Critical geographies of energy, politics, and sub-national climate change education policy

This paper examines how nations around the world are shifting their educational systems toward addressing climate change (UNESCO, 2024). However, there is uneven uptake across countries, and initial research suggests this is also true across sub-national jurisdictions. Initial analysis suggests that energy rich states are less likely to have climate change in education policy, with energy poor states more likely to have it included, i.e., in state/provincial curricula. These findings suggest how conservative, extractivist geographies are preserving carbon economies, including through lack of uptake of climate change in education.



Examining how distinct federalisms shape the development and enactment of international education policy priorities is key (Beech et al., 2023), and we take this as a focus in this paper. In doing so, we pay attention to sub-national “politics of scale” (McKenzie, 2012) to understand how CCE exists across variegated geographic, cultural, and political terrains (McKenzie & Aikens, 2020). We posit that investigating factors that influence CCE policy enactment in federated education systems is necessary to understand how to improve sub-national policy-making. We suggest a variety of geographic and social factors, such as heavily resource extractive economies, ongoing settler colonialism, ideological positions of policy-makers may all play roles. In this paper, we will explore some of these spatial dynamics by applying a critical geography lens to examine CCE in federated, carbon-rich nations with legacies of colonialism, specifically Australia, Canada, and the United States.