Educators in Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) often struggle to help learners understand how is the local and the extra local or global are connected. Formulations of ESE often emphasise either the local or the global at the expense of understanding the relations between these two poles.  Robertson’s theory (1995) of glocalization argues that the local and extra-local can be understood as interdependent. In this paper, I argue that going glocal in ESE pedagogies can offer a way forward for practitioners and theorists because a glocal orientation can ameliorate some of the risks and address some of the critiques.

The core of the contribution is an outline of what ‘going glocal’ might mean in an educational sense in ESE. Looking across literatures in ESE and beyond, we can see a need to more coherently and explicitly understand how the local and the so-called ‘global’ are connected. The application of glocalization theory is gaining ground in research about, for example, teaching and learning in higher education, in language teaching, and science education. In the area of environmental and sustainability education, there are expressed concerns with the link between global and extra-local issues in place-based (Gruenewald and Smith 2008) and ‘place-responsive’ pedagogies (Mannion & Gilbert, 2015; Mannion, Fenwick & Lynch, 2013). Whilst some advance the idea that local places are important for ESE experience, others worry that a local educational focus might be too parochial and be incapable of handling global issues like climate change. In education for sustainability and global citizenship, critics have shown that programmes can be too ethnocentric and fuel neocolonial mindsets (Andreotti 2015). It is timely and fruitful, therefore, to consider the benefits of an application of glocalization theory to ESE endeavors, and to attempt to delineate what glocal pedagogies might comprise and how this might address these critiques and risks.

In ESE we see a sustaining of, on the one hand, place-based and other experiential forms of ESE (that emphasise local places) and, on the other, forms of education for sustainability and global citizenship (and often attempt to start with globalisation or global issues). Without doubt education needs to respond to various challenges as so-called global issues of many kinds are becoming a priority: climate change, population ageing and migration, marketization, economic competition, religious radicalisation and terrorism, food security and military threats have come to characterise politics, culture, and environmental analyses. These concerns give rise to critiques and risks associated with a ‘merely’ local educational response. But whether local- or globally-oriented, critics have noted the failure of many different educational processes to take account of extra-local issues, to adequately name, notice, and critique what counts as globalisation, the conflation of the global with cultural and economic concerns, and the individualisation and depoliticization of processes and outcomes. Others fear the on-going ‘extinction of experience’ (after Pyle) especially in natural settings that have been shown to engender forms of engagement, place attachment, place-based identification and commitment to care. But theories of the ‘glocal’ when applied to education can usefully open up ways of mitigating these risks and answering some of these critiques. 

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