Since the late 1960s, the global dimension in education seems to be slowly moving from the margins to the mainstream. According to Bourn (2015, p. 23), “the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the biggest ever expansion of support, interest and engagement with learning about global and development issues in the leading industrialised countries”.

Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is now the term generally used in international fora and debates and is the predominant concept in the scholarly literature. But the concept of GCE is complex and ambiguous as it is “entwined with a number of overlapping ideas including development education, democratic education, education for cosmopolitan citizenship, peace education and human rights education” (Oxley & Morris, 2013, p. 302) as well as intercultural education and education for sustainable development .

Across Europe, despite the level of integration of GCE in formal education tends to be rather limited, there is a visible trend towards supporting the adoption of a global perspective within school curricula (Tarozzi & Inguaggiato, 2016). The embedment of GCE into the education systems at all levels, in coordination with the competent local and state authorities, and through a whole school cross-curricular approach, involving community representatives, continues to be a priority for decision makers and practitioners working on a European strategy framework for expanding GCE and improving its quality (North South Centre of the Council of Europe, 2012; 2015).

Marshall (2011) underlines that calls for the integration of GCE in schools come from a wide range of different organisations – intergovernmental bodies, national governments, NGOs, the media and the voluntary and business sectors. These calls convey an equally diverse range of agendas, including sustainability, intercultural understanding, human rights, equality, social justice but also economic integration and the acquisition of competences for the global economy. Therefore “all calls must be contextualised”, historically, politically, culturally and geographically, and “situated among wider instrumentalist agendas” (Marshall, 2011, p. 412). Two instrumentalist agendas are prevalent: the technical-economic instrumentalism where the curriculum is related to economic changes and the future employability of students; and the global social-justice instrumentalism, which facilitates an understanding of particular interpretations of economic, political, legal or cultural injustice and demands an emotional and often active commitment to social justice issues (Marshall, 2011).

In sum, GCE is a complex, ambiguous, and highly normative concept. It is “subject to a wide range of interpretations in the diverse contexts in which it is appropriated and promoted” (Oxley & Morris, 2013, pp. 301-302). The “different meanings attributed to ‘global citizenship education’ depend on contextually situated assumptions about globalisation, citizenship and education that prompt questions about boundaries, flows, power relations, belonging, rights, responsibilities, otherness, interdependence, as well as social reproduction and/or contestation” (Andreotti, 2011, p. 307). In the international literature on GCE , moreover, we can find a broad range of perspectives (Pashby, 2016) with some drawing on liberal humanistic frameworks (Noddings, Nussbaum, UNESCO), and others adopting more critical ones (Andreotti, Birk, Pike, Rizvi, Shultz).

This paper analyses the emergence of GCE in the policy discourse of a Local Authority in Italy, the Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT), which has recently amended its legislation on education to facilitate the inclusion of GCE in the curriculum of the schools under its jurisdiction, and has also taken on a role at the national level to promote the integration of GCE in formal education. The paper addresses the following questions: What motivates PAT to take on GCE at both the provincial and national level when others seem to be disinterested? How is GCE interpreted by PAT? Which instrumentalist agendas are at play?

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