This paper presents an explorative study of environmental and sustainability education (ESE) policy research literature and aims to derive from this stock-taking process novel insights that can inspire future ESE policy and policy research.

Although up till now often labelled as an ‘emerging’ field of scholarship, during the past decades ESE research has been characterised by a significant growth of literature (Wright and Pullen 2007; Scott 2009). Not only the number of articles on ESE but also the journals in which they were published (disciplinary journals as well as in mainstream interdisciplinary and educational journals) and the number of authors writing about it have increased strongly. These are all signs of a healthy field of research, but we do also argue that to fully exploit the potential of the field a strong sense of the history of the field is of utmost importance. As emerging researchers in this field, we want to explore the rich body of literature in order to gain a sense of history which, we believe, is vital to determine and discuss new directions and priorities for future research. In doing so, we particularly focus on ESE policy research and the link between research and policy.

Our own research interests will guide this exploration. On the one hand, it is against the backdrop of the theoretical inquiries and discussions in which we are engaged that the history of the field ‘talks’ to us. On the other hand, we are particularly interested in finding inspiration for future research in these domains. In particular, we will thus relate our review of ESE policy literature to two vital issues in our research: materiality and democracy. First, as several authors argue (Fenwick and Edwards 2013; Lysgaard and Fjelsted 2015) examining the social without the material implies working with a limited concept of society. They urge the necessity of delimiting the role of discursive approaches as the sole road to a coherent understanding of what education should be based on and emphasise the importance of including a focus on the effects of materiality. Especially when engaging with ecological and sustainability issues, they stress, educational researchers should be mindful of the pitfalls of exclusively relying on language, discourse, and notions like social constructivism. ESE scholars therefore argue for moving the field of ESE research beyond the boundaries of the Modern Constitution with its strict division between, on the one hand, the world of nonhuman objects, science, nature, materiality, etc. and, on the other, the world of human subjects, society, politics, ethics, etc. (e.g. Garrison et al. 2015; Van Poeck et al. 2014). Secondly, considering that sustainability issues are often very uncertain and controversial (both in factual and normative terms) and drastically affect our planet and its inhabitants, researchers argue that these issues raise major democratic challenges (Lundegård and Wickman 2012; Sund and Öhman 2014; Van Poeck et al. 2014). ESE is characterised by a certain entanglement of educational and political/democratic processes. Therefore, research about the role of education in the light of a more sustainable world inevitably implies questions of democratic thought. Other perspectives could have been chosen, but as this study represents an effort to understand the history of the field from the specific perspective of two early career researchers with an explicit wish to contribute to the field for the next 30-40 years, topics aligning with our interests as well as with lively debates in contemporary educational scholarship have been chosen.

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