Journal of Education Policy

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What moves us also moves policy: the role

of affect in mobilizing education policy on
sustainability

Viviana O. Pitton & Marcia McKenzie

To cite this article: Viviana O. Pitton & Marcia McKenzie (2020): What moves us also moves
policy: the role of affect in mobilizing education policy on sustainability, Journal of Education Policy,
DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2020.1852605

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JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY
https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2020.1852605

What moves us also moves policy: the role of affect in

mobilizing education policy on sustainability
Viviana O. Pitton and Marcia McKenzie
Sustainability and Education Policy Network, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article explores the role of affect in influencing whether and how Received 3 October 2019
education policy on sustainability is circulated, adopted or resisted. Accepted 14 November 2020
Drawing on empirical data from K-12 education across Canada, the KEYWORDS
paper examines the mobility of sustainability in education policy in Affect; policy mobility;
relation to i) collective affective conditions, ii) the mediating influ­ education policy;
ences of affective bodily encounters, and iii) affect as a target of sustainability education;
apparatuses of power. The analysis suggests how collective condi­ environmental education
tions of precarity or environmental responsibility, policy actors’
attachments to nature and relationships with other policy actors,
and the affective mediations of technologies of power such as eco-
certification programs, all contribute to mobilizing sustainability in
education policy in the schools, divisions, and ministries under study.
The article offers insights for sustainability initiatives in education and
for research attending to the affective mobilities of education policy.

Introduction
As policy ideas have become increasingly globally mobile due to the advances in information
and communication technologies and the transnational work of international organizations
and businesses, policy researchers have geared their efforts to understand the nuances of why
and how policies move within and across geographical and temporal boundaries (e.g., McCann
and Ward 2011, 2012; Peck 2011; Peck and Theodore 2015). The movement of policies is not
a new phenomenon, as a myriad of studies on policy borrowing and transfer attest (e.g.,
Robertson and Waltman 1992; Stone 1999). The renewed interest in policy mobility comes
from critical approaches that recognize policies do not simply travel from one context to
another; they are subject to translations, reformulations, and resistances (e.g., McCann 2008;
Peck and Theodore 2010, 2015; and in education, Ball 2016; Ball, Junemann, and Santori 2017;
Gulson and Symes 2017; Lewis 2020; McKenzie, Bieler, and McNeil 2015).
Despite having gained richer understandings of the ways in which policies move and mutate
temporally and spatially, there has been less emphasis on considering how affect also influences
these movements and mutations (McKenzie 2017). Analyses of how policy mobilizes through
‘affect’ include attention to both the capacities to be affected by policy, and tracing how affective

CONTACT Marcia McKenzie [email protected] Sustainability Education Research Institute, University of

Saskatchewan, 28 Campus Drive, Saskatoon SK S7N 0X1, Canada
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 V. O. PITTON AND M. MCKENZIE

conditions contribute to shape policy work. In our view, in-depth explorations of the affective
techniques used to incite policy mobility and uptake, as well as the affective conditions that
move us collectively and individually to engage with or reject certain policies, can further
understandings of how and why policy moves.
Despite prior suggestions that affect and emotions ‘shape and animate the fields of policy
and practice’ (Clarke et al. 2015, 59), empirical studies attempting to weave the affective into
their analyses of what makes policies move are scarce. In critical education policy studies, there
are recent bodies of literature on both affect (e.g., Brøgger 2018; Matus 2017; Sellar and Lingard
2018) and policy mobility (e.g., Ball, Junemann, and Santori 2017; Gulson and Symes 2017;
McKenzie, Bieler, and McNeil 2015), with little research as yet examining the two together (see
McKenzie 2017 for a review). More broadly, the policy mobilities literature has not engaged to
much extent with affect; and emerging political science research focused on affective govern­
ance (e.g., Jupp, Pykett, and Smith 2016; Jones, Pykett, and Whitehead 2013; Penz and Birgit
2020) has not included a specific focus on the mobility of policy. Furthermore, specific
considerations of why and how education policy focusing on sustainability develops and
travels, and the affective dimensions involved in such mobilization, remain largely unexplored
(Lingard 2020; McKenzie, Bieler, and McNeil 2015; Rickinson and McKenzie 2020).
Building upon the work of Ben Anderson (2014; 2016) and other scholars who take
critical materialist approaches to affect (e.g., Berlant 2011; Stewart 2007), in this paper we
draw on empirical data from a study on K-12 education in Canada to examine how affect
may contribute to the mobilization of education policy on sustainability. Complementing
the ideas advanced in previous theoretical work (McKenzie 2017), this article explores
why and how education policy on sustainability ‘moves’ in relation to i) collective
affective conditions, ii) the mediating influences of affective bodily encounters, and iii)
affect imbued in apparatuses of power. In so doing, we seek to contribute to discussions
on the role of affect in why and how policies move within and across regional and
national contexts.

