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

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). 

Trump’s theatre of cruelty

Trump’s domestic policies have been equally devoid of a rights-based framing and have included performative acts of cruelty visited mostly on migrant communities and undocumented workers but including American citizens.  As Henry Giroux writes in this issue of Policy and Practice: ‘State violence has become a public spectacle, disinformation has supplanted truth, and the democratic bonds of shared responsibility have withered into a corrosive politics of shared fear’.  The murder by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis of Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse on 7 and 24 January 2026 respectively while peacefully protesting the cruelty of Trump’s anti-immigration progrom, sent a shudder of fear and anger across the entire nation (St. Clair, 2026a).  Jeffrey St. Clair presciently summarised the aim of the ICE operations: ‘to inflict maximum cruelty on a vulnerable population that it has used as a scapegoat for the decline of the American economy, resulting from four decades of ruthless neoliberal policies’ (2026b).  Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has been a relentless purveyor of far-right rhetoric with a speech in May 2025 decrying what he described as ‘cancerous, communist, woke culture that is destroying this country’ and called for the dismantling of policies on diversity, equity and inclusion, and transgender medical treatments (Viser and Wootson Jr., 2025).  In chilling rhetoric recalling fascist Europe of the 1930s, Miller said: ‘Children will be taught to love America.  Children will be taught to be patriots’ (Ibid.). 

‘Trump is only a symptom, not the cause of our troubles’, wrote Henry Giroux (2016) after Trump’s 2016 presidential election, adding that ‘Global capitalism is the monster and Trump is its most dangerous, confused and hateful messenger’.  In an atomised society created by neoliberalism, poverty is presented as the result of individual failings and success the product of hard work, ingenuity and entrepreneurship.  But according to Oxfam (2025: 7), 60 percent of billionaire wealth comes ‘from either inheritance, cronyism and corruption or monopoly power’ - not from hard graft.  Those at the other end of the economic scale on low wages are finding that employment is no longer a firewall from poverty.  Polling by the Living Wage Foundation (2025) in the UK has found that ‘3 in 5 low-paid workers (59 percent) were forced to skip meals regularly, were unable to heat their homes, fell behind on bills or took out a pay-day loan to cover their essentials in the past year because of their level of pay’.  At a macro level, the World Inequality Report (2026) has found that the top ten percent of the world’s population control 53 percent of income and 73 percent of wealth.  The bottom 50 percent controls just 8 percent of income and 2 percent of wealth; a staggering picture of global inequality facilitated and accelerated by neoliberalism (Ibid.).  These extreme levels of economic injustice are both pushing people into deeper levels of poverty and fueling support for the far-right.  Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, warned that: ‘From London to Lisbon, politicians from centre-right and centre-left parties alike had steadily eroded social programmes, fostering a sense of scarcity and creating fertile ground for the stirring up of anti-migrant sentiment’ (Kassam, 2025).

The interconnectivity of the meta crisis

There has been a striking interconnectivity to the crises currently assailing democratic spaces and institutions.  Many of these crises are rooted in the collusion of global minority states in Europe and North America with Israel’s genocide in Gaza which has undermined the norms and conventions of international humanitarian law and the institutions set up to uphold them (Albanese, 2024).  Amnesty International (2024) has concluded that Israel ‘has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity’.  Francesca Albanese (2025a), the United Nations (UN) Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian Territories (oPT), has reported on the extent of corporate complicity in Israel’s settler-colonialism of Palestine finding that ‘the law governing corporate responsibility has deep roots in the historic relationship between violent dispossession and private power and the legacy of corporate collusion with settler-colonialism and racial segregation’ (Albanese, 2025a: 3).  Albanese has also reported on the complicity of ‘third states’ in enabling ‘long-standing systematic violations of international law by Israel’ (2025b: 2).  The legal obligations on all states ‘not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’ was set out in a July 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ, 2024: 18). 

Despite this ruling, Francesca Albanese (2025b: 3) has named 63 third states as complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation and yet it is activists protesting against this complicity who have regularly been targeted by their governments.  In the UK, 2,500 protestors were arrested for publicly supporting Palestine Action, a direct action movement that was proscribed by the British government as a terrorist group.  On 13 February 2026, the government’s proscription was over-turned by the high court as ‘disproportionate and unlawful’ as their (Palestine Action’s) ‘activities had not reached the level, scale and persistence to be defined as terrorism’ (Siddique, 2026).  While this was an important victory for the right to protest, the original ban reflected how far fundamental freedoms, once taken for granted, were being constrained and criminalised by governments.  University campuses across the world have seen student protests against the genocide in Gaza (Williams, 2024) with many encampments brutally suppressed by their governments which have been prepared to strip the rights of citizens to defend corporate and state complicity in Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine (Levin, 2025).

