Levels of Governance in Policy Innovation Cycles in Community Education: The Cases of Education for Sustainable Development and Climate Change Education

Nina Kolleck, Helge Jörgens and Mareike Well
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Nina Kolleck: Department of Educational Research and Social Systems, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany
Helge Jörgens: ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa and CIES—Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia, Avenida das Forças Armadas, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal
Mareike Well: Department of Educational Research and Social Systems, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: While there is little doubt that social networks are essential for processes of implementing social innovations in community education such as Climate Change Education (CCE) or Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), scholars have neglected to analyze these processes in the multilevel governance system using Social Network Analysis. In this article, we contribute to closing this research gap by exploring the implementation of CCE and ESD in education at the regional and global levels. We compare the way CCE is negotiated and implemented within and through the global conferences of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with the way the UN Decade of ESD is put into practice through networks in five different German municipalities. We argue that the role of social networks is particularly strong in policy areas like CCE and ESD, which are best characterized as multi-level and multi-actor governance. Based on data derived from standardized surveys and from Twitter we analyze the complex interactions of public and private actors at different levels of governance in the two selected policy areas. We find, amongst others, that the implementation of CCE and ESD in community education depends in part on actors that had not been assumed to be influential at the outset. Furthermore, our analyses suggest the different levels of governance are not well integrated throughout the phases of the policy innovation cycle.

Keywords: Education for Sustainable Development (ESD); Climate Change Education (CCE); Social Network Analysis (SNA); multi-level governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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