Five Movements Toward Planetary Futures: Redefining Education Governance Across Worlds

• In Event: Reimagining Education for Planetary Futures: Refusal, Relationality, and Radical Renewal

Proposal

In an age of ecological collapse and epistemic fragmentation, global educational governance faces a profound ontological crisis. Frameworks such as UNESCO’s Futures of Education and OECD’s Education 2030 remain grounded in the very ontologies of progress, universality, and anthropocentrism that produced the crises (Komatsu, Rappleye, & Silova, 2020; Machado de Oliveira, 2021). This conceptual paper argues that the crisis is not only about governance but about how governance itself is conceived. To imagine planetary futures otherwise, education governance must move beyond nation-state sovereignty, human exceptionalism, and universalizing epistemologies toward relational and pluriversal approaches.

Drawing on Indigenous, postcolonial, feminist, and multispecies scholarship (e.g., Kimmerer, 2013; Millán, 2024; Tlostanova, 2023), we conceptualize this shift through five movements: recognition, refusal, relation, responsibility, and reworlding. These map a trajectory from critique to co-creation, and from extractive governance to regenerative world-making.

Recognition asks whose knowledge counts and what worlds are erased. Global frameworks privilege Western epistemologies while relegating Indigenous, Southern, and more-than-human knowledges (Quijano, 2007). Recognition unsettles this hierarchy, exposing how “progress” and “quality” disguise colonial logics (de la Cadena, 2015). It does not romanticize alternatives but insists on taking them seriously, creating conditions for refusal, relation, and reworlding.
Refusal insists recognition is not enough. As Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. Refusal resists epistemic extraction and assimilationist inclusion, disrupting frameworks so plural sovereignties and ontologies can stand on their own. In divided worlds, refusal becomes peace-building by protecting difference from erasure.
Relation names the move from refusal to connection, asking how to build bridges without collapsing difference. Relational governance foregrounds encounter and co-presence, holding open equivocations (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). It calls for portals, not pipelines (Escobar, 2020), and for world-traveling (Lugones, 1987), cultivating humility across divides and shifting governance from scaling up to scaling sideways.
Responsibility turns relation into commitment. Responsibility insists knowledge is situated and engagement requires obligations to people and more-than-human beings. It resists extractive practices (Tlostanova, 2023) and cultivates reciprocity through activism, art, and slow research (Stengers, 2017). Governance thus becomes an ethic of care, honoring worlds on their own terms.
Reworlding gathers these movements into a practice of imagining governance otherwise. It reframes education beyond human-centered frameworks toward planetary entanglements: Gaian relationality (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974), Pachamama (de Oliveira, 2021), and Earth Democracy (Shiva, 2005). Legal innovations like Rights of Nature show how rivers, forests, and ecosystems can be recognized as subjects, shifting governance from control to care. Reworlding is a commitment to world-with, where rivers teach, forests are kin, and students co-create futures.
By articulating these five interdependent movements, this paper offers a grammar for reimagining planetary educational governance. It critiques the universalist logics of mainstream frameworks and advances cosmopolitical orientations (Stengers, 2005) that sustain coexistence. In addressing the CIES 2026 theme “Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World,” it argues peace cannot emerge from homogenizing governance but only through cultivating ethical relations across radical difference. Education governance is not simply about policy but about the worlds we choose to sustain.

Authors

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Victoria Desimoni, Arizona State University

• Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University

• Carla Andrea Sabbatini, Universidad De San Andrés