Whole School Approaches (WSA) and/or Whole Institution Approaches (WIA) are becoming more popular in developing education that connects with the grand challenges of our time (e.g. education for sustainability, health and well-being, climate adaptation and mitigation, nature and biodiversity, and citizenship). While not new – the WSA goes back more than 25 years (e.g. Henderson & Tilbury, 2004) – it appears that nowadays policy-makers and leaders in educational institutions prefer systemic change approaches ad-hoc add-on ones. Such a whole system approach can be a key strategy in moving urgent interrelated planetary issues around environment, ecology, health and well-being, citizenship, ethics and justice from the margins of education to the periphery.  In the context of our research  a WIA can be seen as an overarching term also encompassing WSA, and therefore we will refer to the more encompassing term WIA in this study.

Rather than focusing on how to add new content/subjects/topics to an often perceived as overloaded curriculum and then to didacticize them, there is a stronger realization that these topics are all inter-connected and cannot be taught separately, but need to be actively explored, embodied and, indeed, lived within the learning environments. Many different models of WIA have been proposed over the last decades (Gericke, 2022), amongst them the WIA flower model proposed by Wals and Mathie (2022) has gained great interest the last years. The model propose learning environments that allow for sustainability as ‘lived experience’ that requires the alignment and synchronizing of all the petals of the WIA flower: organizational ethos, culture and leadership; curriculum; pedagogy and didactics; community relations; learning organization as a lived experience; and professional development of staff. Many studies have been published about the WIA and these can be divided into theoretical-oriented studies (e.g., core WIA principles and interrelations among them) (Holst, 2023; Wals & Mathie, 2022; Wang et al., 2023) and practice-oriented research (e.g., teacher/students competencies or effectiveness of WIA) (e.g., Holst et al., 2024; Olsson et al., 2022; Torsdottir et al., 2024).

So far studies on the policy and governance frameworks in which a WIA is nested, have been scarce, and most research to date has focused strongly on the areas of school education and higher education (cf. Gericke 2022; Holst, 2023). Despite the advances, the progress report on the implementation of the UNECE Strategy for ESD across the ECE Region (2015-2018) states that WSA mainly concerns primary and secondary schools rather than other formal, non-formal and informal education and other institutions (Hadjiachilleos and Zachariou, 2022). As a result, the existing literature leaves a significant gap when it comes to systematic policy frameworks for enabling and supporting WIAs across different national contexts and educational areas — something that is crucial for achieving the objectives set for WIAs (e.g. UNECE 2022). This is a gap that this study address.

The policy research at hand here is conducted within the framework of the UNECE ESD Strategy new implementation framework 2021-2030 and covers 56 member states, lays the foundation for a comprehensive framework for development, enactment and evaluation of a WIA that can be used in a wide range of contexts, especially for educational policy-makers, educational leadership and governance. (526)

Stratford and Wals (2020) use the concept of healthy policy ecologies that require; forms of governance that include multiple actors, often stakeholders, bridging and bonding between sectors and levels, continuous dialogue and negotiation, and the (re)framing and reframing of the issues a policy seeks to address. This relational ecological perspectives provides a lens for our research. The foundation for the policy framework for WIAs will be created by three overlapping research phases: mapping the policy landscape, scoping of existing WIA policy-ecologies and, distilling building blocks for a universal or generic policy framework to be complemented with more context-specific frameworks for all distinguished educational contexts. Each phase has its own research approach. 1) The mapping will be informed by a review of international policy-documents (e.g; European Commission, 2022; UNECE, 2022) that highlight the WIA as a means for embedding inter-related themes around sustainable development, climate change, global citizenship, health and well-being, in a systemic way in education. 2) Parallel to this, a review of scientific peer-reviewed research on WIA in relation to sustainability will also be analyzed (Gough et al., 2019). Here research focusing on organizational change, changing organization ethos and culture, and leadership and governance in the context of a WIA. 3) The identification of supportive policy frameworks is done through a three round Delphi study informed by the mapping review. The Delphi-process (Okoli & Pawlowski, 2004) is designed to tackle complex issues by first eliciting opinions or judgements from respondents representing a wide range of stakeholders, then summarising the various opinions, confronting each respondent with alternative points-of-view and providing them with an opportunity to revise their original perspective in light of new information. The Delphi will also yield the identification of critical case studies of a WIA in various cultural contexts within the UNECE region. (296)

While much of the research described here is on-going and/or about to take off, there are some initial findings that can be presented at ECER. One result is the mapping of the policy-landscape in which WIA’s are developing across the UNECE region which includes all of Europe). During an expert consultation of the UNECE WIA Expert Group that guides this research, the landscape was framed using a heuristic created by Wals and Jickling (2008) to describe the ESE landscape. This heuristic used two dimensions to identify four possible manifestations or, rather different contexts, in which a WIA can be positioned: a horizontal participation axis and a vertical goal orientation axis. Governance cultures in some countries, regions or communities, can sometimes be more hierarchical and prescriptive in nature while others can be more egalitarian, participatory and open. This contextual background likely has consequences for how a WIA is conceived of in policy and practice but also for how a WIA can be best developed and supported. We will discuss what these consequences are in light of the results of the mapping and the first round of the Delphi studies which will be completed by the time ECER comes. In order to distil the building blocks for the policy framework, the results of the mapping and the scoping of WIA policy ecologies, will be integrated. While some of this research will take place after ECER, we will be able to present the contours of these initial building blocks. (246)

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