The complicity of states in the genocide in Gaza and their preparedness to defend their illegality at all costs up to the point of incarcerating, deporting and inflicting violence on protestors is arguably the epicentre of the meta crisis.  As the political activist and academic, Angela Davis, has said: ‘Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world’ (Davis, 2023) which means educators should self-assess the extent to which they pass that test and support a pedagogy of resistance to the rising tide of fascism, normalised violence, extremism and genocide.  We are living in dangerous times that demand what Henry Giroux (2025: 145) describes as an ‘educated hope’ that confronts the ‘constraints facing the struggle for a radical democratic society’ and creates the preconditions ‘for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present, for not making the present the future’.

Confronting the meta crisis

Issue 42 of Policy and Practice carries contributions from authors based in Ethiopia, India, and Indonesia, as well as several European states.  It’s a reflection of the development education sector’s growing recognition and practice in education sectors and societies across the world.  Four of the Focus contributions to Issue 42 are concerned with the practice of development education in alternative settings underscoring the sector’s flexibility and capacity to support learning beyond the formality of mainstream education.  Gertrude Cotter’s article reflects on the ‘critical global justice education’ co-created by students who established Camp Saoirse, a six-week student encampment on the campus of University College Cork (UCC) to ‘protest their university’s institutional and financial links to companies complicit in Israel’s actions in Gaza’.  The article draws upon interviews with nine of the participating students who reflected on the pedagogical outcomes from the encampment which included ‘practiced democratic decision-making’ and engagement in a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’.  The encampment not only functioned as a form of political intervention but as an alternative pedagogical site that extended beyond the ‘boundaries of formal higher education’.  The article’s implications for the development education sector include the lesson that ‘mainstream educational structures often prioritise cognitive knowledge and abstract analysis, neglecting the embodied, affective, and political dimensions of learning’.  This is a salutary learning point for the development education sector in Ireland which has largely restricted its solidarity work with Palestine to mainstream learning spaces rather than engage in non-direct actions such as ‘occupations, vigils and picket lines’.

The second Focus article that champions alternative pedagogical spaces to traditional formal sector education is by Aris Sarjito and Nora Lelyana, who draw from a qualitative thematic discourse analysis of secondary sources to present evidence of home-based learning by urban communities across the global South.  Their five-year period of analysis (2019-2024) includes the COVID-19 pandemic when school closures forced mothers to operate ‘as de facto educators, transforming domestic spaces into sites of learning grounded in care, emotional labour, and critical awareness’.  The authors show how the home was redeployed ‘as a legitimate site of development education praxis’ and their article calls for the validation of ‘maternal pedagogies’ that exemplify core principles of development education such as critical consciousness and participative learning.  Development education in alternative settings is also the focus of an article by Katie Chapple and Joanne O’Flaherty which is centred on Youthreach, a state-funded employability programme for early school leavers aged between 15 and 20 years.  The article presents findings from a study carried out by WorldWise Global Schools, a national post-primary programme for development education, that explores how five educators in Youthreach centres and an alternative setting have practiced global learning outside formal, mainstream delivery.  The study reveals how learners’ direct experience of marginalisation and exclusion helped to foster their agency and critical consciousness.  It also revealed the pedagogical benefits of student-led experiential and cross-curricular practices focused on global issues such as climate activism.  The authors’ deliver a valedictory assessment of the positive pedagogical outcomes of delivering development education in alternative settings suggesting that it contributes ‘to broader reflections on pedagogical approaches within mainstream education, alongside ongoing considerations around leadership and resourcing for GCE’.

