Conscientisation and Communities of Compost: Rethinking management pedagogy in an age of climate crises

Abstract

The unprecedented scale of the climate crisis has led to a questioning of conventional approaches to sustainability in management education, centred around business case for sustainability narratives. Such critique gives rise to serious questions around how we approach teaching the universality of the climate crisis, species extinction and biodiversity loss differently. Working with Freire’s stress on the political role of the educator, action rooted in the concrete and the interconnections he establishes between pedagogy and political organisation, our contribution is to connect these interventions with Haraway’s call to stay ‘with the trouble’ and generate Communities of Compost – that is, collective more than human communities of multi-species flourishing. In doing so, we propose threading together ecocentric and political economy approaches in management education, to present an alternative to corporate sustainability solutionism and to politically rethink scalar mismatches – that is when problems and proposed ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis apply to different sets of relations. As a way of addressing this, we develop pedagogical practices around Haraway’s multi-species Communities of Compost and combine this with the political movement of La Via Campesina – focusing on its campaigns for agroecology and food sovereignty.