The research team, led by Liam Ó Riada with Unai Pascual, Esther Turnhout and Julia Neidig, applied discourse analysis to the historical record of Spanish education policy. Discourse analysis, in this context, is a method for examining how language constructs reality: which concepts are elevated as self-evident truths, which are marginalized, and which actors are granted authority to define what education is for. Rather than treating policy texts as neutral descriptions of reform, the researchers read them as battlegrounds where different worldviews compete. This approach draws on political theory holding that dominant ideas are never permanent; they can be destabilized by crises and dislocations, creating openings for alternative visions to enter the mainstream.

The analysis identified three distinct periods in Spanish education policy. The first, spanning roughly 1975 to 1990, coincided with Spain’s transition to democracy after four decades of dictatorship. During this era, policy discourse was animated by emancipatory aspirations: education was framed as a vehicle for freedom, democratic citizenship and social justice. The legacy of authoritarian schooling made it politically urgent to imagine classrooms as spaces where critical thinking and participation could flourish. This period, the authors argue, contained genuine affinities with what scholars now call transformative sustainability education—an approach that emphasizes transdisciplinary learning, experiential and embodied pedagogies, and the capacity of learners to question and reshape the systems around them.

That emancipatory moment, however, did not last. From about 1990 to 2018, the study documents the consolidation of a neoliberal consensus in Spanish education policy, one heavily shaped by the discourse of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD and similar actors have long promoted a human-capital framing of education, in which schools are evaluated primarily by their contribution to economic competitiveness and employability. Under this logic, the purpose of education narrows to generating human capital: measurable skills that can be fed into labor markets. Standardized assessment, international rankings and performance indicators became the dominant instruments of governance, and the creative, critical and transdisciplinary pedagogies that sustainability transformation requires were progressively marginalized.

The technical heart of the study lies in showing how this economistic framing operated discursively. Human-capital discourse did not merely coexist with other visions of education; it absorbed and reinterpreted them. Even concepts with emancipatory origins, such as lifelong learning or educational quality, were redefined in market-oriented terms. The researchers describe this as a hegemonic process, in which one worldview achieves such dominance that its assumptions become common sense, rendering alternatives difficult even to articulate. For advocates of sustainability education, this meant that arguments about ecological crisis, social justice or intergenerational responsibility struggled to find legitimate space within a policy conversation organized around productivity and competitiveness.

The third period begins in 2019 and continues to the present, and it is here that the analysis becomes most striking. A sequence of dislocatory events—including large-scale student climate mobilizations, growing public awareness of ecological breakdown and political turbulence within Spain—destabilized the previously settled consensus. Sustainability emerged as a central signifier in education policy, culminating in a new education law that explicitly legitimizes transdisciplinary, experiential and embodied pedagogies. For the first time in the country’s democratic history, the legal architecture of Spanish schooling formally recognizes that learning for sustainability must go beyond transmitting facts about the environment and instead engage students in transformative, experience-based practice.

The authors are careful, however, not to declare victory. Their analysis shows that the discursive opening of the recent period remains constrained by entrenched neoliberal governance. The market-oriented logics built into assessment regimes, funding structures and institutional incentives did not disappear when sustainability entered the policy vocabulary. This creates a real risk of co-optation: the possibility that sustainability itself will be reframed as another form of human capital—a set of green skills for a green economy—rather than as an invitation to question the economic assumptions that drove ecological crisis in the first place. The study suggests that whether the current opening leads to genuine transformation or to a rebranded version of the old consensus depends on struggles still underway.

One of the most consequential findings concerns how change actually happens. The researchers found that dislocatory events alone are insufficient; what matters is whether different struggles for educational reform can be linked together into a broader coalition. When movements for climate action, pedagogical innovation and democratic schooling connect their demands, they can collectively push elements of transformative sustainability education into law and policy. Conversely, when reform efforts remain fragmented, the resilient machinery of market-oriented governance tends to absorb or dilute them. This insight travels well beyond Spain: it offers a strategic lesson for educators and policymakers in other countries navigating similar tensions between economic and ecological imperatives in their school systems.