The fourth Focus article in Issue 42, based on research in alternative settings, has been submitted by four researchers from the University of Zaragova in Spain - Ana Cristina Blasco-Serrano, Jorge Bernad-Vicente, Ana Virginia López-Fuentes and Esperanza Cid-Romero – who reflect on a participatory action-research project in Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria.  The research was initiated by the Sahrawi Education Ministry and Sahrawi teachers to enable the latter ‘to reflect on and reconstruct their educational practices’.  The research sought to co-create transformative teaching approaches that supported the critical thinking and autonomy of students.  The researchers visited the camps bi-annually and established WhatsApp groups to maintain remote learning as part of participatory action-research that nurtured ‘political, socially engaged, democratic action, based on horizontal relations, with real participation, avoiding the traditional hierarchies between investigators and those being investigated’. The multifaceted research included interviews and focus groups with Ministry of Education civil servants, head teachers, teachers and students, counsellors and inspectors. Teacher questionnaires reflected meaningful shifts in pedagogical approaches in the classroom using more critical, transformative and interactive methodologies.  The research outcomes included enhanced teacher confidence and pedagogical skills and new opportunities for peer learning in ‘processes of reflection, deconstruction and construction of knowledge’.  It has also created more horizontal management practices in what was a very hierarchical education system.  In commenting on the application of Freirean methodologies in a refugee community, the authors / researchers suggest that ‘collaborating with refugees operating on the margins of society in the global South, is both a vindication and exemplar of the sector’s radical pedagogical process’.  The training and pedagogy of teachers in a refugee community has been rarely researched by the development education community, so this article is potentially ground-breaking in establishing a valuable baseline for future practice.

While alternative settings provide new opportunities for debating the meta crisis with learners, formal education remains a critically important statutory provider of development education to students.  The Focus article by Brighid Golden, Jenny Gannon, Benjamin Mallon and Fiachra Kennedy is concerned with how Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) navigate the delivery of development education in their first year as practicing teachers.  The article is based on a case study of four NQTs who have received initial teacher education (ITE) from the DICE (Development and Intercultural Education) Project, a longstanding and well-regarded national programme in Ireland that delivers ITE at primary level.  In interviews with the NQTs, the authors reveal the ‘opportunities and constraints in implementing global citizenship education, shaped by school culture, curriculum priorities, and the broader context of intersecting global crises’.  The teachers shared how the meta crisis has impacted their practice through the questions, behaviours and emotions of their students who have ‘lived experiences of the global issues emerging in the classroom, whether it be racism, war and conflict, or migration’.  The authors call for deeper research engagement with more diverse groups of NQTs to ‘investigate how different ITE pathways, including those which don’t include a specialism in GCE, shape teachers’ long‑term engagement with global justice issues in the classroom’.

Bridging the gap between policy and practice

The first of six Perspectives articles in Issue 42 is a laudatory critique of the development education sector’s silence on the genocide in Gaza and settler-colonialism of Palestine (Murphy, 2024) by five early career researchers: Maayke de Vries, Małgorzata Anielka Pieniążek, Diego Posada Gonzalez, Riikka Suhonen, and Luca Vittori.  They have been actively involved in Palestinian solidarity activism in their respective higher education institutions and ‘share the increasingly explicit critique of the field that exposes its hypocrisy: employing value laden terms without accompanying actions’.  Their response has been to engage with Palestinian scholars and literature to identify ways to shift the sector from silence to action and ensure that normative commitments are translated into effective activism.  This engagement has led them to solidarity with and for Palestine and Palestinians.  Solidarity with Palestine ‘entails working alongside Palestinians in collective struggle, grounded in relationality and shared political commitment’.  Solidarity for Palestine ‘refers to actions that disrupt the erasure of Palestinian voices within curricula, research, and institutional structures’.  The article usefully carries a list of questions that development educators can use to reflect on their practice and ensure that their work is informed by Palestinian voices and literature.  Policy and Practice has long championed the need for the development education sector to break its silence on Palestine and this article commendably addresses that by listening to Palestinians, learning ‘from their pedagogies of resistance and joy’, and calling for action.

Perspectives articles are concerned with the practice of development education and often reflect the gap between policy and delivery.  That is the case in Getaw Girma Zemedu’s article about the language policy of the Ethiopian government which has supported aptitude in English at the expense of Indigenous languages.  The Ethiopian government promotes an ‘inclusive education policy’ but this is inconsistently implemented.  The author argues that integrating the dynamic development education pedagogy with critical language pedagogy (CLP) can assist in narrowing the gap between policy and practice.  The article identifies a role for development education in supporting the professional development of language teachers and supporting curriculum design toward introducing critical enquiry and participative learning in Ethiopia’s language education system.  A highly internationalised Perspectives’ collection includes an article by Shashikant Nishant Sharma that advocates the application of development education in the training of urban planners in India to ‘re-centre values of participation, equity, and interdependence’.  Urban planning education is currently dominated by ‘technocratic and formalist models’ that ‘often privileges economic growth’.  It argues that integrating critical pedagogies into the urban planning curricula can ‘interrogate systemic drivers of inequality, ecological degradation, and authoritarian governance’.  It can also offer ‘both a critique of the present and a pathway to reimagining education as a site of resistance and reconstruction in times of crisis’. 

