Guest Editorial: Pedagogical Responses to the Meta Crisis: The Role of Development Education

Stephen McCloskey

Introduction

The intersecting crises currently impacting our world are known as a polycrisis and many of these converging and interlocking issues have previously been debated in Policy and Practice, including: the climate emergency; racism and the far-right; the hollowing out of democracy; the genocide in Gaza; and neoliberal economics.  The meta crisis, however, seeks to understand the systemic causes of these crises (Pollock and Bell, 2025) which neatly aligns it with development education’s concern with ‘the root causes of local and global injustices and inequalities in our interdependent world’ (IDEA, 2022: 13).  According to UNESCO (2017: 10) competency in systems thinking ‘is the ability to recognise and understand relationships; to analyse complex systems; to think of how systems are embedded within different domains and different scales; and to deal with uncertainty’.  To what extent have the development education and international development sectors risen to the challenge of the meta crisis and applied a systemic analysis to the ecological, economic, political and social crises enveloping our world?  The limited evidence available to us on the island of Ireland suggests that both sectors give ‘priority to individual, single issue considerations and actions rather than systemic, holistic explanations and collective actions’ (Fricke, 2022: 92).  As Wheatley suggests: ‘We might call this a meta-silence about the global metacrisis, and it is illustrated well by the fact that none of (the) twelve principles in the Irish Development Education Association’s 2023 Code of Conduct (Code of Good Practice in Development Education), focus squarely on sustainability’ (Wheatley, 2024: 40).  ‘To heal societies and ecosystems and thus secure a decent future’, argues Wheatley, ‘education at every grade must shift toward teaching students about the nature and causes of this global metacrisis’ (Ibid.: 41).

One of the challenges to advancing systemic thinking about the meta crisis is the lack of political honesty and urgent action from decision-makers in engaging the public with the scale and causes of the crises impacting the world.  This places a greater burden on educators to deconstruct ‘the paradigm underlying modern civilisation’ and develop the critical consciousness needed to support transformational action toward a sustainable society (Ibid.: 47).  This editorial aims to unpack the main causes and effects of the meta crisis before introducing the collection of innovative and inspiring examples of practice in Issue 42 of Policy and Practice that suggest how development educators are rising to the challenge of the multiple intersecting crises afflicting society.

Democracy or oligarchy?

In its 2026 global economy report titled Resisting the Rule of the Rich, Oxfam argued that the world faced a choice of either democracy or oligarchy.  With billionaire Elon Musk sitting on wealth of half a trillion dollars while one in four people globally lack enough to eat, inequality in terms of both wealth and income is assuming unprecedented proportions (Henley, 2025).  This extreme wealth is not only engendering trenchant inequality but concentrating increasingly unaccountable political power governing in the interests of elites.  Oxfam found that billionaires were 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens (Oxfam, 2026: 3) which is resulting in the elite capture of political institutions and the unequal influence of the super-rich on political decision-making.  When Musk assumed a leadership role in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as part of the newly elected Trump administration in 2025, he boasted that he fed ‘USAID into the wood chipper’ (Robins-Early, 2025).  The swingeing cuts made to USAID are predicted to contribute to as many as 500,000 to 700,000 additional deaths annually around the world (Kenny and Sandefur, 2025) reflecting Trump’s renewed rejection of multilateralism initiated in his first administration.  This unilateralist stance was reflected, too, in US withdrawal from 66 international organisations, mostly UN bodies combating climate change (The White House, 2026a).  Domestically, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) with its planned cuts of over $1 trillion from health programmes has been described by the Center for Medicare Advocacy (2025) as ‘the largest rollback of federal support for health care in American history’.  The Yale School of Public Health (2025) estimates that the OBBB’s removal of health coverage for millions of Americans could result in 51,000 preventable deaths per annum.  These are the lethal consequences of neoliberalism driven by ‘a ruthless emphasis on privatization, deregulation, commodification, a sclerotic individualism and ruthless model of competition’ (Giroux, 2023).

In January 2026, the United States’ increasing descent into authoritarianism was reflected in foreign policy by the illegal invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its head of state, President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, a Deputy in the National Assembly, killing 83 Cuban and Venezuelan soldiers in the process (Aljazeera, 2026a).  And, on 28 February 2026, the US and Israel launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Iran that ‘was undertaken in violation of international law and the UN Charter’ (Reliefweb, 2026) with the victims of this aggression including 180 schoolgirls, aged 8-12, attending an elementary school in Minab, southeastern Iran (Middle East Eye, 2026).  The attack was launched while the US and Iran were locked in nuclear disarmament talks that held the promise of a breakthrough, according to the Oman negotiator (Aljazeera, 2026b).  The Middle-East is now convulsed in an entirely preventable conflict that is engulfing countries across the region and causing prices to surge on energy markets which will most severely impact the poorest in society (Chia and Sherman, 2026).  The US has also intensified its economic blockade of Cuba by threatening tariffs on countries that supply the island with oil (The White House, 2026).  This is a naked attempt to overthrow the Cuban revolution which has withstood US aggression and an extraterritorial blockade for more than six decades that is estimated by the Cuban government to have cumulatively cost their economy $171 billion (Cuba’s Report, 2025: 6).

The United States’ aggressive posturing toward Latin America under the Trump administration has been interpreted as a modernist renewal of President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that ‘the hemisphere belonged to the US’s sphere of influence’ (Sommers, 2026).  Taken together with his threat to ‘acquire Greenland’ (Cole, 2026), diplomatic, financial and military support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and illegal war on Iran, Trump’s renewal of Monroe’s conception of Latin America as Washington’s backyard seems to confirm an abandonment of election pledges ‘to end multiple global conflicts’ (Bazzi, 2026).  Trump’s unvarnished imperialist ambitions (Borger, 2026) are most directly impacting peoples of the global South subjected to US aggression but has rendered the world a more dangerous place by completely upending the rules-based order.  As Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said about how the US will conduct its campaign against Iran: ‘No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.  We fight to win, and we don't waste time or lives’ (US Department of War, 2026). 

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