Can we learn from Copenhagen disappointment?

It is difficult not to be disappointed by the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Expectations had been high for so long with the urgency and scale of the issue and because, at long last, of the involvement of the United States in the event. The failure seemed all the worse given that, these days, we’re often told we mustn’t fail. We’re used now to working all hours on projects until they’re complete and being told we need to stay in countries we’ve invaded ‘until the job is done’. There seemed no reason for the event to end without a result. Why couldn’t they stay on until they reached agreement? What else did they have to do that was more Urgent/Important in their little priorities matrix? The determination and speed at which the banking system was bailed out in 2008 doesn’t seem to be on offer to the planet as a whole.

 

Perhaps the agreement Obama worked on with China, India and South Africa will start move things. It is irritating for the US (or Europe) to lecture China on reducing emissions when so much of it comes from manufacturing products imported by western corporations to sell to western consumers. This exporting of pollution by the west to developing countries is a ‘market failure’ aspect of globalisation as much as the toxic debt that has crippled the world economy and exposed neo-liberal self-regulation ‘certainties’. Equally, I can’t understand how China, with a significant leadership position in the G77, will explain its reported refusal to move to an agreement to the rest of the group who have pressed for reductions by major economies.

 

It is depressing. However, although it’s taken over 30 years for the issue of climate change to be seriously debated, I do think that Copenhagen shows that governments are taking it seriously now. To some extent, 2009 has been characterised by people recognising that we can’t wait for, or rely on, politicians and we need make changes ourselves, in our homes, communities and workplaces. After all, we are the consumers and I suppose I’m not alone in wondering how I’ve managed to know about this stuff for so long and do so little about it personally. The 10:10 campaign, so far, has been brilliant in making a huge and demoralising issue more manageable, personal and showing it’s possible to act in any organisation.

 

Last year the WEA we made ‘Promoting Sustainability’ one of nine strategic priorities for the period to the end of 2013. We’d made some small steps about it early this year but moved forward more quickly with a ‘Forum for the Future’ Masters Scholar placement attached to the WEA for four weeks in the early autumn. Steven Bland worked with us and, as part of a very busy month, gave us the impetus to sign the WEA up to the 10:10 Campaign. Steven surveyed the views of over 10,000 WEA members, 2700 tutors and 600 staff and we had an overwhelming confirmation of the importance of this issue to people involved with the WEA. Usefully, this survey (the biggest mass e-mail the WEA has undertaken to date) has led to 600 people asking to be part of an e-mail network on Promoting Sustainability across the WEA. Incidentally, it also makes you realise what can be done in four weeks by someone with energy and enthusiasm. Steven’s work had far more impact, resonance and reach into the organisation than an army of consultants could have brought.

 

So, we’re readying ourselves for 10:10; getting our benchmarks in place. The 10% reduction will be tough and that’s why we wanted to be confident it was something that colleagues across the organisation would support. The WEA is a very dispersed organisation using hundreds of venues in communities and neighbourhoods across the country, with thousands of tutors and tens of thousands of students (one reason why the dismal Framework for Excellence ‘learner views’ survey is difficult to promote). We still involve our students and partners in determining the courses we run. We don’t control the energy use of most of our venues and we do have tutors travelling by car some distance to where they teach. On the other hand, the students have shorter journeys because our provision is so local and our classes improve the utilisation (and viability) of many community venues.

 

The relationship to the curriculum is more tricky than the organisational energy issues. Over the year, I feel that the issue for the WEA is how to share ideas and gain encouragement from each other so that sustainability and the personal and organisational responsibility it involves become a permitted and evident part of the Association’s work.

 

In honesty, we are only beginning to look to ways that the small number of courses and activities the WEA already runs on these issues can be linked up and tutors who are involved can share and develop their practice and the WEA can learn from them. However, I’m pretty convinced that this can’t be a centralised, micro-managed initiative. We’ll need some measures for our organisational impact and we’ll need to monitor how we’re doing but, more than that, we need to make this a permitted, encouraged and – possibly - celebrated (but not in a marketing/PR/ ‘let’s look at the communication plan’ sort of way) thread of activity.

 

It’s been quite striking to see how difficult a fit this is for the WEA. I suppose that’s true for all 10:10 signatories. Our finance system isn’t set up to account for our CO₂ ‘expenditure’ and Sector Subject Areas don’t generate the kind of data evidence for this work that we’ve been so encouraged to see as the measure of ‘success’ in the world of post 16 regulation and improvement. Moreover, the other stuff still keeps coming: new agencies, funding audits, procurement, ‘new professionalism’, revised inspection approaches - all the hyperactivity and churn of the last decade zooms past the collapse of part-time adult learning opportunities and the warming planet. Perhaps this issue can be the one where we say this is too important to leave to be directed from the superstructure to meet its ‘deliverables’.

 

In some ways, although I really hope we can progress with the development of the curriculum in a conventional sense, I’m more interested in the possibility that promoting sustainability can be a thread running through – and changing - all our provision. ‘Think Global, Act local’, is an idea that feels fairly modern and yet was coined by Patrick Geddes almost 100 years ago. He also talked of ‘place, work, folk’ and, in education, ‘head, hand, heart’. These ideas together seem a good basis for thinking and taking action for sustainable learning and local future.

 

I admire all the efforts being taken by people and communities taking action on sustainability and climate change through 10:10, transition towns etc. and I hope that the WEA can contribute to these actions in 2010 and beyond.