The fourth Perspectives article shares the findings of a systematic literature review on poverty in Northern Ireland which was commissioned by the Centre for Global Education, development non-governmental organisation based in Belfast, and carried out by researchers from the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work in Queen’s University Belfast.  The three researchers – Canan Ozkaya, Qurat Ul Ain and Allen Thurston – have summarised their findings in this article which includes a comparative analysis of poverty in Northern Ireland with the Group of 12 industrially advanced economies.  The report reflects how neoliberal policy making has increased the vulnerability of marginalised groups in society, increased inequality to dangerous levels and concentrated capital accumulation in the hands of the few.  This is a valuable micro study of poverty in a small regional economy on the edge of Europe which reflects the extent to which the meta crisis is permeating into societies in the global North.

The fifth Perspectives article is authored by Colette Saunders, the Early Years Development Education Officer with Trócaire, an Irish international development agency.  Her article is a blueprint for an early childhood workshop focused on climate justice and activism, and framed by Aistear, the early Irish childhood curriculum framework and the Sustainable Development Goals.  The workshop also aims to debate children’s rights in the context of climate and the environment, and enable young people to become ‘agentic, competent and confident global citizens’.  The climate emergency is framed by the workshop as a form of injustice and inequality experienced by young people, and therefore a matter of intergenerational justice.  The article and workshop offer the prospect of valuable peer education for development educators interested in introducing climate justice into early years education.  

The sixth Perspectives article has been written by Portuguese educators, Carlota Quintão and Sara Borges, who are part of the community of practitioners engaged with the delivery of a project called Sinergias ED.  The project aims to create collaborative learning spaces between civil society organisations (CSOs) and higher education institutions (HEIs), promoting participatory action research and supporting the co-production of knowledge.  The article is concerned with the challenges of evaluating the nuances of development education practice within a linear, deductive and performative model that has been advanced by government bodies within the sector.  The article particularly rails against the theory of change evaluative framework characterised by rigid frameworks leading to pre-designed outcomes and based upon pre-determined assumptions.  This neoliberal evaluative paradigm has become increasingly prominent in Portugal since the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent financialisation of social policies and impact assessment.  The article asks if development educators will continue to have the freedom to experiment and evaluate their practice using the same kind of participative methodologies that characterise their practice.

Henry Giroux’s Viewpoint article for Issue 42 titled ‘Higher Education in the Time of Fascist Plague’, is an urgent call for the defence of higher education from ‘fascist and neoliberal control’.  Universities, argues Giroux, have been turned into ‘battlegrounds for democracy’s future’, given the criminalisation of dissent to Israel’s genocide on campuses across the United States and the contesting of truth and civic memory.  Giroux calls for the preserving of universities as sites of ‘knowledge production and democratic possibility’ to ensure the cultivating of ‘agency, solidarity, and critical awareness’.  He adds that: ‘Higher education must reclaim academic freedom, dissent, critical thought, and democratic governance not as abstract principles but as urgent practices of resistance’. 

As we face into the meta crisis as educators, the content of Issue 42 has been an important reminder of Paulo Freire’s enduring influence as a radical practitioner across the world.  His work has been cited by many of the authors published in this issue because it assumes increasing importance in developing pedagogies of resistance against rising tide of global authoritarianism.  In the words of Henry Giroux about his friend and colleague: ‘For Freire, education and schooling were part of a larger struggle against capitalism, neoliberalism, authoritarianism, fascism, and the depoliticisation and instrumentalisation of education’ (Giroux, 2021: 115).  Adding that ‘Freire’s spirit and politics are not to be celebrated but emulated’ (Ibid: 117).

Remembering Dip Kapoor

Finally, it was with great sadness that the Policy and Practice community learned of the untimely passing of Dip Kapoor, Professor in Social Justice and International Studies in Education at the University of Alberta, Canada in August 2025.  Dip was a member of the Policy and Practice International Editorial Board and a renowned scholar and author in the fields of education and international development, with a particular focus on social movements in the global South.  Giselle Thompson, a longstanding colleague and friend of Dip, has written a moving and fulsome tribute to his political pedagogy for Issue 42 of the journal.

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Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education and Editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review.