Global challenges such as the climate crisis, international migration, or violent ideologies and conspiracy theories pose serious questions to educational systems worldwide. Vocational education and training (VET) is requested to provide ‘green skills’, ‘global competence’ or ‘global citizenship’ for the future worker-citizens to deal with these global tensions. However, few empirical studies analyse sustainability and global responsibility critically in VET policies. If policies are understood to represent societal ‘problems’ and prescribe solutions to them (Bacchi, 2009), it matters how ‘problems’ such as the climate crisis are framed and argumented in the policies envisioning the future of VET, and what kind of VET is suggested as a solution to them.

Global citizenship education (GCE) focuses on “what is going wrong in the world – or what are key global issues – and what should be done about them” (Pashby, 2016: 70).  The interpretations of what ‘global citizenship’ means vary greatly, but the starting point for conceptualizing GCE for this study is understanding it as interlinking the different fields of education for sustainability, intercultural education, and citizenship education. The more critical, Freirean forms of GCE emphasize participatory, dialogic learning, critically reflected action, and transformative social and political learning that aims to challenge power imbalances (Reilly and Niens, 2014). It has been argued that there cannot even be a universal understanding of GCE which is always contingent, situated in specific cultural and geopolitical contexts, and changing over time (Franch, 2019).

UNESCO (Marope et al., 2015) has suggested global citizenship as a new responsibility area in VET for reaching populations that are normally left out of opportunities for education for sustainable development. Often, GCE is associated as a middle-class project mainly serving the global mobility of privileged elites (Yemini and Maxwell, 2020). Studying global citizenship in the context of VET challenges this elitist view, as vocational students come from very diverse, often lower socio-economic backgrounds. If vocational students are excluded from grasping abstract concepts – or theoretical knowledge as Wheelahan (2015) argues – will they be able to participate in societal debates, and search for “[a]lternative ways of knowing, being and relating on, and to, the planet” (Khoo and Jørgensen, 2021) as suggested by critical global citizenship approaches?

Drawing from different GCE typologies (Pashby et al., 2020), our paper examines how global citizenship is constructed in vocational education policy documents of UNESCO, the European Union and Finland (2015-2021). As these organisations on global, European and national levels approach VET in different ways, the aim is to understand premises, possibilities, and limitations to applying global citizenship education within VET.

The research questions for this study are:

1)      How is global citizenship delimited and contextualized within the aims of VET conveyed by UNESCO, the European Union, and Finnish VET policy documents?

2)      To what extent does the definition of the ‘necessary’ future competences in these VET policy documents enable or limit the possibilities of vocational students to engage with global questions in their workplaces and societies?

The data consist of educational policy documents – recommendations, background studies, reports – focusing on the future of VET, published by UNESCO, the European Union institutions, and the Finnish government institutions. The documents were selected using purposive sampling criteria related to the topic and purpose, time period, and origin. Firstly, the document discusses the future of VET and proposes objectives, lines of action, or policy recommendations. Secondly, the documents have been published between the years 2015-2021, to reflect the global discussion around the UN SDGs. Thirdly, although not all the documents are politically binding, they have been published by official national or international organisations and are publicly available on their websites. We employ critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the overall analytical approach. Carol Bacchi (2009: 35) defines discourse as “powerful fiction” that can “make things happen, most often through their truth status”, when language is used to construct “worlds, problems and persons as governable entities”. CDA is inherently political and tackles questions of power and justice. It is based on the idea that expressions of language – including those of the researcher – are never neutral, and that discourses are situated in power relations, place, and time (Mullet, 2018: 118). Bacchi’s (2009) ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to policy analysis was used as a methodological tool for examining the representation of global citizenship in the documents, considering the premises and effects of the representation: what is the desired change implied in the particular policy proposal? In the analysis, we combined Bacchi’s WPR approach with elements from political discourse analysis as understood by Fairclough and Fairclough (2012), focusing on the argumentation and the socio-political consequences embedded in the texts. When analysing the documents, we were interested in looking at the balance between the three discursive orientations of global citizenship education as typologised by Pashby et al. (2020): 1) neoliberal, instrumentalist view where global citizenship is understood in terms of efficiency and flexibility to function in the competitive global economy; 2) liberal, humanistic view where learners are supported in their growth as active citizens of the world, towards a democratic dialogue with the “other”; and 3) critical global citizenship where the aim is to challenge power structures and global injustices through emancipatory, transformative learning. The focus of the analysis was on the vocabulary, moral and political values, overall problematization and the context in which the text was produced.

Investigating VET policies from the perspective of global citizenship raises ethical and philosophical questions on the overall aims of education. Education policies define how to reach the imagined better future, or alternatively avoid a state of emergency (Hansen et al., 2021). What do the discourses of global citizenship in these policies tell us about the balance between economic growth, wellbeing of people, environment, and the planet? Educational policy discourses examined in this paper offer different opportunities for enacting global citizenship in VET. Although sustainability, 'green skills' or 'global competence' are being emphasized more prominently in recent vocational education and training (VET) policies, economic growth remains as the primary goal. The policies understand the climate crisis to be solved mainly through technological means, instead of understanding it as a social or values-related problem of global justice. We argue that this framing in VET policies of UNESCO, the European Union, and Finland between the years of 2015 and 2021 constructs vocational students mainly as environmental global citizens that are expected to make their workplaces 'greener'. On the one hand, this opens possibilities for a more environmental, solution-oriented global citizenship to emerge: one in which vocational graduates participate in solving the sustainability crisis through their work. On the other hand, the framing limits the development of vocational students’ civic and political agency as individuals and collectives within and outside their workplaces as the focus on wider democratic competence remains marginalized in VET policies, especially at the European Union level.

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