Change agents are professional agents charged with implementing participative processes aimed at securing a sustainable future (Læssøe 2008). In doing so, they promote learning processes in non-formal educational settings. This paper explores the entanglement of the political and the educational within such processes, thereby focussing on the role of change agents as educators. In particular, we want to reveal the diversity of roles change agents can play and elaborate how this affects the kinds of education they make possible/impossible. Examining change agents can nurture the discussion about the intersection of political and pedagogical challenges because of the specificity of the practices in which they are engaged. After all, they act in public spaces where education meets the political in a very tacit and direct way. We approach this research challenge from a ’performative’ perspective (Hajer 2005), focussing on what actually takes place in change agents’ practices and how this affects the kind of education that emerges there. As education depends on the state and character of the relations, processes and settings in which it occurs (Lewin 1936/1948), we empirically analyse different practices in Denmark and Belgium. Drawing on these case studies, we present an ideal typology of the diverse ways in which change agents can play their role. Thereby, we particularly pay attention to how change agents can be situated on a continuum between a neutral/detached versus involved/committed position. Insights from social psychology (Cooke 2001), environmental sociology (Jamison 2001) and political theories (Marres 2005; Mouffe 2005) allow to grasp what actually happens in the practices under study. Then we connect our findings to educational theories about metaphors of learning (Sfard 1998; Van Poeck and Vandenabeele 2014) and functions of education (Biesta 2009) in order to further conceptualise the different kinds of educational practices that can emerge through change agents’ practices.

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