Neoliberalism and Environmental Education

Joseph Henderson, David Hursh, David Greenwood

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138229570
• eBook ISBN: 9781315388762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This timely book situates environmental education within and against neoliberalism, the dominant economic, political, and cultural ideology impacting both education and the environment. Proponents of neoliberalism imagine and enact a world where the primary role of the state is to promote capital markets, and where citizens are defined as autonomous entrepreneurs who are to fulfill their needs via competition with, and surveillance of, others.

These ideas interact with environmental issues in a number of ways and Neoliberalism and Environmental Education engages this interplay with chapters on how neoliberal ideas and actions shape environmental education in formal, informal and community contexts. International contributors consider these interactions in agriculture and gardening, state policy enactments, environmental science classrooms, ecoprisons, and in professional management and educational accountability programs. The collection invites readers to reexamine how economic policy and politics shape the cultural enactment of environmental education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times

Marcia McKenzie^a, Andrew Bieler^b and Rebecca McNeil^c

^aDepartment of Educational Foundations, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada; ^bCollege of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada; ^cIndependent consultant, Vancouver, BC, Canada

This paper is concerned with the twinning of sustainability with priorities of economic neoliberalization in education, and in particular via the mobility or diffusion of education policy. We discuss the literature on policy mobility as well as overview concerns regarding neoliberalism and education. The paper brings these analyses to bear in considering the uptake of sustainability in education policy. We ask to what extent sustainability as a vehicular idea may be twinning with processes of neoliberalization in education policy in ways that may undermine aspirations of, and action on, environmental sustainability. Toward the end of the paper, we draw on data from an empirical study to help elucidate how the analytic frames of policy mobility can inform our analyses of the potential concerns and possibilities of sustainability as a vehicular idea. In particular, we investigate how sustainability and related language have been adopted in the policies of Canadian post-secondary education institutions over time. The paper closes by suggesting the potential implications of the proceeding analyses for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers concerned with sustainability in education policy.

This paper is informed by trajectories of work in critical policy scholarship or policy sociology in education (e.g. Ball 1994, 1997; Dale 1999; Ozga 2000; Rizvi and Lingard 2010), as well as by interdisciplinary research on policy diffusion and transfer, and in particular, policy mobility (e.g. Peck and Theodore 2010a; Peck 2011a; Temenos and McCann 2013). We explore the shifts in theoretical perspective and methodological orientation that are required to analyze neoliberalism and sustainability as ‘vehicular ideas’ (Temenos and McCann 2012) and follow the uptake and mobility of policy concerned with sustainability¹ in Canadian post-secondary education institutions.

Our understanding of policy includes policy texts, but also broadly considers the contexts and consequences influencing their development and enactment. As Lingard and Ozga (2007) suggest, a process/text definition of educational policy ‘indicates the politics involved in the production and implementation of a policy and in the actual purposes and language of the policy text’ (2). We are concerned with these politics and their potentially productive and/or constraining effects on how sustainability is being conceived and mobilized in and through educational policy.

In this paper, we focus particularly on factors that may be influencing where and how sustainability is being taken up in post-secondary education policy, including in relation to processes of neoliberalization. We appreciate the cautions made against uses of ‘neoliberalism’ as a ‘blunt, omnibus category’ that can ‘reproduce a narrowed analytical and political gaze;’ as well as the arguments for nonetheless considering its distinctive hegemonic aspects across diverse settings and variations (Peck 2013, 17, 10). Analyses of the impacts of neoliberalization on education policy within specific locations and across sites have been ongoing over the past several decades (e.g. Ball 1994, 1998, 2013; Olssen and Peters 2005), with many concerned about ‘the increasing colonization of educational policy by economic policy imperatives,’ including neoliberalism (Ball 1998, 122).

