Special Session: Fostering the political aspects of climate change and economics education
| Název česky | Speciální sekce: Posilování politických aspektů v klimatickém a ekonomickém vzdělávání |
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| Autoři | |
| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Citace | |
| Popis | While the window of opportunity to mitigate and adapt to climate change is rapidly closing, researchers worldwide highlight the potential of the education sector to play an active role in fostering a climate-just transition. Climate change education (CCE) is thus identified as one of the social tipping points. CCE literature argues that as today’s children, adolescents, and young adults will be the ones most affected by climate change, they should be educated to recognize climate-related risks and possible actions. Although there has been a shift within CCE from educating about climate change merely as a physical–geographical process and focusing predominantly on individual actions, towards adaptation and mitigation measures addressing also the political and economic aspects of climate change, little is still known about how (if at all) climate literacy programs address the political and economic aspects of climate change. Another aspect of this problem is the practice of economics education that predominantly reproduces mainstream economics approaches to climate change. As discussed by many, neoclassical and mainstream economics offer a very limited spectrum of analyzing and following policy recommendations, and thus in the context of climate change, mainstream economics’ education can be seen more as part of the problem than the solution. Hence, fostering heterodox economics approaches and teaching methods might be essential in addressing the current environmental crises, including climate change. Several initiatives attempting to pluralize economics education have been gaining ground in recent years, such as Rethinking Economics or Exploring Economics. Still, their impact is limited and much more needs to be done to make economics education more fit for the 21st century. Based on these insights, we argue that climate change education and economics education need to reflect the political and economic aspects of climate change (the former) and to provide a more pluralistic approach to economics (the latter). Both these shifts should be seen as interrelated, and both are political in the sense that CCE practitioners will have to deal much more with the complex and contested political and economic drivers and consequences of climate change, and economics students and educators will have to get actively involved in the change of the economics curricula. In this sense, both climate literacy and (heterodox) economic literacy can be seen as a political issue and can see students (also) as future political actors who should be able to identify possible leverage points and participate in political and economic decision-making. |
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