Conference Agenda

The poly-crises of today, their rising social-ecological injustices and contamination of fundamental life conditions, reveal profound limitations in liberal democratic models (Eckersley, 2020) and other contemporary regimes that harm and marginalise ecological interdependence and more-than-human relations (Brückner & Paulsen, 2026). With the eco-democratic concern, we seek to reimagine democratic and political practices, both as a way of life and a form of government, in ways that recognise reciprocity, shared flourishing, and ecological responsibility. Inspired by emerging work (Blenkinsop & Wilhelmsson, 2025) and building on conversations initiated at the 2025 international symposium on eco-democracy, this panel aims to generatively elaborate on eco-democracy as an educational project. We creatively explore eco-democracy in diverse ways in relation to education, while examining and conceptualising how democratic life, knowledge, and practice might shift and be otherwise enacted when the more-than-human is acknowledged as an educative and political participant.

The panel seeks to initiate a critical discussion about how eco-democracy may change ESE research, its scope, function, and methods, and shed light on transformative educational possibilities that support mutually beneficial flourishing. To do this, the panel turns to the double movement of democratising ecology and ecologising democracy as a generative but unsettled educational problematic. What might it mean, in practice and in theory, to democratise ecological life by expanding who participates in deciding shared socio-ecological futures, while simultaneously ecologising democratic life by reworking who or what can count as political participants?

We approach environmental education as a key site for diving into these questions together as entangled learning or living processes of world-making, subject formation, and relational becoming, and discuss what pedagogical forms, micro-methods, human and more-than-human encounters, and modes of eco-literacy might initiate such transformations. How do these processes inevitably encounter ethical tensions with dominant anthropocentric, colonial, patriarchal, and scenic-humanist world understandings? Further, if democracy is about protecting the commons, what might it mean to include the interests of all species and all people (Shiva, 2005)? This also highlights the need to discuss how the concept of eco-democracy accommodates radical asymmetries of power and conflicts of interest. The panel will open ontological, epistemological, ethical, political, and methodological aspects, perspectives, obstacles, and implications of eco-democracy in education, addressing these four key themes and questions:

1. What might it mean, educationally and politically, to democratise ecology by expanding who participates in co-deciding the ecology of life, when more-than-human actors and marginalised voices are recognised as co-participants in educational decision-making, and how can education navigate the tensions this generates with prevailing life-limiting power structures? This challenge existing approaches to democracy and citizenship education and highlights tensions between democracy as a life form and as a form of government.

2. What might it mean, educationally and politically, to ecologise democracy by expanding who or what can count as political participants and relations, and how can eco-democratic values and practices be conceptualised within educational settings while navigating tensions with dominant anthropocentric and institutionally entrenched world understandings that question the relevance, desirability, political priority, and even the meaningful possibility of more-than-human participation?

3. How can micro-methods and minor pedagogical experiences support and sustain the double movement between democratising ecology and ecologising democracy without imposing fixing it in advance? How can education and research navigate the tensions this generates with prevailing school norms, curriculum regimes, and common human-centred research methodologies?

4. How can education contribute to the emergence of a life-friendly people capable of sustaining eco-democracy, and how might eco-democracy itself become a transformative educational force when people are not necessarily oriented toward the flourishing of life, and may even act against it?