Oil, transport, water and food: a political-economy-ecology lens on VET in a climate changing world

In this paper, drawing on an extensive research project across three countries (VET Africa 4.0 Collective 2023), we produce an emerging argument that it is necessary to rethink and reframe VET logics and approaches in a warming future dominated by informality and mass unemployment. Currently,neither the formal VET college or workplace are adequately set up to provide the type(s) of VET that are in demand or needed for just transitioning and sustainable futures. We acknowledge the importance of political economy accounts in developing a richer understanding of VET, but suggest these are not sufficient for dealing with the existential and practical crisis of the climate emergency. We note that many scholars have sought to address this tension in the academic literature by adopting a political ecology account that reframes the theoretical and political challenge. This leads us to call for a political-economy-ecology account of VET. Although we acknowledge the limited nature of our approach here, we offer some thoughts for VET analysis with reflection on these theoretical issues applied to four cases studies from Uganda and South Africa of VET provisioning in oil, transport, water and food (which materially shape our cases).