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Contributing Articles

ISSN: 2053-4272

Issue 43 Call for Contributors

Development Education: Learning for Transformation

 

  • Deadline for submissions of abstracts is Friday, 06 March 2026
  • Deadline for submission of articles is Friday, 03 July 2026
  • Publication date is Autumn 2026

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Policy and Practice is a peer reviewed, bi-annual, open access journal published by the Centre for Global Education, a non-governmental development organisation based in Belfast.  First published in 2005, Policy and Practice aims to provide a space for development education (DE) practitioners to critically reflect on their practice, discuss the main challenges faced by the sector and debate new policy developments.  Development education uses an active learning, participative approach to education that addresses the root causes of poverty and injustice and seeks to enable learners to take action toward positive social change.  It draws upon Paulo Freire's concept of praxis that combines reflection and action to support a meaningful intervention in reality.   Policy and Practice aims to: share new research in development education; celebrate and promote good practice in DE; enhance collaboration between development education and related adjectival education sectors; further mainstream development education within the statutory education sector in Ireland; and provide opportunities for exchange and debate between educators from the global North and South.

Policy and Practice has a designated website (www.developmenteducationreview.com) which contains an archive of all previous 41 issues which are available for viewing online and for downloading.  The journal is listed on Scopus (H-Index 2) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  In 2024, the Policy and Practice web site received 199,402 unique visits from countries in the global North and South.  Policy and Practice articles have generated 5,707 citations that have appeared in 788 journals, 402 books and 469 dissertations.

ABOUT THE THEME

The Centre for Global Education is inviting contributions to Issue 43 of our bi-annual, peer reviewed, open access journal Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review on the theme: Development Education: Learning for Transformation.  Recent issues of Policy and Practice have diagnostically explored the crises enveloping our world at present including the climate emergency; spiking levels of racism and the rise of the far-right; class and inequality; the ‘othering’ of migrants; neoliberalism; and the genocide in Gaza.  They are issues that occupy us as development educators because the aim of Freire’s praxis is to challenge injustice by addressing the root causes of problems through informed action.  But as a sector, we have struggled to think and act systemically and engage with the institutions that maintain injustices and inequalities.  The theme of Issue 43 consciously evokes the Training for Transformation (TFT) handbooks published in the 1980s by Partners Training for Transformation, a non-profit community organisation established ‘to provide a participative way of working with local communities towards greater empowerment’.  The Training for Transformation books were inspired by Freire’s praxis and their authors’ – Sally Kimmel and Anne Hope’s – community development work in Kenya.  The TFT books created ‘a temporary learning community using problem-posing and dialogic group processes to address the circumstances of marginalized communities in a politicized and empowering manner and to co-develop community-based resources’.   They also looked at problems systemically and how they impacted wider society by offering ‘opportunities to better understand social, political and cultural systems and how we can constructively engage with them’. 

For many, this community-led, bottom-up, radical, politically engaged and systemic practice is missing from contemporary development education which has impeded the sector’s capacity for transformational thinking and action.  As Bernie Grumnell suggested in a reflective chapter on Partners Training for Transformation, the ‘shift from a process-oriented approach to an outcome and measurement orientation means community development groups, including Partners TfT, increasingly struggle to get their transformative, process-oriented approach recognized’.  This is the result of neoliberal processes, like Results-Based Approaches, imposing ‘performative criteria’ on ‘development discourses’.

The Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, writes in his latest book:

“When it comes to critique by social scientists, many of them avoid taking the next logical step – they are cautious because of their own position.  Very few of them, even if all the charts in the world tell them that the economic system is increasing inequality, worsening health outcomes, leading more people into poverty, will go so far as to suggest that we need to go beyond capitalism, or present a hopeful vision for a post-capitalist world.  With social scientists who analyse what’s wrong with contemporary politics, it’s obvious that they themselves are part of the very system and their livelihoods depend on it.  So, they shy away from demanding a revolutionary overhaul of the system, but recommend specific reforms that can improve particular areas without changing the system as a whole”.

While Pappé is writing here about tertiary educators and researchers, the same analysis could be applied to the development education and international development sectors.  They hospice the broken neoliberal system by adhering to a Eurocentric position that ahistorically frames poverty in the global South as the outcome ‘of how the development process is structured’ rather than the ‘structural process of uneven development’.  Underdevelopment in the global South is rarely framed in a colonial context or ‘development’ in the global North framed in the context of expropriation, slavery, ecocide, dispossession and imperial drain from the global South.  The dominance of the Eurocentric position in international development and, indeed, the colonial origins of international NGOs as state appendages supporting ‘development’ in the global South, has fostered a depoliticized sector ‘embedded in a very specific framework of economic development advanced by the global North’.  This has created a sector that fails to identify the interconnections between the issues it addresses, neglects the systemic causes of development problems, and reserves advocacy work for the symptoms of crises which ensures the re-production of structural inequalities. 

