The climate crisis is generating strategies in diverse sectors: politics, economy, as well as education. The Paris agreement (UN, 2015, p. 6), in its article 12 establishes “Parties shall cooperate in taking measures, as appropriate, to enhance climate change education (CCE), training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information, recognizing the importance of these steps with respect to enhancing actions under this Agreement”. This requires commitments by the governments through creating policies, programs, and agendas to facilitate the educational process. In this sense, and according to UNESCO (2019) “the education is an essential element of the global response to climate change”. Currently, we speak about “environmental education”, “sustainability education”, and more recently also “CCE”. The first two educational concepts try to equilibrate the relationship between humans, society and environment, recognizing some wicked problems, and searching contributions from the field of education to solve them. The third one, according to Stevenson et al. (2017), is about learning in the face of risk, uncertainty and rapid change, and the same time, it is a possibility to develop capacities for addressing the climate crisis. 

It does not matter which name or type of education, it implies two variables to consider: education and environment; two dimensions that are related to social, political, and economic interest. In addition, assuming that education is constructed through ideological institutions, it means that the school as institution is an instrument to change from a political civil society to regulated society (Gramsci, 1984). If we continue in a capitalist context, it will be difficult to achieve the goals of environmental education, sustainability education, and CCE, because the schools are teaching based on a capital ideology. According to Althusser (2014) “the school teaches ‘know-how’, but in forms that ensure subjection to the dominant ideology, or else the ‘practice’ of it, every agent of production, exploration, or repression, to say nothing of professional ideologies” (p. 52). It means if the government has a neoliberal ideology, the schools as ideological state apparatuses will design and develop education with this perspective. In consequence, if governments are not committed strongly with environmental issues, hardly will we be reflecting in the practice of educational programs and curriculums, on CCE, unless communities take leadership to design and develop local activities. In addition, according to Van Dijk (2011) ideologies are underlying discourses.

This article argues that some discourses at the United Nations Climate Actions Summit (UNCAS)  (2019) were a discursive strategy to maintain dominant ideologies of the market system, omitting the local reality of policy agendas. To illustrate this, we have analyzed the discourses of the presidents of Colombia and Chile made at the UNCAS meeting in New York on 23 of September 2019, in confrontation with the reality of their compromise, projects, and facts in their countries, considering that “all social practices and hence all text and talk are conditioned by the social environment, that is, by ongoing interaction, as well as by the identity, interests, goals, relationships and other properties of the communicative situation as the participants define it, that is, by the context” (Van Dijk, 2011, p. 394). 

Thus, the paper critically discusses the neoliberal politics in each country and environmental problems in comparison with the president’s discourse. Using as theoretical and methodological background Van Dijk’s concepts of Critical Analysis of Discourses, communicative events such as presentations at the UNCAS are analyzed focusing on the discursive strategies that they employ, considering intertextuality, speech acts, as well as, socio cognitive dimension, as ideologies. Against this backdrop, the paper asks: What are the implications of the political discourses on climate change for CCE?

According to Martínez “The central objective of a critical qualitative research transcends an explanation to prediction, or control or to verification of hypotheses, characteristic aspects of the investigation quantitative” (2010, p. 107), thus we used the critical discourse analysis as a theoretical and methodological perspective. In so far as we recognize the discourse as action, and the social as object of observation that cannot be separate ontologically from the discourse. Morever, considering two dimensions of the structure: government (presidents) and education system, we agree with Fairclough (2011) when argued that “texts are involved in processes of meaning making and that texts have causal effects that are mediated by meaning making” (p. 122). We considered the discourse strategies used in each of the transcribed texts of the Colombian and Chilean presidents’ discourses made at the United Nations Climate Action Summit meeting in New York on 23 of September 2019, first performing a general reading of the document, and then textual analysis. Thus, within our analysis, we find aspects of textual dimension such as modality, speech acts, presuppositions, and intertextuality, allowing the understanding of the cognitive dimension based on Van Dijk’s theory. We approached the social dimension through an exploratory research in public journals about environmental problems in Colombia and Chile. To afterwards cross the information with the presidents’ discourses. Then, we applied interviews with several policy makers and teachers. Our aims is to identify the influence of the presidents’ discourses on the environmental projects and laws, and to identify the advance of climate change education in the curriculum, the position of the teachers in relation with the presidents’ discourses, and possible uses of political discourses in the educational practice. Finally, we identify some implications for climate change education from a critical review.

The findings describe persistence of dominant discourse with effect on knowledge for CCE, supported by a technical and economical perspective. This logic affects the possibility to develop a critical CCE, by ignoring the contributions for example that social movement can make for the field as well as all the dimensions that created the “risk” that implies the climate crisis. To propose implications for CCE, first we assume that, CC is interpreted by governments and international institution, such as World Bank, which design international policies which influence national policies. These policies are influencing the context of practice of different sectors, such as communication, transport, health, education, agriculture, and industry. We highlight these sectors, because in the presidents’ discourses industry sectors are privileged. Each political decision is affecting micro processes, and social actors in different ways. In a context, where only industry is privileged, normally the negative impact is to the more vulnerable population, in Latin American countries, indigenous, farmers and workers. Additionally, this analysis shows that CCE should not only imply education about risk, adaptation and resilience, but should also imply a critical education about publics policies, address emancipatory, critical and transformative content, consider non-formal and informal communicative events in the construction of critical thinking, analyze how power relations can restrict, and motivate, or boost the education agency for CCE (Mejía-Cáceres, 2019). From the interpretation of climate change policies, it is possible to generate breakpoints, which can be reflected in more articulated curricular transformations with non-formal spaces. We believe that a political education is necessary, where vulnerability, social and environmental injustice appear as themes of discussion, but also alternatives such as Buen Vivir and degrowth, providing the citizens with knowledge and competencies to be able to participate in the public debate about our future.

Althusser L. (2014). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Brooklyn, NY. Fairclough (2011). Semiotic Aspects of Social Transformation and Learning. In. Rogers R. An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. Routdlege. New York. Gramsci, A. (1984). Cuardernos de la cárcel 3. Edición crítica dle Instituto Gramsci. Ediciones Era. México, D.F. Martínez L. (2010). A Abordagem de Questões Sociocientíficas na Formação Continuada de Professores de Ciências: Contribuições e Dificuldades. Doctoral Thesis. Universidade Estadual Paulista. Bauru. Brazil. Mejía-Cáceres M.A. (2019). De las Estructuras Sociales a los Eventos Comunicativos: Formación Inicial de Profesores de Ciencias y Edución Ambiental en contexto Sociopolitico colombiano. Stevenson, Nicholls, & Whitehouse (2017). What Is Climate Change Education?. In: Curriculum Perspectives, 37 (1), pp 67-71. United Nations, (2015). Paris Agreement. Retrieved from http://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/convention/application/pdf/english_paris_agreement.pdf UNESCO (2019). Climate Change Education. Retrieved from https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development/cce Van Dijk, T. A. (2011). Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Sage: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapur, Washington DC.