Environmental education in three German‐speaking countries: tensions and challenges for research and development

Abstract In this article, we explore a series of issues and tensions raised by the papers in this Special Issue of Environmental Education Research. The papers focus on developments in environmental education and ESD research in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In order to provide an alternative framework for contextualising and understanding the trends and challenges illustrated in the collection, we begin with an examination of Germany's green political movement, both at the level of national politics but also in relation to broader cultural shifts that have taken place in recent years. We then invite further debate on environmental education and ESD by focusing on three nodes within the discourse on these complex, dynamic and linked fields of theory and practice. First, we explore the themes of compatibility and compliance regarding environmental education and the 'global' as two of the key ingredients to ESD. Second, we consider the growing dominance of competency‐based approaches to ESD, primarily in terms of educational standards projects, but also in relation to images of the human therein. Third, we look into understandings of agency in relation to innovation and change, including the role of NGOs in research and policy‐making, and the sources and drivers of possible frames for future research agendas. The article ends by inviting wider discussion and critique of the achievements, tensions and challenges for research and development in environmental education and ESD, both in the three countries, and further afield. Acknowledgements We would like to thank Ingolfur Blühdorn, Stephen Gough, Kim Walker, Paul Hart, William Scott and Susanne Müller for their help in developing this piece. Notes 1. The quotations in this article from reference works in German are the translations of the authors of the article and/or the editors, unless otherwise indicated. 2. Thus, for example, in relation to the notions of thresholds and lifecycles we might wonder how environmental education has been institutionalised (and even de‐institutionalised) in the face of changing priorities within UN‐level initiatives; in what senses it has been formalised (or de‐formalised) as a governing framework for environmental learning and practice in relation to the environmental, natural and/or ecological; and so forth. 3. For example, we might envisage some correspondence here with these trends in raising questions about shifting political and cultural terrains for supporting and promoting environmental education and ESD, alongside the responses to this amongst the various communities of interest, research and practice here, including those of environmentalists, policy‐makers, transnational organisations, NGOs, and so forth. 4. Are, for that matter, the ecumenical learning initiatives distinctive here? How do they relate to other 'faith‐based' initiatives in German‐speaking countries and further afield, or how and where do they sit in relation to the broad spectrum of NGO‐type activities? 5. For example, in an editorial for the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, Jickling (Citation2005, p. 7) asks, 'If we are entering a period of political uncertainty marked by the end of globalization, as John Ralston Saul (Citation2005) predicts, then the next decade will be crucial in shaping emerging political trends – crucial in making a difference.' How this relates to the post‐ecological thesis merits close scrutiny, as does whether the processes and effects of globalisation and its lifecycles are felt equally around the world, and among the environmental education, ESD and research communities. 6. Or, perhaps, we might consider whether the development of competency‐based approaches has more to do with, say, attempts to understand and respond to 'PISA shock' as one example of how large‐scale international comparative studies come to influence and shape educational debate and policy making. 7. Of, for example, material progress, the triumph of modern Western scientific worldviews, of human betterment, and so on. 8. What lessons can be learned from the case of Die Grünen? 9. But there is no guarantee of this final stage before a transfer phase takes place; that is, such checks and balances are built into the system of development and modelling of the innovation.