Exploring Education and Intergenerationality as a New Climate Governance in Uncertain Times

Dear Colleagues,

With the limited success of formal state climate policymaking over the past thirty years or so, does society now need to look beyond depending solely on neoliberal state imaginings to effectively tackle the climate crisis? This Special Issue requests theoretically and empirically engaging papers that explore education and intergenerationality as a new climate governance in uncertain times.

The recent school climate strikes around the world have demonstrated the power of youth voices in inspiring increased climate action, arguably infringing the institutional rhythms of formal educational spaces (e.g. Fridays for Future). Whilst there is also evidence of youth involvement in national and international frameworks and policy related to climate change (e.g., see Cumiskey et al., 2015; Narksompong et al., 2015), policy rhetoric ostensibly remains confined to fancy buzzwords such as sustainability, resilience, transition and transformation (Nicholson, 2017). These buzzwords act as a means to mask how the state frames climate change within a neoliberal world system that reduces its politics and policies to nation-state territorial sovereignty and competitiveness, reductive science based on climate temperatures and projections, social administration and technocratic management over more socially equitable forms of climate justice (Hulme and Mahony, 2010; Kythreotis, 2012; Seck, 2016; Banai, 2017). Climate post-politics therefore currently delimits and even marginalises locally situated and alternative knowledge from emerging and taking greater precedence in environmental policymaking (Kythreotis et al., 2019; Mantyka-Pringle et al., 2017; North, Nurse and Barker, 2017; Swyngedouw, 2014; Jasanoff, 2010), especially youth-inspired contributions to the climate change agenda (Fernandez and Shaw, 2013; Haynes and Tanner, 2015; Hemstock et al., 2020; Mitchell et al., 2008; Napawan et al., 2017). These shortcomings do little to engender climate governance and policy innovation, and often short-circuit connections between new social innovations in climate governance and real-world climate policy practice (Matyas and Pelling, 2015).

New youth-inspired, creative, critical reflexive practices related to climate experience and intergenerationality have been relatively underexplored in academic debates as a governance innovation in its own right and need further development in terms of how it is related to (or even integrated into) formal political and policy action spheres. How can a new equitable governance of education and intergenerationality be augmented within a contemporary society suffering multiple crises, and what are the current social, cultural, political and economic conditions that hinder or enable innovation governance? This Special Issue invites trans- and interdisciplinary manuscripts that explore the ways in which education and intergenerationality relate to state climate policymaking in uncertain times. We particularly welcome manuscripts that explore and synthesise innovative theoretical and empirical understandings of education and intergenerationality with the formal climate policymaking practices of the state in the post-Covid and/or -climate change emergency era.

Dr. Andrew Paul Kythreotis
Dr. Theresa Grace Mercer
Dr. Sarah Hemstock
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• climate policy and governance
• intergenerational equity
• youth climate action
• climate change education
• climate justice