The Spanish case also illustrates a broader tension in global sustainability politics. International organizations have increasingly embraced education as a tool for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, yet the same institutions often promote the human-capital frameworks that the study identifies as a barrier to transformative pedagogy. The result is an ambivalence at the heart of international education policy: sustainability is celebrated in declarations while the governance instruments that shape classrooms daily continue to reward standardization and measurable economic outcomes. The Spanish experience shows that national politics can partially break from this pattern, but only when domestic coalitions are strong enough to translate crisis into legal and institutional change.

What emerges from this research is neither optimism nor fatalism, but a precise map of where leverage lies. The discursive history of Spanish education demonstrates that dominant framings are historically contingent rather than natural, that crises can crack them open, and that coalitions can push transformative visions into binding policy. At the same time, it warns that vocabulary is not victory: a law that mentions sustainability can still be implemented through competitive, market-driven governance that hollows out its meaning. For anyone concerned with how education systems might help societies navigate the ecological transition, the Spanish record offers both a warning and an invitation—the door to transformative education is open, but only sustained political struggle will keep it that way.

Subject of Research: Discourse analysis of Spanish education policy and openings for transformative sustainability education

Article Title: From generating human capital to transformative education: discursive struggles in Spanish education policy and openings for sustainability

Article References: Ó Riada, L., Pascual, U., Turnhout, E., & Neidig, J. (2026). From generating human capital to transformative education: discursive struggles in Spanish education policy and openings for sustainability. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(8), e0000267. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267

Keywords: education policy, sustainability transformation, Spain, discourse analysis, human capital, OECD, neoliberalism, transformative education, climate crisis, pedagogy, PLOS, policy reform

The empirical core of the paper is a state-of-the-practice survey, reviewed and approved by the Internal Review Board at the University of Colorado Denver, that asked scholars about the research methods they have used over the past decade, the dependent variables that anchor their studies, the economic theories embedded in doctoral training, and the institutional incentives that shape career decisions. Respondents also answered open-ended questions about the barriers that keep the information systems community from engaging with climate and environmental challenges, and about alternative pathways for doing better. The researchers coded these responses using established qualitative content analysis techniques, with generative AI tools used only to summarize pre-coded themes and select representative quotes, all of which the authors independently verified against the original data.

The picture that emerges is one of a field that is aware of the problem but structurally unprepared to address it. Scholars overwhelmingly recognize the importance of environmental issues, yet the survey reveals that research agendas remain dominated by revenue, innovation, customer, and performance outcomes, while explicit incentives to pursue climate-related work are rare in departments and doctoral programs. Doctoral curricula lean heavily on free-market and mixed economics, leaving graduates with little exposure to the ecological, political, or critical economic traditions that question growth itself. The authors argue that this training pipeline reproduces a narrow view of what information technology is for, treating it primarily as an engine of productivity and profit rather than as a force embedded in biophysical systems.

The technical backdrop to this critique is stark. The information and communication technology sector’s energy and emissions footprint is growing as data volumes soar, and the rise of generative artificial intelligence is accelerating demand for power-hungry data centers, a trend documented in industry analyses from Deloitte and the World Economic Forum. Local communities are beginning to push back, as in the reported rejection of an Amazon-linked data center project amid fears over water use. The authors also cite material flow research showing that the volume of man-made stocks increased twelvefold between 1900 and 2015, with roughly 35 percent of that material now solid waste and 25 percent emitted into the environment. Consumption-based accounting of material footprint shows a consistent rise alongside GDP, raw material extraction, and carbon dioxide emissions since 1970.

