The EarthCARE Global Justice framework emerged out of an international R&D network of eco-social learning initiatives that seek to integrate ecological, cognitive, affective, relational, and economic (EarthCARE) approaches to local and global justice.
This framework is intended to push the boundaries of prevailing approaches to global change and related definitions of ‘global citizenship’, ‘development’, ‘success’, and ‘sustainability’ beyond problematic patterns of simplistic analyses and engagements well documented in research. The framework aims to support the design of deep learning processes that explore ‘alternative approaches to engagement with alternatives’, moving beyond the search for universal models and problem-solving approaches towards preparing people to work together with and through the complexities, uncertainties, paradoxes, and complicities that characterize efforts to address unprecedented global challenges collaboratively today.
The EarthCARE framework proposes a vision of deep transformational learning processes that combine practical doing (together), the building of trust (in one another), deepening analyses (of self, systems, and social and ecological complexity), and dismantling walls (between peoples, knowledges, and cultures). In this vision, intellectual engagements, the arts, ethics, cosmovisions, the environment, and embodied practices are all understood as important conduits for learning. The framework invites learners to explore the contributions, paradoxes, and limits of their current problem-posing and problem-solving paradigms, to engage experientially with alternative practices that challenge the limits of their thinking and capabilities, and to contribute to the creation of new paradigms of social change that open up not-yet-imaginable possibilities for co-existence in the future.
The EarthCARE Global Justice Framework is a useful conceptual framework for those interested in exploring or developing more complex (critical) approaches to GCE that are grounded in (academic) research and based on experiential and embodied learning practices. Organisations that are part of the EarthCARE Network are each developing their own unique ways of engagement with the multifaceted questions of global justice, based on their specific contexts.