According to recommendations of the UN Secretary General's Global Education First Initiative, countries and regions require a number of structural changes if they are to implement educational policies and practice based on global citizenship education, and to promote respect and responsibility across cultures. In this paper, we present the first results of a three-year project to compare existing educational policies, strategies and school curricula in ten European Union (EU) countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Spain, Portugal, UK) to ascertain the current level of such structural changes. Through a comparative policy analysis, we investigated whether, to what extent, and how global citizenship education is integrated within primary school curricula. The article focuses on national governmental agencies – specifically two main bodies in each country, the ministries of foreign affairs and education – and their political discourses. We argue that the gap between the two traditions, with separate approaches, purposes, concepts and bureaucracies, represents a strategic political challenge for the introduction of global citizenship education in primary schools.

The Argentinian Dry Chaco has suffered from very high deforestation rates in the last decades, and forest degradation remains an important issue. This study examines the adoption of sustainable silvopastoral practices by smallholder households in the Chaco. Data for the study were collected from 393 families in two municipalities of the Province of Salta. We used multivariate probit (MVP) models to assess land users' decision to adopt three management practices. We show that socio-economic factors (household assets, number of animals), human and social capital (literacy, affiliation with a producer organization), as well as access to financial resources (credit) determine adoption. Secured land tenure also increases the likelihood of adoption, but not as much as we initially hypothesized. We discuss how certain specificities of the area, including difficulties accessing land titles and pressure from the agro-industry, as well as the characteristics of the resource itself -forest grazing areas, some shared by multiple families -might explain this unexpectedly low influence of land tenure on the adoption of sustainable silvopastoral practices.

Deforestation represents an important contributor to climate change. For this reason, identifying conditions that enable the adoption of policies halting or reversing this process is crucial to avoid catastrophic climate change. The Argentinian Gran Chaco is a hotspot of deforestation, mainly due to the expansion of capital-intensive agriculture. In Argentina, the introduction of the national forest law (NFL) represents an important step to protect the remaining forests. However, in the Chaco ecoregion, the implementation of the NFL by the different provinces is extremely heterogeneous. Previous research has provided rich descriptions of the dynamics behind the implementation of the NFL. Yet this research, mainly based on qualitative approaches, does not allow for a systematic analysis of the conditions leading to more or less stringent implementations of the NFL. To address this gap, we first combine the socio-ecological systems (SES) framework with historical materialism (HM) to generate a plausible hypothesis for the heterogeneous implementation of the NFL across he twelve different provinces of the Argentinian Chaco. Specifically, we hypothesise that it is the differences in contextual factors (i.e., differences in forest cover), material/economic conditions (i.e., presence and extent of capital-intensive agriculture) and strength of pro- and anti-deforestation coalitions, which lead to a heterogeneous territorial classification of native forests across the various provinces. Subsequently, we test the hypothesis by developing thick case-studies via qualitative comparative analysis. This approach allows to study in a more systematic way the reasons for the observed institutional heterogeneity. The results show that the proportion of native forests characterised as of low conservation value reflects both the environmental context (i.e., the extent of native forests) as well as the material/economic conditions (i.e., the extent of capital-intensive agriculture) and the presence of strong pro-deforestation cultures, expressed via pro-deforestation coalitions.

Deforestation causes biodiversity loss and the eviction of small-scale ranchers and indigenous people. Accordingly, it is a global issue in environmental politics. This article analyzes a participatory governance system associated with the implementation of Argentina’s forest law in a hotspot of deforestation: the province of Salta in the Gran Chaco ecoregion. Specifically, this article investigates policy actors’ core beliefs, how they match with policy network clusters, and how this affects the implementation of the forest law. The study is based on a unique data set derived from extensive fieldwork and a network survey among all actors who participate in the policy forums. After defining three main core beliefs that describe policy actors’ motivations, we systematically analyze all key actors’ beliefs as well as their interactions in the various policy networks. This analysis shows that it is necessary to empirically identify coalitions based on both behavior and core beliefs to understand the limited implementation of the law. Our methodological approach holds promise for the analysis of other governance systems where multiple stakeholders engage in consensus-oriented decision-making.

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<p>The Gran Chaco represents an important habitat that is undergoing significant changes, as a result of the expansion of the agricultural frontier, with a range of negative social and environmental consequences. Such a change is the result of a “bad transition” from an extensive/subsistence agricultural system towards a capital-intensive one, to which corresponds a completely different level of anthropization. The largest part of the Gran Chaco is located in Argentina. Partially as a response to the rapid loss of natural habitat in the region, Argentina passed a federal forest law in 2007. The law requires the different provinces to introduce a set of implementing regulations and adopt a territorial classification of native forests (TCNF), denoting different conservation values (high, medium and low). Although referring to the same federal law, the TCNFs developed by the various provinces in the Argentinian Chaco ecoregion differ significantly. We first develop a theoretical framework, which combines historical materialism with the theory of socio-ecological systems, to explain the emergence of institutional configurations. Through this framework, we hypothesise that the heterogeneity in the TCNFs results from the combination of contextual factors (i.e., differences in the physical environment among the provinces), material/economic conditions (i.e., production processes, social relationships and reproduction processes) and different forms of agency. We test the hypothesis by developing thick case-studies on the various Argentinian provinces in the Gran Chaco region via qualitative comparative analysis. The results allow determining which configurations co-occur with certain outcomes in terms of TCNFs. The results shed light on the process of emergence of differentiated environmental institutions in the region from the interactions of different conditions, contexts and forms of agency. This knowledge, in turn, could be extremely useful in navigating the Anthropocene while promoting a “good transition” towards sustainability.</p>