Against this backdrop, the paper’s theoretical move is to import the frameworks of ecological economics into information systems research. The field’s intellectual foundations, the authors argue, rest on assumptions inherited from neoclassical economics: that economies can grow indefinitely, that technology will decouple output from resource use, and that market mechanisms will price environmental damage appropriately. Ecological economics starts from a different premise. The Earth is effectively a closed system for materials, open only to incoming solar energy, so no amount of digital innovation can conjure new resources or make waste disappear. Economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen argued as early as 1975 that the transition from fossil fuels to solar energy is not merely a policy option but an ultimate necessity for economies to operate within biophysical limits, a point the authors treat as foundational for any credible theory of sustainable computing.

Central to the proposed transformation is Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, whose dual focus on ecological ceilings and social foundations the authors adopt as a template for reorienting the discipline. In this framing, humanity must live below planetary boundaries, such as climate stability and intact ecosystems, while ensuring that everyone has access to the social essentials of a dignified life. The authors suggest that information systems research should be evaluated not by whether it increases firm performance or adoption rates, but by whether it helps societies stay within the doughnut. Alternative indicators already exist to support such a shift: the Genuine Progress Indicator adjusts personal consumption for inequality, household labor, and environmental costs, and long-term data show that GDP and GPI moved together until the late 1970s before diverging, with GDP rising while genuine progress declined.

The survey respondents themselves offered a set of alternative pathways, which the authors organized into four aggregate dimensions: institutional change, leadership, research approach, and other measures. On the institutional front, scholars called for departments to provide explicit financial rewards and promotion criteria for climate-related research, and for doctoral programs to broaden the economic theories taught alongside methodological training. On the research front, respondents pointed toward studying green information systems in organizations, circular economy practices enabled by digital technologies, carbon management systems that promote ecologically responsible behavior, energy informatics, and the detection and reduction of data waste through machine learning. Others emphasized the need to distinguish between artificial intelligence for sustainability and the sustainability of artificial intelligence itself, given the technology’s own growing resource demands.

The authors are careful to note that the barriers are not primarily attitudinal. Information systems scholars already perceive the community as having reasonable awareness of climate and environmental challenges; what is missing, they argue, is domain knowledge, relevant theories, and data sources for measuring climate impacts within the field’s traditional research domains. This gap between awareness and capability is compounded by incentive structures: ranking systems that track publications in the field’s leading journals reward conventional topics, and junior researchers rationally follow the path of least resistance. Without changes to what gets rewarded, the authors warn, individual goodwill will continue to produce only marginal, incremental contributions while the window for meaningful action narrows.

The paper’s recommendations extend to journal editors and institutional leaders, not just individual researchers. Editors are encouraged to welcome work that measures ecological and social outcomes alongside economic ones, and to treat ecological framing as legitimate across the full range of information systems topics rather than confining it to special issues. Institutions are urged to align hiring, promotion, and doctoral education with the reality of the environmental crisis. The authors also acknowledge the practical grounds for optimism: the International Renewable Energy Agency reported in 2025 that solar photovoltaic projects were on average 41 percent cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel alternatives, and onshore wind 53 percent cheaper, meaning that the technological economics increasingly favor the transition that ecological theory demands.

What makes the study notable is its willingness to question the discipline’s own growth-oriented foundations at a moment when the digital sector’s material consequences are becoming impossible to ignore. The authors conclude that, given the urgency of the crisis, ecological perspectives should serve as a guiding meta-framework for designing and conducting general information systems research, shaping research priorities, institutional structures, collaborative practices, and methodological approaches alike. Whether the community takes up that challenge will depend less on the persuasiveness of any single paper than on whether the incentives that govern academic careers can be redesigned to reward work that treats the planet’s limits as a first-order research constraint rather than an afterthought.

