-oriented approaches can inform the aims, knowledges, methodologies, and practices of ESE in primary schooling. The study responds to Network 30’s special call by examining how pre-service teachers can be supported to engage critically and ethically with global–local environmental issues and their uneven impacts.

Research questions

• How can pre-service primary teachers be equipped with insights and tools to address global inequalities through a decolonial lens?
• What shifts occur in teachers’ aims, knowledges, methodologies, and classroom practices when using a decolonial perspective such as EGIP (Pashby & Sund, 2022) in their daily teaching routine?
• How does continuous engagement with global inequalities from a decolonial perspective in teacher training affect the teacher-trainer-as-researcher and how can these insights be used to further improve teacher training within a decolonial ESE context?

Across Europe and internationally, higher education institutions are increasingly tasked with responding to the climate crisis while also preparing graduates to navigate a world marked by deep uncertainty, inequality and compounding crises (Stein et al., 2025). Sustainability education has expanded rapidly within business and finance programmes, reflecting growing recognition that economic systems, financial markets and corporate decision-making play a central role in shaping socio-environmental outcomes (Irwin et al., 2024). Yet much sustainability teaching in these disciplines continues to be framed through market-oriented and dominant Western paradigms that risk reproducing the very conditions of unsustainability they seek to address (Patara & Agyeman, 2025). In a time of poly-crisis characterised by climate change, geopolitical instability and social inequality, such approaches risk narrowing how sustainability is understood, whose knowledge is valued, and what forms of action are imagined as possible (Tikly, 2023).

This paper argues that decolonising sustainability education within business and finance constitutes a critical intervention for Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) more broadly. Rather than treating sustainability as a neutral set of competencies or tools, the study explores how student–staff co-creation can reframe sustainability education as a space for plural knowledges, ethical reflection and intercultural dialogue within higher education. It responds to growing calls within ESE research to examine not only what knowledge is taught, but how knowledge is produced, legitimised and mobilised under conditions of systemic crisis.
The study is grounded in a curriculum innovation project at a UK Russell Group university with a strong international student cohort. It investigates how co-created sustainability curricula within business and finance programmes can engage the cognitive, social and behavioural dimensions of learning, as articulated within Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2023). Students from diverse cultural and national backgrounds are positioned as co-researchers and co-designers, contributing lived experiences and cultural perspectives that challenge dominant sustainability narratives and foreground questions of justice, responsibility and agency.
The central research question guiding this paper is:
How can decolonising, student-led approaches to sustainability education in business and finance expand the forms of knowledge, learning practices and agency recognised within ESE in a time of poly-crisis?

The study also asks:

1. What dominant assumptions about sustainability knowledge are embedded within existing business and finance curricula?
2. How can co-creation with students challenge technocratic and Eurocentric framings of sustainability?
3. What are the implications of decolonising sustainability education for ESE research, policy and practice across European and international contexts?

Conceptually, the paper draws on decolonial theory, critical sustainability education, and participatory pedagogies (Lotz-Sisitka, 2017; Kamasak et al., 2025). These perspectives are combined to examine how sustainability education can move beyond instrumental and competence-based approaches towards relational, reflexive and justice-oriented forms of learning. The European and international dimension of the study is reflected in its diverse student body, its engagement with global sustainability challenges, and its interrogation of how Western-centric sustainability frameworks travel across cultural and geopolitical contexts.

By focusing on business and finance education as a revealing and influential case, the paper contributes to wider debates within ESE regarding the purposes of sustainability education, the knowledges it legitimises, and the realistic contributions higher education can make to societal transformation within and beyond institutional boundaries.

This paper shares findings from a four-year participatory research project, A Decolonial Approach to Teaching Global Justice Issues (DecoPrax, 2022–2026) involving a group of upper secondary school teachers interested in exploring critical and decolonial approaches to education. Based on focus groups with the teachers the research team developed a conceptual framework drawing on post-, de-, and anti-colonial theory and reflexive pedagogy. Through workshops and school visits, the research considered to what extent and how these concepts supported teachers’ engagement with global justice issues, with a particular focus on climate change. This paper will share two key findings from an analysis of data sets.

Decolonial theory has increasingly been drawn upon in ESE over the past decade as climate change has moved from a primarily scientific concern to an existential, ethical, and political challenge, experienced globally through extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and the displacement of vulnerable populations (Sultana, 2025). Recent IPCC reports explicitly identify colonialism as both a historical and ongoing driver of climate change, highlighting how colonial patterns of extraction and inequality continue to heighten vulnerability among Indigenous Peoples and marginalised communities (IPCC, 2023). These insights underscore the importance of integrating coloniality-based critiques into both ESE and global citizenship education (GCE). In settler-colonial contexts there have been strong engagement with indigenous experiences and knowledges in relation to understanding and responding to climate change and related crises (see McKenzie et al., 2023). However, arguably this is a more recent but growing turn (Eriksen et al., 2024) in the Nordic contexts where pedagogical approaches have historically emphasised technical solutions and action competence development over structural analysis and reflexive approaches (Sund & Öhman, 2025).

