The Swedish International Training Programme in Education for Sustainable Development, which has been run annually for the past 10 years, is a five-phase program that supports participants to develop and implement a change project in their work places. It requires a team of students from an institution and provides extensive follow up. The course…

The concept of Big Society provides inspiration--working "bottom up" to promote "collective action, reciprocity and a new, more engaged relationship between local people and public services". With so much written about the theory of the Big Society, this seems like an ideal time to put a little more practical detail into the mix. The authors argue…

This paper explores the practices of one small non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Mindanao working innovatively to challenge power and interests by linking resources to local communities who control their productivity. While this may seem like social capital, I suggest that the agency over production, and the deeply political and ideological…

This paper provides a critical interpretation of food security politics in the UK. It applies the notion of food security collective action frames to assess how specific action frames are maintained and contested. The interdependency between scale and framing in food security discourse is also scrutinised. It does this through an examination of…

This paper explores the relationship between global, regional and local influences on adult literacy policy and practice in the UK through a discourse analysis of policy-related texts. The analysis is framed by theoretical perspectives from literacy studies and socio-material theory. The paper identifies a number of specific features in the UK…

Researchers suggest there is an increasing apathy in the study of natural history in academic settings and in the scientific community. However, most studies of environmental knowledge do not address knowledge of local flora and fauna; they are concerned with the knowledge of environmental issues or broad ecological knowledge. Ecoliteracy…

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of a New York City-based third-sector organization focused on what it calls "food justice." This study concentrates on how this organization, that I call Food Rights, has built a broad multi-sector network made up of a varied set of constituents and collaborators aiming to develop and promote an…

A focus on the changes in the relationship between international cooperation and local actors in the skills development field in Peru as the country strengthened its financial position in the last two decades allows us to examine the role of the economic factor in these changes. The paper argues that indeed there is an association between the two.…

This article examines what a pedagogy of public rhetoric and community literacy might look like based on an understanding of twentieth century Mexican American civil rights rhetoric. The inductive process of examining archival materials and conducting oral histories informs this discussion on the processes and challenges of gaining civic…

Community-Based Social Marketing is presented as a technique to add to Extension's community economic development toolbox by examining perceived benefits and barriers to local food procurement at publicly funded institutions. Data were gathered through 86 in-person interviews with representatives across the supply chain. The findings revealed that…

The authors of this research brief were co-principal investigators on a grant awarded by the IRP RIDGE Center for National Food and Nutrition Assistance Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in partnership with the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Their project, summarized here, was one of five proposals…

Although the role of education in addressing the challenges of climate change is increasingly recognized, the education sector remains underutilized as a strategic resource to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Education stakeholders in many countries have yet to develop a coherent framework for climate change education (CCE). This article…

This article discusses the findings of the commission set up jointly by NIACE, the Association of Colleges (AoC) and the 157 Group to investigate the role of colleges in their communities. The commission learned that: (1) further education colleges are, often, already embedded in their communities; (2) although there has been some simplification,…

Purpose: With the advance of globalization the competitive chances of industrial districts depends increasingly on their ability to connect to the cognitive circuits of the global economy. This challenge demands the presence of local actors capable of acting as cognitive interfaces between the district context and the global environment. The paper…

This paper describes and analyses the work of a large scale improvement project in England in order to find more effective ways of fostering equity within education systems. The project involved an approach based on an analysis of local context, and used processes of networking and collaboration in order to make better use of available expertise.…