This symposium is an international and inter-disciplinary collaboration in the areas of environmental, sustainability, global and development education research with a special focus on current ethical and political issues within these areas. The symposium brings together researchers from five countries — Belgium, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden — who have a common interest in confronting political and ethical issues in the context of educational initiatives.

Over the years, environmental and sustainability education (ESE) has clearly undergone a transition where social and human development issues, alongside environmental issues, have gradually become more prominent. This transition can be understood in relation to social and economic changes in the global community as well as to discursive changes. A striking example is how the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg implied a shift in focus from the environment to poverty eradication and an interest in multicultural issues. Shortly after the 2002 World Summit, the UN’s Decade of ESD was adopted where the environmental – according to some critics – was subsumed within social issues.

As a result of these changes new ethical and political challenges have emerged within the ESE research field – challenges which also call for new approaches to understanding interconnections and interdependence between and among social and ecological systems in current and future generations. The papers in this symposium address a range of such ethical and political issues and relate them to forces that are at work in society today, such as globalization, internationalization, multiculturalism, and neo-liberalism.

Karen Pashby, Vanessa Andreotti, and Nadja Widell focus onthe intragenerational ethical implications of internationalisation policies in higher education.In theirpaper they use a postcolonial perspective to examine the ways such policies relate to questions of environmental and cultural sustainability.

Also Louise Sund’s paper engages with intragenerational ethics but in terms of global social justice and the pedagogical challenges of distance ethics. More specifically she explores how teachers integrate issues of social justice into their teaching on global sustainability in order to clarify how historical processes, ethical relations to others, issues of power, and different forms of knowing influence ESE practice.

Katrien Van Poeck and Gert Goeminne question the traditional boundaries between science and politics and the way these affect the dichotomized distinction between instrumental and pluralistic ESE. They argue for a ‘public pedagogy’ that is better in tune with the hybrid socio-technical character of sustainability issues and focus on how to research such practices within which the political and the pedagogical are intertwined.

Helen Kopnina highlights the ethical relation between human and non-human species. She claims that non-human species that suffer from the effects of economic development do not profit from current ESD since it is largely informed by an anthropocentric perspective and a focus on economic equality and social justice. The ethical argument is developed to support a bolder move in the direction of eco-representation and reinstatement of education for nature.

Chair of the symposium is Johan Öhman, Örebro University and discussants are Stephen Gough, University of Bath and Sharon Todd, Stockholm University.