Subject of Research: Environmental sustainability and ecological economics in information systems research

Article Title: [State-of-the-Practice-Survey] Environmental Sustainability in Information Systems Research: Beyond Incrementalism Toward a Transformative Path Forward

Article References: Oh, O., Gregg, D. G., & Aghakhani, N. (2026). [State-of-the-Practice-Survey] Environmental Sustainability in Information Systems Research: Beyond Incrementalism Toward a Transformative Path Forward. Information Systems Frontiers. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-026-10825-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-026-10825-0

Keywords: environmental sustainability, information systems, ecological economics, Doughnut Economics, climate crisis, green information systems, survey research, data centers, generative AI energy use, circular economy, Genuine Progress Indicator, academic incentives

LaMothe’s central analytical tool is the concept of the apparatus, borrowed from the philosopher Giorgi Agamben. In Agamben’s formulation, an apparatus is a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient human behaviors, gestures, and thoughts in ways that purport to be useful. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Agamben notes that in a disciplinary society, apparatuses create docile yet free bodies that assume their identity and their freedom as subjects. LaMothe applies this lens to the theological and philosophical traditions of the Abrahamic West, arguing that their theologies, narratives, and rituals have functioned as apparatuses shaping masculine identity around sovereignty, mastery, and dominion. The result, he argues, is a masculinity that treats other species and the Earth itself as objects to be used, reified, and destroyed rather than as fellow creatures deserving of care.

The paper is careful about definitions. By Western, LaMothe means people who have internalized the narratives and practices of dominant European anthropologies, theological and philosophical, that create a seemingly unbridgeable divide between humans and other species. He explicitly notes that many people and groups within the West, including Indigenous peoples, hold anthropologies that do not produce such a chasm between the human and the other-than-human, citing the work of anthropologists such as Eduardo Kohn and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Masculinity, meanwhile, is treated as biologically rooted but socially constructed, taking varied forms across time and cultures, with a fluidity of gender expression depending on culture and era. This definitional care matters, because the argument is not that men are inherently destructive but that particular historically contingent formations of manhood have been recruited into an ecological project of domination.

One of the paper’s most striking claims concerns the very concept of nature. LaMothe places the word in quotation marks because he regards it as a construct that is itself a feature of the ontological divide between Western human beings and the rest of the living world, a point he grounds in the work of Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Bruno Latour. Many Indigenous religions and philosophies, he observes, do not have a concept like nature at all, mainly because they do not view themselves as distinct from the world around them. The implication is unsettling: the modern Western mind, in carving the world into human and natural domains, may have manufactured the very alienation that licenses ecological destruction. Once the Earth is deemed dead or inert, practices such as mountaintop removal, fracking, and oil drilling become thinkable, even legitimate, because there is no living community to injure.

LaMothe traces the genealogy of sovereign masculinity through political and psychoanalytic mythology alike. He points to the origin myths of Scripture and their counterparts in the origin myths of philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s imaginative recreation of the origins of society in Totem and Taboo, in which the father of the clan dominates others only to be killed and overthrown by his progeny, essentializes and leaves unquestioned male sovereignty. Hobbesian political thought, meanwhile, implies that communal life depends on civilization, and therefore that ruling epistemologies are necessary for social order, a view that renders those deemed uncivilized subject to the whims and cruelties of nature and helps justify the colonization of other human beings and everything falling under the construct of nature. Even Aristotle, who believed animals have souls, placed them within a hierarchy crowned by human beings, diminishing the significance of other-than-human animals and othered humans alike.

The paper does not pretend that concern for animals is absent from Western history. LaMothe catalogues a counter-tradition stretching back to antiquity: Plutarch argued for the rights of animals, and the third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry maintained that it was our moral duty to extend justice to other animals. Centuries later, Jeremy Bentham argued for animal welfare, and in the nineteenth century Arthur Schopenhauer raised concerns about animal rights. In recent decades, philosophers such as Peter Singer, Andrew Linzey, and Martha Nussbaum have explored the thorny ethical issues surrounding humanity’s treatment of other species. Yet LaMothe’s point is that these ethical currents have largely failed to reshape dominant masculinity, which remains tethered to apparatuses of sovereignty and mastery. Care ethics, developed by thinkers including Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto, Virginia Held, and Maurice Hamington, offers resources, but they must be deliberately extended beyond human relationships to the more-than-human world.

