Global Citizenship Education in a Time of Polycrisis: Seven Propositions

Abstract

This chapter argues that the current ‘polycrisis’—the intertwined realities of ecological breakdown, widening inequality, resurgent authoritarianism, and persistent coloniality—reshapes what global citizenship education (GCE) must ask, what knowledge it must privilege, and what pedagogical responsibilities it must assume. Against competency-only approaches, the chapter frames GCE as a critical and transformative pedagogical orientation grounded in critical reading of the world, epistemic plurality, and accountable action within supercomplex and contested realities. GCE proposes seven implications for the field: (1) renewed attention to epistemic foundations and epistemic justice, (2) movement beyond instrumental competency framings, (3) pedagogies capable of holding the tension between critique and hope, (4) structural engagement with belonging and exclusion, (5) a planetary reorientation that extends citizenship beyond anthropocentrism, (6) critical engagement with digital mediation and the politics of information, and (7) re-centring Global South and Indigenous scholarship as theory-generating rather than supplementary. The chapter concludes by outlining a research-and-practice agenda for GCE under polycrisis: accountable scholarship, institutionally situated pedagogy, and collective action without romanticizing either ‘the global’ or the ‘citizen’.