Issue 43 of Policy and Practice seeks contributions that explore a transformative practice that rejects the depoliticised and deradicalized position of hospicing neoliberalism, side-stepping colonialism and rejecting political advocacy.  It calls for articles that present transformational approaches to deep-rooted problems such as the normalization of extreme inequality, climate injustice, genocide, collapsing public services, the consumerization of citizenship, and hollowing out of democracy.  It seeks articles that reflect on what Oxfam describes as the urgency of ‘transforming the current economic system, which has exploited and exacerbated patriarchy, white supremacy and neoliberal principles’.  For development education, failing to critique neoliberalism has closed off the possibilities of transformational learning that offers the opportunity to imagine alternative futures and advance sectoral thinking on sustainable, inclusive and just economic systems.  

Considerable academic traction has gathered around the concept of post-growth and the idea that we end the economic tyranny of gross domestic product as the dominant goal and measurement of development.  Reducing economic growth is not only desirable but essential if carbon emissions are to remain within planetary boundaries.  De-growth means transforming the economy from one that revolves ‘around the interests of capital (exchange-value) through accumulation, enclosure, and commodification’, to instead be organised ‘around provisioning for human needs (use-value) through de-accumulation, de-enclosure and de-commodification’.  The world produces more than enough wealth to eradicate hunger, house everyone, ensure access to education, transport, employment and leisure for all.  However, most of this wealth is accumulated by a minority of the world’s population with the top 10 percent of the world’s income-earners earning more than the remaining 90 percent combined.  Issue 43 invites articles on the role of development education in leading learners in debate on the merits of alternative economic systems such as de-growth and post-growth and building links with academics and activists striving for sustainable and transformational paradigms of development.

Authors are invited to consider submitting contributions to Issue 43 of Policy and Practice that address one or more of the following:

  • The repositioning of development education toward the transformational learning premised upon the community-led, dialogic and problem-posing methodology set out in the Training for Transformation handbooks.
  • The role of development educators in engaging peers and learners in systemic thinking that examines the root causes of problems and how they can be addressed. 
  • How to shift development education from an outcome and measurement orientation toward a process orientation driven by Freirean praxis.
  • How development education can contribute to the debate on alternative economic systems such as de-growth that seek to orient the economy from one revolving around capital accumulation and GDP toward one premised upon meeting social needs.
  • How to mobilise conversations about alternative futures using Andreotti et al.’s HEADS UP social cartography.
  • How to create a framework for the decolonization of development education and international development by confronting the Eurocentric view of development using anti-colonial and decolonial scholarship.
  • An assessment of the efficacy of development theories (modernization, dependency, post-development etc.) for navigating the future of the development education and international development sectors.
  • Articles that consider the future of development education and imagine new ways of delivering transformational learning.
  • Reflections on how the development education sector can connect with horizontal and community-led movements for change that share our values and goals.

Authors interested in submitting an article to Issue 43 should send a completed abstract submission form to journal editor, Stephen McCloskey, by Friday, 06 March 2026.  Please email: stephen@centreforglobaleducation.com.  The submission date for commissioned articles is Friday, 03 July 2026.  

Article Types

There are four kinds of article published in Policy and Practice. 

  • Focus articles are peer reviewed, between 3,500 and 6,000 words, and should have a strong critical and theoretical analysis of their topic. 
  • Perspectives articles which are 3,000 – 5,000 words in length and more descriptive, addressing an aspect of development education practice. 
  • Viewpoint articles which are 2,000 – 4,000 words in length and opinion pieces on burning issues related to DE policy and practice. 
  • Review articles are 1,000-2,000 words in length and offer an opinion of a new book, film, teaching resource or online site on development issues.

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Policy and Practice is funded by Irish Aid.

This document has been published as part of a development education project funded by Irish Aid at the Department of Foreign Affairs. Irish Aid is the Government’s overseas development programme which supports partners working in some of the world’s poorest countries. Irish Aid also supports global citizenship and development education in Ireland to encourage learning and public engagement with global issues. The ideas, opinions and comments herein are entirely the responsibility of the Centre for Global Education and do not necessarily represent or reflect DFA policy

For further information contact:
Stephen McCloskey
Editor
Centre for Global Education
9 University Street
Belfast BT7 1FY
Tel: (0044) 2890 241879
E-mail: stephen@centreforglobaleducation.com
Web: www.centreforglobaleducation.com 
Facebook: www.facebook.com/centreforglobaleducation

X: @GCEDevEdReview

www.developmenteducationreview.com

January 2026