What would becoming eco-cooperative and caring men and boys actually involve? LaMothe argues that forms of eco-masculinity sustain caring relations toward other species, and that such relations depend on capacities for vulnerability, empathy, and compassion vis-à-vis the other species that share this one habitable Earth. Vulnerability here is technical rather than sentimental: it means relinquishing the fantasy of invulnerability and control that sovereign masculinity demands, and accepting exposure to the needs, sufferings, and singularities of other creatures. Empathy and compassion, in this framework, are not merely feelings but practiced capacities that orient action toward the flourishing of particular animals, plants, and places. The affirmation of the singularities of other human beings and other species accompanies what LaMothe describes as a categorical ethical command to care for and cooperate with other species and the Earth, a formulation that deliberately echoes the unconditional structure of Kantian ethics while relocating its scope beyond humanity.

The paper finds exemplars of this stance in unexpected places, including male researchers whose scientific work manifests caring and ethical concern in relating to and cooperating with other species, such as Peter Godfrey-Smith, whose study of octopus minds models a form of engagement that neither dominates nor reduces the other. LaMothe also draws on Dana Lloyd’s account of Yurok earth-based theology, in which the Land itself is a living being: the Yurok believe the Earth is alive and has a spirit, motivating care for mountains, rivers, wildlife, and ocean in which each part is entangled with every other part. Because trees are considered living beings and members of the community, their removal is an attack on the community itself, which Lloyd argues should be understood as a continuation of genocidal policy rooted in epistemologies of ruling and deficiency. Such relational stances, LaMothe suggests, expose the poverty of the sovereign model.

He is equally candid about the limits of fashionable solutions. Chandler and Reid have objected to the tendency of anthropologists and others to argue that dealing with the climate crisis requires becoming Indigenous, citing Indigenous peoples’ history of resilience and ways of relating to the land. Yet even those critics conclude their book by calling for a recovery of the hubris on which modernity was built, and from which other worlds are yet to come. LaMothe’s verdict is blunt: the hubris of Western subjects is exactly what we do not need, because hubris, especially with regard to masculinities, has been a significant factor in the current climate crisis. The paper thus refuses both romantic primitivism and technological triumphalism, insisting instead on the harder work of transforming the emotional and ethical formation of men within Western societies themselves.

The significance of the argument extends well beyond pastoral theology. If LaMothe is right, then climate communication, environmental policy, and sustainability education may all be addressing symptoms while leaving intact the gendered apparatuses that reproduce domination across generations. Raising boys to equate manhood with control, invulnerability, and mastery does not merely constrain individual lives; it recruits them into an economy and politics that treat the living Earth as inert material. An eco-masculinity of care and cooperation, by contrast, would reframe strength as the capacity to remain vulnerable, to empathize across species lines, and to act on a categorical obligation to protect the singular creatures with whom humans share a single habitable planet. Whether such a transformation can occur at the scale and speed the climate crisis demands remains an open question, but LaMothe’s paper makes a compelling case that the answer will depend, in part, on what it means to become a man in the West.

Subject of Research: The relationship between Western masculinity, anthropocentric thought, and the climate crisis, and the development of an eco-cooperative, caring eco-masculinity

Article Title: (Western) Men and the Climate Crisis: Toward an Eco-Cooperative and Caring Masculinity

Article References: (Western) Men and the Climate Crisis: Toward an Eco-Cooperative and Caring Masculinity. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01381-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01381-0

Keywords: eco-masculinity, climate crisis, care ethics, Western philosophy, anthropocentrism, pastoral theology, sovereignty, animal ethics, Indigenous worldviews, Giorgi Agamben, vulnerability, environmental ethics