A Critical Discourse Analysis of EU environmental education policies

In January 2022, the European Commission released a Proposal for a Council Recommendation on learning for environmental sustainability, in which it recognised that “[w]e are at a critical point in time: human action has brought us close to causing irreparable damage to our planet” and that “collective and individual actions are urgently needed to place our society and economy on a sustainable path” (European Commission, 2022, p. 1). The proposal was then adopted by the Council of the European Union in June 2022 with the “Council Recommendation on learning for the green transition and sustainable development” (Council of the EU, 2022), which focused on the key role of education in addressing the climate crisis and on the importance of preparing learners for the future. This chapter aims to critically analyse the aforementioned Commission Proposal and the ensuing Council Recommendation, as well as the Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the proposal (European Commission, Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, 2022a), in order to discuss the main linguistic, pedagogical and political issues emerging from an ecocritically-informed analysis.