Abstract
Education is considered an essential tool for achieving sustainability-related goals. In this regard, education for sustainable development (ESD) and climate change education (CCE) have become prominent concepts. The central characteristics of both concepts influence the non-hierarchical network governance structure that has formed around them: (1) their international origin, (2) the conceptual ambiguity that surrounds them, and (3) the limited implementing power of international organizations who developed these concepts. Hence, networks are essential to ESD and CCE, however, only few studies have used social network analysis (SNA) techniques to analyze their governance structure. The aim of this article is to illustrate how to use SNA, based on Twitter data, as an approach to examine the governance structure that has developed around ESD and CCE. We conduct an illustrative SNA, using Twitter data during three global climate change summits (2015-2017) to examine CCE-specific debates and identify actors exerting the most influence. We find that international organizations and international treaty secretariats are most influential across all years of the analysis and, moreover, are represented most often. These findings show that using SNA based on Twitter data offers promising possibilities to better understand the governance structure and processes around both concepts.
Highlights
Since the beginning of the debate on sustainable development with the so-called “Brundtland Report” in 1987 [1], education has been considered a crucial tool for achieving sustainability-related goals
Among the most popular examples are the concepts of education for sustainable development (ESD) and climate change education (CCE), which have been implemented by several international organizations (IOs) and by national governments around the world
This structure can be attributed to the three basic characteristics of the ESD and CCE concepts laid out in Section 2: The international origin of both concepts, their conceptual ambiguity, and the limited sanctioning power of the international organizations that promote them
Summary
Since the beginning of the debate on sustainable development with the so-called “Brundtland Report” in 1987 [1], education has been considered a crucial tool for achieving sustainability-related goals. The implementation of ESD and CCE at the global, national, and regional levels requires a set of actors who are interlinked through social relations in a respective governance structure. Three aspects influence this governance structure: First, both concepts have been developed at the international level, mainly by international organizations or within international treaty systems, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). SNA enables researchers to identify the most influential actors within a governance network in an indirect manner, that is, without the need to directly observe this influence. We discuss our results and show future research directions
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