Some researchers have also examined the shift to the language of ‘sustainable development’ or ‘sustainability’ in relation to economic policy priorities. For example, While, Jonas, and Gibbs (2004) have suggested the uptake of this lexicon in policy can provide a ‘sustainability fix,’ or in other words, support an ‘organization of economic interests, institutional capacities, and political positions that allows development to proceed despite economic and ecological crises and in the face of growing popular concerns about the state of the environment’ (Temenos and McCann 2012, 4). There seems little doubt that sustainability is a ‘vehicular idea’ (McLennan 2004; Temenos and McCann 2012) or a ‘floating signifier’ (Gonzalez-Gaudiano and Nidioa Buenfil-Burgos 2009), which can be taken up in different ways toward various means. Vehicular ideas are distinguished by their hermeneutic and contextual flexibility, by their ability to balance between discursive exclusivity and vague open-endedness, by their robust capacity to reabsorb opposition, evolve with the times, and move across sites (McLennan 2004, 488–489), which, more cynically, can serve to propel or greenwash economic interests. More optimistically, the terminology of sustainability can be powerful because of its ability to allow for coalition building and for ‘moving things on’ (Temenos and McCann 2012). The analysis of sustainability as a ‘vehicular idea’ requires consideration of both sides of this potentiality, which aligns with calls for both typological, observational analysis of such vehicular notions and attention to their normative characteristics (McLennan 2004, 494). For example, we can observe the uptake and use of various types of sustainability discourse, such as the three pillars definition, but we should not lose sight of the norms and ideologies that may be articulated with various types in particular policy-making contexts.

We bring these trajectories together in our concerns with the pairing of sustainability with priorities of economic neoliberalization in education, and in particular via the mobility or diffusion of education policy. We are interested in shifts from language of ‘environment’ to ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’ over the past several decades and explore the concerns and possibilities of the mobility of these terms and their associated meanings in education policy. We ask to what extent sustainability as a vehicular idea may be twinning with processes of neoliberalization in educational policy in ways that may undermine aspirations of, and action on, environmental sustainability. In doing so, we build on earlier work that has begun to examine the relationships among sustainability, neoliberalization, policy mobility, and education (e.g. Jickling and Wals 2008; Hursh and Henderson 2011; McKenzie 2012; Sylvestre, McNeil, and Wright 2013). Toward the end of the paper, we draw on data from an in progress empirical study to help elucidate how the analytic frames of policy mobility can inform our analyses of the potential concerns and possibilities of sustainability as a vehicular idea. In particular, we investigate how sustainability and related language have been adopted in the policies of Canadian post-secondary education institutions over time. The paper closes by suggesting the potential implications of the proceeding analyses for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers concerned with sustainability in education policy. We first begin with a discussion of sustainability as a ‘vehicular idea’ in relation to the developing literature on policy mobility.

The mobility turn and policy research

‘It sometimes seems as if all the world is on the move’ (Urry 2007, 3). The movement of vehicular ideas, like Richard Florida’s creative city model or municipal sustainability fixes (Peck 2012; Temenos and McCann 2012), can be interrogated through the lens of the mobility turn in the social sciences and humanities. This ‘turn’ focuses on the immense scale of movement of objects, people, and ideas across the globe. It takes a stance that embraces epistemological exchange across disciplines and proposes a transformation of the social sciences away from static paradigms, where roots are favored at the expense of routes, in order to explore expanded metaphors of movement (Cresswell 2006; Frello 2008; Urry 2007). ‘The term “mobilities” refers not just to movement but to this broader project of establishing a “movement-driven” social science in which movement … as well as voluntary/temporary immobilities, practices of dwelling and “nomadic” place-making are all viewed as constitutive of economic, social and political relations’ (Buscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011, 4). This project seeks to explain the complex relationships between mobilities, moorings (like airports or conference centers), spatial scales, and practices of place-making, in order to describe how social worlds, like sustainability policy-making, are in part ‘made in and through movement’ (Buscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011, 13). This paradigm marks a shift away from the historical focus of social scientific research on face-to-face relationships within spatially propinquitous communities, and toward an analysis of the multiple, the distributed, the fleeting, and the complex interdependencies between corporeal, communicative, and physical travel that variously shape what we have come to call ‘globalization’ (Buscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011). This turn is less defined by any overarching theoretical orientation than by a renewed empirical sensitivity to the movement of materials and ideas. This sensitivity attends not only to the global flow of vehicular ideas like ‘sustainability,’ but also to the flow of these ideas within and across national, regional, or local contexts.

