Last week, the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences published “The challenge of coordinated civic climate change education.” The project was born from the multi-state Power Dialog in 2016, a coordinated civic climate change education initiative started by Eban Goldstein at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy and carried out in 20 states across the nation. Through the Power Dialog, we brought students in touch with governors, their aids, regulators, and legislators to provide constructive input on the implementation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (see the abstract below).
In 2016, Eban, Rob Alexander (James Madison University), and I presented on this topic at the Association for the Environmental Studies and Sciences conference at American University in Washington, D.C. We realized that we had some research-informed insights and stories that could help other faculty create similar educational initiatives, even at different scales. So we reached out to some of our peers in Maryland, New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania to make sure we had rich anecdotes and a strong theoretical background.I think we have a few strong insights regarding practice that bear on theory. First, we learned that the commitment to the policy was integral to implementation of the Power Dialog. When the Supreme Court put a stay on the Clean Power Plan (CPP), Republican governors cancelled activities related to the CPP, including public input. Second, our intercollegiate relationships made reduced coordination costs and made joining in both easier and more effective. Third, our own academic and student life programs within our colleges and universities provided ready-built platforms for excellent participation. Our observations and analysis of the Power Dialog provide evidence for Kingdon’s and others’ theories of policy windows, Best and Best’s theories of behavioral economics, Keast’s theories of cooperating, coordinating, and collaborating, and more anecdotally, the effectiveness of commitments to civically engaged education in a democratic republic in the spirit of Horton and Dewey.
Finally, I want to thank my co-authors, Eban Goodstein, Rob Alexander, Barry Muchnick, Mary Ellen Mallia, Neil Leary, Rob Andrejewski, and Susannah Barsom. It was a true team effort with many many months of back and forth, revisions, corrections, and resolutions of tone.
- ABSTRACT: Many sustainability educators want to more effectively engage their students with climate policy. They also seek to support students’ civic and change agent skills and dispositions to take on critical social, economic, and environmental challenges that require collective action. Training young people for civic leadership and collective action is integral to the mission of higher education and part of achieving that mission has been to share success stories. This article shares anecdotal but research-informed reflections on the Power Dialog, a twenty-state, multi-month, civically minded, coordinated climate change educational program developed for college students to provide input to state governments on the Clean Power Plan. The Power Dialog was crafted on theories and practices of democratic education, behavioral economics, policy theory, and up-to-date climate science and risk assessments. This reflection shows that factors in state government, strong interinstitutional networks and leadership, and programs inside of the universities themselves were critical for success. The article concludes by recognizing that the national, state, and local political landscapes have shifted with the Trump administration and educators will need to respond accordingly.
Peter Walks for Democracy 