Background: affect and policy mobilities

On affect and Anderson’s typology
The term ‘affect’ has been used to describe a wide range of phenomena, from moments of
euphoria or boredom, to societal moods of fear and hope. We understand ‘affect’ in this
paper as encompassing and exceeding individualized emotions; as referring to the invisible
registers and habits of feeling embedded in our social and cultural ways of operating
(Anderson 2006; 2014; Berlant 2011; Stewart 2007). This type of orientation builds on
earlier cultural materialist articulations of emotion as central to developing or changing the
relationships between the experiences of individuals and broader patterns of social life
through dominant ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams 1961, 1977; McKenzie 2017). Socially
and culturally mediated and circulated, affect can be viewed as ‘attached to things, people,
ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other
things, including other affects’ (Sedgwick and Frank 2003, 19). This aligns with Anderson’s
(2013) suggestion that various forms of affect ‘are not discrete properties of an individual
mind or body, [but rather], are relational phenomena and/or emergent from relations’
(p. 455).
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 3

This paper is informed by the aforementioned affect theorists’ contributions, and

following McKenzie (2017), Anderson’s (2014) typology of affect is used as an analytic
frame. Anchored on the assertion of the multidimensional nature of affect, this typology
understands affect as ‘simultaneously an object-target, bodily capacity, and collective
condition’ (Anderson 2014, 17). In other words, affect is experienced individually (e.g.,
through emotions and bodily sensations), including as a result of the influences of various
apparatuses which mobilize affect to target particular ends (e.g., media advertising, perfor­
mance standards, policy), and as manifestations of or in response to broader societal or
‘collective’ norms or structures of feeling (e.g., expectations, desires, fears). While operating
simultaneously, analyzing these three aspects distinctly enables us to better explore how
collective expressions of affect influence policy inception, as well as how policy is then
further mobilized and experienced via affective modalities. We advance the idea that by
investigating how affect mediates the policy process, we are better able to understand why
and how particular policies or policy directions are developed, circulated, and enacted at
different times. Though we use the example of the mobilization of education policy on
sustainability in this analysis, the underlying discussions also can apply to other policy
priorities.
In what follows we define the constitutive parts of Anderson’s affect typology in the
same order as they are discussed later in the paper. We start by looking at collective
conditions, or how affect is part of the conditions of living together. This encompasses
what Williams (1977) described in relation to structures of feeling, ‘a pattern of impulses,
restraints, tones’ (159) and ‘a particular quality’ (131) that is commonly shared in a given
time and place, such as a dominant ethos of an era. For example, as we elaborate further
later, economic precarity is a shared sensibility for many in current circumstances of
austerity policies further worsened by a global pandemic. Our references to forms of
‘collective affect’ thus encompass shared feelings, or those not exclusive to an individual
but part of a more common social experience (Highmore 2017). Engaging this concept in
the educational arena implies, for instance, being attentive to common sentiments of
communities, and the students, teachers and administrators within them, (e.g., sense of
fatigue due to excessive organizational demands, the pessimism and loss experienced due
to financial cuts and austerity measures, fear for the future, hope for the future). There
can be various and conflicting forms of collective affect, and operating at various scales of
community, from a classroom to a peer group, a country, or an era; but what is consistent
is the acknowledgement that affect is not contained within an individual, but felt by
individuals as a result of their embeddedness within broader social and cultural norms
and expectations.
At the more micro level of ‘affective atmospheres’, or ‘ephemeral affective impressions’
(e.g., the ‘mood’ at a teachers’ meeting), these forms of collective affect are understood to
emerge from and envelop particular social encounters, including in relation to broader
structures of feeling (Anderson 2016, 742). Atmospheres, or as Böhme (1993) puts it,
‘affective powers of feeling, spatial bearers of moods’ (119), are relational; they emanate
and are created by ‘things, by people, and by the constellations that happen between
them’ (Böhme 1995, 33–34 translated by Anderson 2014). Atmospheres are experienced
with and through others (Hitchen 2019), and provide a ‘ubiquitous backdrop of everyday
life’ (Bissell 2010, 272). Educational researchers have used this term to differentiate the
affective qualities of a school – its ethos, as well as more fragile fleeting affective
4 V. O. PITTON AND M. MCKENZIE