Centring coloniality involves confronting how Western modernity, rooted in centuries of European colonial expansion, continues to shape educational treatments of global justice issues such as climate change (Stein et al., 2024). Gandolfi (2024) describes this as making visible the socio-political and environmental injustices produced by historical and contemporary forms of (neo)colonial extractivism. This conceptual framing is increasingly relevant in Nordic contexts, where scholars have highlighted how colonial assumptions continue to inform global education (Pashby et al., 2023; Mikander et al., 2026). There has been a slow but rising uptick in calls for education research to take up coloniality in the Nordic countries. A recent editorial for a special issue on this topic (Eriksen et al., 2024) recognised growing calls for education research to confront denials of entanglements with colonialism evident in colour-blind approaches the disavow race and racism in Nordic education at all levels (Fylkesnes et al., 2024). Particular attention has been given to citizenship education (Eriksen & Stein, 2022), global citizenship education (Mikander et al., 2026), and education for sustainable development (Eriksen, 2018). A generative space has been connecting wider scholarship on decolonial engagements with global citizenship education in global North contexts (e.g. Machado de Oliveira, 2021) with environmental and sustainability education (e.g. Sund & Öhman, 2025).

To explore more ethical ways of engaging with colonial legacies and structural inequalities in education and to support teachers’ work in classrooms, we initiated the DecoPrax project with a group of highly skilled teachers in Sweden. In this paper, we look specifically at what the data suggest about the extent to which the concepts supported teachers to deeply consider the challenges and opportunities of teaching about climate change, with a particular focus on relationality, responsibility, and engagement.

This paper takes its starting point in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis and suggests broadening the repertoire of existing ESE-pedagogies. To illustrate Castoriadis’ conceptual landscape and its potential for ESE, it discusses the notion of Nordic exceptionalism.

The concept of Nordic exceptionalism denotes a picture of the Nordic countries as globally unique in their manifestation and defense of values such as solidarity, equality, universal welfare, and, not least, sustainability (Körber & Volquardsen, 2023). This picture is also prevalent in Nordic education. It springs from a range of studies (e.g. Martela et al., 2020) and, particularly in relation to sustainability, is part of broader Nordic branding efforts (Buns & Hinde, 2023). Still, this picture of the Nordics as exceptional is contested (Eriksen & and Stein, 2022; Körber & Volquardsen, 2023). For one, the Nordic welfare states rely on industries that drive nature degradation and climate change, threaten animal welfare, and uphold inequalities both in the region and abroad. Norway, where I am situated, is a case in point. Despite its climate commitments, Norway continues to expand oil exploration beyond what is sustainable under the Paris Agreement (OCI, 2024). Its salmon farming industry—second to oil—has raised environmental and social concerns, including those of animal welfare, land conflicts, and biodiversity loss (Future in our hands & Rainforest Foundation Norway, 2018).

The problem with the notion of Nordic exceptionalism is not only one of representing the Nordic countries adequately or neglecting their contribution to ecological crises and prevailing inequalities. The notion of Nordic exceptionalism is problematic also because it poses a challenge to education and its democratic purpose, one that is well illuminated by Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis (1993) argued that all societies make their own laws and thereby limit themselves in order to function. In what he calls autonomous societies, the closure through societal institution is not final and should be subject to continuous questioning: Are these laws just? What needs to we have? What life do we want? In their conscious and democratic reinstitution such societies are self-reflexive. Crucially, all institutions of society are to support this process of self-reflexivity, and so are, hence, educational institutions.

The picture of the Nordics as exceptional is problematic, then, because it undermines the need for societal renewal. It facilitates the closure of the instituted society and thereby depoliticizes its institution. Not least, it obstructs education’s potential of reflexivity, especially where notions of Nordic exceptionalism enter into and are maintained in educational arenas.

Castoriadis wrote extensively about social imaginaries and the imaginative capacities of humans. While individuals always are socialized into their societies as an inevitable part of becoming a self and making sense of the world, the psyche similarly creates a constant imaginary overflow and moves beyond the instituted (Castoriadis, 1997). Fostering the social imagination, Castoriadis argued, is a vital task in an autonomous society.

What does Castoriadis add in this context of Nordic exceptionalism? Established pedagogies such as the pluralist tradition (Tryggvason et al., 2023) or the action competence approach (Mogensen & Schnack, 2010) evolve around societal problems which are to be explored or resolved by students. These approaches tend to favor reformative perspectives and risk to act within and support dominant imaginaries. Castoriadis’ philosophy puts the social imaginary center stage and advocates for a more direct engagement with it. As such, it opens for a transgressive approach without falling into a progressive paradigm.