Policy & Practice - A Development Education Review

 

 

Submission Guidelines

 

ISSN: 2053-4272

Issue 42 Call for Contributors

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

 

  • Deadline for abstract submissions is Friday, 26 September 2025

  • Deadline for article submissions is Friday, 5 December 2025

  • Publication date is Spring 2026

  • Download abstract submission form

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Policy and Practice is a peer reviewed, bi-annual, open access journal published by the Centre for Global Education, a non-governmental development organisation based in Belfast.  First published in 2005, Policy and Practice aims to provide a space for development education (DE) practitioners to critically reflect on their practice, discuss the main challenges faced by the sector and debate new policy developments.  Development education uses an active learning, participative approach to education that addresses the root causes of poverty and injustice and seeks to enable learners to take action toward positive social change.  It draws upon Paulo Freire's concept of praxis that combines reflection and action to support a meaningful intervention in reality.   Policy and Practice aims to: share new research in development education; celebrate and promote good practice in DE; enhance collaboration between development education and related adjectival education sectors; further mainstream development education within the statutory education sector in Ireland; and provide opportunities for exchange and debate between educators from the global North and South.

Policy and Practice has a designated website (www.developmenteducationreview.com) which contains an archive of all previous 38 issues which are available for viewing online and for downloading.  The journal is listed on Scopus (H-Index 2) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  In 2023, the Policy and Practice web site received 149,435 unique visits from countries in the global North and South.  Policy and Practice articles have generated 5,275 citations that have appeared in 761 journals, 373 books and 452 dissertations.

ABOUT THE THEME

The Centre for Global Education is inviting contributions to Issue 42 of our bi-annual, peer reviewed, open access journal Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review on the theme: Pedagogical Responses to the Meta Crisis: The Role of Development Education.  While the poly crisis is concerned with the entanglement of multiple crises impacting our world including: the rise of the far-right; accelerating poverty; global heating; the curtailing of democratic rights; and demonisation of the ‘other’, meta crisis seeks to understand the systemic causes of these crises.  It neatly aligns with development education’s concern with the root causes of local and global injustices and inequalities.  As Freire suggested: ‘in order to surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognise its causes’.  

Issue 42 calls for articles that thoughtfully reflect on how the development education sector can deploy its radical pedagogy to determine the interconnectivity of the crises currently assailing democratic spaces and institutions.  Many of these crises are exacerbated by 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.  Amnesty International has concluded that Israel ‘has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity’.  Francesca Albanese, the UN Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian Territory, has also reported on the 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’.

While western states have failed to implement international law and end the genocide in Gaza, they have used emergency legislation to silence domestic dissent to their complicity.  For example, the British government has used terror legislation to proscribe a non-violent direct action movement, Palestine Action, which could make it a criminal offence punishable up to 14 years in jail to be a member of or to support the group.  And in the United States, the Trump has canceled more than 300 visas, mostly of foreign nationals who have been involved in pro-Palestinian campus protests.  At the same, the Department of Homeland Security has pressed immigration agents ‘to jack up immigration-related arrests to at least 3,000 people a day’.   These measures are creating terror across the US as migrants, students, and minority ethnic communities live in fear of arrest and possible deportation.

‘The ongoing assaults on democracy, both domestically and globally’ argues Henry Giroux, ‘are not isolated events but part of the groundwork laid by gangster capitalism for the rise of fascism in American society’.  The scourge of neoliberalism has also taken root in higher education with universities becoming ‘spaces that prioritize economic outputs over intellectual autonomy, turning critical thought and democratic engagement into commodities’.  Stephen Ball has written about the performativity of teaching in an ‘advanced liberal way’ in which personal beliefs, values and commitments are set aside for an ‘existence of calculation’.    The performative individual succumbs to ‘targets, indicators and evaluations’ at the expense of authenticity, critical learning and transformative dialogue.  Under neoliberalism, employability, growth and the needs of the economy are asserted above the protection and rights of the planet’s ecology and the multilateral efforts needed to reduce our unsustainable dependence on high carbon pathways.  Rather than problematise growth and the accumulation of extreme wealth, and address the systemic causes of ecological breakdown, the Sustainable Development Goals are paralysed by their own alignment with the same failed economic model.