intensities, such as pushes for progress in data-driven schools that operate ‘in “pockets”
or spheres which emerge and envelop members of the school in some classes and not
others’ (Finn 2016, 32). Another example from the literature focuses on stakeholders’
shared feelings that emerged during deliberations of a new higher education policy (e.g.,
‘atmospheric turbulence’; Lindgren and Linda 2018). In discussing collective affective
conditions, we are referencing either or both of the broader societal structures of feeling,
and more localized affective atmospheres, as they delimit and pressure the development,
circulation, and transformation of policies.
The next section focuses on bodily encounters, or in other words, when bodily interac­
tions of people and places produce and share affect. These encounters can include inter­
actions among individuals, and between an individual – or a group of individuals – and
their material environments. For example, the proximity of meetings (e.g., school boards,
teachers’ federation conferences) affords the opportunity for the circulation of forms of
affect in the encounters of individuals, from friendship to animosity, which can influence
policy decision-making in unexpected ways (Sellar 2015; Lindgren and Linda 2018).
Moreover, interactions with materials and places (e.g., a school building, other species,
a specific sociohistorical and geographical place) can also elicit attention and affect to
influence decision-making beyond the official intentions of policy (Mulcahy 2012;
McKenzie and Bieler 2016). It is important to note that collective affective conditions in
part also shape and delimit how specific encounters happen and are felt. However, ‘the
charge of affect’ emerging from individually experienced ‘bodily encounters’ can surpass
these collective forces and mediate them (Anderson 2014, 105), and likewise the influences
of apparatuses of power developed in relation to dominant or desired collective conditions.
In this work, then, we consider how bodily affective encounters may foster or mobilize
policy initiatives, as well as at times contribute to denying or resisting them.
Finally, we introduce apparatuses of power that are developed as a result of, and in
order to shape and spread, collective affect, and also that inform bodily encounters. In
relation to education policy, these could include policy language, models, benchmarking
data and assessments, trainings, meetings, and so on, which serve to ‘animate’ and
‘energize’ policy through representational and technological infrastructures (Peck and
Theodore 2012, 279, in McKenzie 2017). Apparatuses of power include various policy
techniques that make the affective lives of leaders, teachers, and students ‘object-targets
of’ controlling life in schools (Zembylas 2018). For example, the promises that account­
ability-driven policies make in relation to performance data can incite hope, fear, or
anxiety and thus influence teachers’ and administrators’ practices (Taylor and Gulson
2012; Sellar 2015; Staunæs 2016). In the context of this paper, our analysis considers in
particular the affective targets of eco-certification programs as apparatuses of power that
use aspiration and reward to mobilize K-12 education policy focused on sustainability.

On policy mobility and affect

We bring this three-fold typology of affect to our analysis, which also builds upon the
literature on policy mobilities (e.g., McCann and Ward 2012; Peck and Theodore 2012,
2015). The latter involves consideration of the multiple and overlapping spaces of policy
formation (Cochrane and Ward 2012), as well as processes of transformation involved in
the flow of policy ideas and techniques between and within locales (e.g., translation,
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 5

reformulation, resistance; McCann and Ward 2013; Peck and Theodore 2012). Drawing
on these insights in our analysis implied taking into account the potential influence of,
for example, global policy networks mobilizing particular orientations to sustainability in
education policy in the sites under study (e.g., UNESCO’s global policy programs on
‘Education for Sustainable Development’), the work of individual agents and social
collectives initiating sustainability efforts in education policy and curricula locally (e.g.,
Sturgeon curriculum in BC), and the dynamics and inertias influencing global policy (im)
mobilities at subnational levels (McKenzie and Aikens 2020).
Introducing affect to the analysis of policy mobilities entails understanding policy
processes as taking place within and mediated by ‘the transactions of body(ies), space(s),
mind(s), feeling(s) in the unfolding of life-in-the-now’ (Jones 2005, 206). As social,
embodied beings, policy actors connect emotionally with particular issues, feel motivated
to advance certain ideas, experience satisfaction or displeasure championing or adopting
particular initiatives, or are carried along by broader collective fears and aspirations
(McKenzie 2017). Sheikh and Bagley (2018, 58) warn ‘failure to pay attention to [affect] is
a potential failure to recognise the indispensability of the human dimension to policy
processes’.
Drawing from scholarly contributions that approach policy processes as socially,
culturally, and emotionally constructed and interpreted (e.g., Maguire, Braun, and Ball
2015), our analyses in this study set out to explore the affective and embodied ‘goings-on’
of individual actors influencing policy mobility (Thrift 2004), as well as the social
conditions and technologies of power that encompass and shape policy mobility pro­
cesses through affect. This implies examining the work of affect not just as a technique of
power concerned with ideological mediation, but also as a constitutive element of the
backgrounds (e.g., atmospheres, moods, structures of feeling) through which social and
cultural life come to form and are lived (Anderson 2016). Our work thus was also
attentive to how particular affective atmospheres and structures of feelings gave momen­
tum to (or inhibited) the mobilities of sustainability in education policy. According to
Anderson (2014), a growing number of scholars are looking at policy enactment or
implementation as involving relational and emotional practices. However, the policy
studies literature still largely neglects the role of affect in the ‘work of making policy’ (17),
i.e., its development and mobility. This study seeks to address this gap by considering not
just how policy actors’ affective responses and encounters influenced whether/how
education policy on sustainability was enacted or resisted in schools and school divisions
across Canada, but also how the affective work of apparatuses of power and collective
conditions influenced policy mobilization in and to those sites. In doing so, we aim to
better understand and theorize the intersections or overlaps of affect and policy mobility.