This mobility turn is currently informing debates in critical policy research. The study of policy mobility and mutation is a relatively recent development in this field, partly building out of earlier scholarship in political science on policy diffusion and transfer. Providing an overview of various stages of the diffusion and transfer literature from the 1960s and onwards, Peck (2011a) suggests aspects of these literatures that continue to be relevant and useful in policy analysis and those which appear to have become outdated in more recent contexts of globalized networks of travel and technology. Table 1 provides an overview of differences identified by Peck (2011a) between the transfer–diffusion literatures and those developing, so far mainly within urban and economic geography, under the label of policy mobilities.

Table 1 Policy transfer vs. policy mobilities (adapted from Peck 2011a, 775).

	Policy transfer	Policy mobilities
Theoretical scale	Methodological nationalism	Mobility turn: global flow of policy across nations, regions, and places
Origins	Disciplinary: political science	Transdisciplinary: geography, political science, sociology, urban planning, and expanding, i.e. environmental education research
Epistemology	Positivist/rationalist	Postpositivist/constructivist
Privileged object	‘Successful’ transfers	Policies in motion/interconnection: continuous transformation and mutation
Social action	Instrumental: bounded rationality	Strategic: embedded calculation
Dynamic	Frustrated replication of best (or better) practices	Contradictory reproduction of connected but unevenly developing policy regimes
Spatiality	Sequential diffusion	Relational connection
Mode of explanation	Reification of essentialized design features	Contextually sensitive analysis of emergent capacities
Politics of knowledge	Abstracts from politics of knowledge and practice	Problematizes politics of knowledge and practice

Across these approaches, the interest is on how policies are instituted (i) over time, and (ii) over space, and (iii) which factors may be influencing temporal and spatial trends. Policy transfer–diffusion literatures have been concerned with how policy developed in one region or nation spreads to other locations over time, outlining geographic clustering (being influenced by one’s neighbors) and networks (being influenced by the networks one participates in) as factors in the diffusion of a policy from its location of origin to other locations (Dale 1999; Weyland 2005). Temporally, diffusion has been suggested to occur on a bell curve, beginning with an innovation and slow uptake until policy uptake surges in popularity and eventually tapers off. The phase at which a government or institution may adopt a policy – either as an early adopter, within the peak of its popularity, or as a laggard – is suggested by the diffusion literature to be related to why the policy was adopted, or its mechanisms of uptake.

While a range of discussions of mechanisms of uptake exist in the transfer–diffusion literatures, a predominant approach is to consider the four classifications such a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Preface
• Introduction: Environmental education in a neoliberal climate
• 1. Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times
• 2. Nature is a nice place to save but I wouldn’t want to live there: environmental education and the ecotourist gaze
• 3. Entrepreneurial endeavors: (re)producing neoliberalization through urban agriculture youth programming in Brooklyn, New York
• 4. Sustainability science and education in the neoliberal ecoprison
• 5. Refusing to settle for pigeons and parks: urban environmental education in the age of neoliberalism
• 6. Supporting youth to develop environmental citizenship within/against a neoliberal context
• 7. Negotiating managerialism: professional recognition and teachers of sustainable development education
• 8. Neoliberalism, new public management and the sustainable development agenda of higher education: history, contradictions and synergies
• 9. The promise and peril of the state in neoliberal times: implications for the critical environmental education movement in Brazil
• 10. Towards a political ecology of education: the educational politics of scale in southern Pará, Brazil
• 11. Against neoliberal pedagogies of plants and people: mapping actor networks of biocapital in learning gardens
• 12. Community organizing, schools, and the right to the city
• 13. The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: business as usual in the end
• Index