Issue 42 also seeks articles that reflect on challenges and opportunities posed by Artificial Intelligence.  UNESCO argues that AI raises profound ethical concerns that arise from ‘the potential AI systems have to embed biases, contribute to climate degradation, threaten human rights and more’.  While AI can undoubtedly enhance educational accessibility, improve access to data and free teachers from time-consuming administrative chores, it can also pose a threat to independent thought.  Authors may be interested in offering an opinion on how the development education sector should respond to the potential impact of AI on our practice and policy environment.  And, finally authors are asked to reflect on their own practice and the response of the wider development education and international development sectors to the meta crisis.  Previous issues of Policy and Practice have identified silences from the DE sector to the genocide in Gaza, to neoliberalism, to the rise of the far-right and the threats to democracy.  How can the sector reconnect with its radical origins and shake itself free of its inertia?

Authors are invited to consider submitting contributions to Issue 42 of Policy and Practice that address one or more of the following:

  • The corrosive effects of Western complicity in the genocide in Gaza and its wider implications for democratic expression, dissent, activism, human rights, international humanitarian law and the practice of development education?
  • The performativity of teaching and the dowsing of radicalism, critical thinking and innovation in formal education. 
  • How do we know it’s working? How does a sector with a radical methodology like development education demonstrate its impact within instrumental evaluation systems?
  • The importance of systemic thinking in development education and as an approach to understand and tackle the meta crisis.
  • The challenges, threats and opportunities posed by Artificial Intelligence and how development education should respond.
  • How to align the advocacy work of development educators with the challenges posed by the meta crisis.
  • Sharing case studies of good practice in development education that align the sector’s pedagogy with the problems posed by the meta crisis.
  • How can development education build alliances with social movements that share our values to challenge the rise of the far-right?
  • How are global food systems to be sustained in an age of climate, waste, and unsustainable growth?
  • How can the sector reconnect with its radical origins and shake itself free of its inertia?

Authors interested in submitting an article to Issue 40 should send a completed abstract submission form to journal editor, Stephen McCloskey, by Friday, 26 September 2025.  Please email: stephen@centreforglobaleducation.com.  The submission date for commissioned articles is Friday, 5 December 2025.  

Article Types

There are four kinds of article published in Policy and Practice. 

  • Focus articles are peer reviewed, between 5,000 and 6,000 words, and should have a strong critical and theoretical analysis of their topic. 
  • Perspectives articles which are 3,000 – 5,000 words in length and more descriptive, addressing an aspect of development education practice. 
  • Viewpoint articles which are 2,000 – 4,000 words in length and opinion pieces on burning issues related to DE policy and practice. 
  • Review articles are 1,000-2,000 words in length and offer an opinion of a new book, film, teaching resource or online site on development issues. 

Policy and Practice is on Facebook

Please ‘like’ the journal on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/policyandpractice. We will post journal updates on the Facebook page. 

Policy and Practice is funded by Irish Aid.

This document has been published as part of a development education project funded by Irish Aid at the Department of Foreign Affairs. Irish Aid is the Government’s overseas development programme which supports partners working in some of the world’s poorest countries. Irish Aid also supports global citizenship and development education in Ireland to encourage learning and public engagement with global issues. The ideas, opinions and comments herein are entirely the responsibility of the Centre for Global Education and do not necessarily represent or reflect DFA policy

For further information contact:
Stephen McCloskey
Editor
Centre for Global Education
9 University Street
Belfast BT7 1FY
Tel: (0044) 2890 241879

E-mail: stephen@centreforglobaleducation.com
Web: www.centreforglobaleducation.com 
Facebook: www.facebook.com/centreforglobaleducation

X: @GCEDevEdReview

www.developmenteducationreview.com

July 2025