Often characterised as ‘unstructured’ (Hoppe 2011), ‘post-normal’ (e.g. Funtowicz & Ravetz 1993) or ‘wicked’ (e.g. Pryshlakivsky & Searcy 2013) problems, complex sustainability issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, gentrification, etc. prove difficult to solve. Their consequences are far-reaching yet unpredictable. Expert knowledge is incomplete, fragmented, and uncertain, giving rise to scientific controversies. Furthermore, social and political controversy arises because of a lack of agreement on norms and values at stake and on the acceptability of goals and solutions. Neither the existing institutions, frameworks and routines for decision-making nor the application of the available expertise appear capable of democratically tackling such problems. All the same, the sense of urgency surrounding these issues that drastically affect our planet and its inhabitants continues to grow. The pursuit of a more sustainable world is one of the most important societal challenges today and – given its wicked character – a challenge that requires a trans-disciplinary engagement with the issues at stake.

In this context, policy-makers as well as scholars repeatedly argue for ‘learning our way out’ of unsustainability (Finger & Asún 2001) and explicitly call on educational institutions to contribute to this endeavour. Yet, also for education such wicked socio-ecological problems bring about major challenges. When the required and available knowledge is uncertain and the desirability of proposed solutions is contested, education cannot be reduced to a matter of teaching and learning the ‘proper’ attitudes, knowledge, behaviour, skills, etc. Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) researchers have emphasised the absence of a universal ethical foundation for sustainable development as well as of an absolute conception of scientific truth. Questions and challenges emerging, then, are e.g. how to deal with unstable knowledge and controversy in educational processes (Ashley 2000)? How to move beyond moralising instruction without falling into undue anything-goes-relativism (Sund & Öhman 2014; Van Poeck et al. 2015)? How to foster creativity (Garrison et al. 2015) and encourage ‘thinking and doing things that have not been done before’ (Jickling & Wals 2012)? Etc.

Highlighting different aspects of such educational challenges and bringing together varied national perspectives, the contributors to this symposium will address this topic from theoretical, methodological as well as empirical points of view. In this first part of the symposium, we focus on exploring promising theoretical frameworks for ESE research on teaching and learning in the face of wicked socio-ecological problems. Van Poeck, Block and Östman develop a conceptual framework for understanding and investigating urban sustainability transition initiatives as spaces for experiential learning drawing on Dewey’s theory of experience. Drawing on ecofeminism and environmental ethics, Bengtsson and Kronlid argue that it is impossible to fulfil the ethical demand to include and acknowledge that which is excluded (e.g. women, nonhuman nature) and explore the consequences thereof for environmental education and social progress. Lysgaard and Van Poeck draw inspiration from theoretical, epistemological work in the fields of Speculative Realism and Actor Network Theory to examine whether and how the entanglement of social, political, human aspects on the one hand and material, technical, natural elements on the other is reflected in the way in which ESE practices present and approach the subject matter of wicked socio-ecological problems.

Ashley, 2000. Science: An unreliable friend to environmental education? Environmental Education Research 6:3, 269-280. Finger and Asún, 2001. Adult Education at the Crossroads. Learning Our Way Out. London/New York: Zed Books. Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993. Science for the Post-Normal Age, Futures 25, 735-755. Garrison, Östman and Håkansson, 2015. The creative use of companion values in environmental education and education for sustainable development: exploring the educative moment, Environmental Education Research 21:2, 183-204. Hoppe, 2011. The Governance of Problems: Puzzling, Powering and Participation. Policy Press, Bristol. Jickling and Wals, 2012. Debating Education for Sustainable Development 20 Years After Rio: a Conversation Between Bob Jickling and Arjen Wals. Journal of ESD 6:1, 49–57. Pryshlakivsky and Searcy, 2013. Sustainable development as a wicked problem. In Sousa-Poza, A. and Kovacic, S. (Eds.) Managing and Engineering in Complex Situations (pp. 109-128). Dordrecht: Springer. Sund and Öhman, 2014. On the need to repoliticise environmental and sustainability education: rethinking the postpolitical consensus, Environmental Education Research 20:5, 639-659. Van Poeck, Goeminne, and Vandenabeele, 2015. Revisiting the democratic paradox of environmental and sustainability education: sustainability issues as matters of concern. Environmental Education Research, pre-published online.