Dataset and analysis

Data for this analysis were gathered as part of a larger Sustainability and Education Policy
Network (SEPN) study that examined the situated contexts of sustainability in education
policy and practice in K-12 education across Canada. The SEPN dataset used in this
paper originated from sites across six provinces and territories, ten school divisions, and
twenty schools. The data collection included a broad array of methods such as focus
groups with students and community members; interviews with teachers, students,
6 V. O. PITTON AND M. MCKENZIE

school staff, and community members; photo-documentation; and document analysis.

The data used for the current analysis include semi-structured qualitative interviews
conducted with 63 provincial ministry of education administrators, regional school
division administrators, school principals and vice principals, and key informant
groups1 at the provincial and territorial levels.
Data collection instruments for the interviews included a heat diagram survey and fixed
interview questions. The former involved allocating a self-rating numerical ranking to six pre-
determined ‘whole-institution’ domains of sustainability activity (Henderson and Tilbury
2004) – e.g., governance, curriculum, research, community outreach, operations, and other –
to examine participant perceptions of their site's sustainability performance in relation to policy
and practice. The interview protocol included nineteen guiding questions devised to elicit
qualitative responses in relation to participants’ impressions and experiences with sustainability
in policies and practices at their setting (ministry, school district, or school), including in
relation to the heat diagram scores. The interviews ranged in length from thirty minutes to two
hours, and included questioning on the role of affect in the development and mobility of
sustainability in policy and practice in the research sites.
During analysis, we adopted some strategies to ‘become attuned’ to the doings of affect
in our interviewees’ policy work (Zembylas and Schutz 2016, 5). Transcribed interviews
were read multiple times and coded using NVivo 12 qualitative analysis software.
Drawing from Watkins (2016) ideas, we paid close attention to the interviewee’s recol­
lection of policy processes, including feelings experienced by administrators during
policy development or by other actors during policy arrival or enactment at their sites.
During our analysis, we considered both the linguistic and discursive features of the
interviews. That is, we analysed what administrators said, as well as what they intended to
evoke through their words (e.g., approval, agreement, sympathy). We examined implied
affective words through analysis of their contextualization cues and linguistic features
such as hedging and amplification (Hufnagel and Kelly 2017), and attended to moments
of ‘affective intensity’ during the interviews (Watkins 2016, 74). Team members collect­
ing the data at the various sites also took field notes and photographs in a number of
specific categories related to our focus on sustainability in education policy, including
those associated with affect or emotion, data infrastructures, and material relations.
These were considered alongside the interview transcripts to inform our analysis.
Given the noted challenges of researching the nebulousness of affect (Zembylas and
Schutz 2016), we employed Anderson’s (2014) typology as a ‘methodology for an analysis
of affective life’ (McKenzie 2017, 5). As proposed by Anderson (2014, 11), we attended
both to capacities to affect and be affected, such as fatigue, fear, hope; as well as then
tracing how such expressions of affect result from and shape specific relations. Indeed,
the three-part typology is intended as a means of breaking down and better under­
standing affect: as an object-target for apparatuses of power, as bodily capacities emer­
ging from encounters that are not reducible to apparatuses of power, and as collective
conditions which structure and influence, as well as flow from, those encounters and
apparatuses.
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 7

Finding affect
We present our analysis according to Anderson’s affect typology. We start by describing how
collective conditions of precarity appeared to influence administrators’ dispositions towards
sustainability in their policy work, as well as teachers’ engagement with or detachment from
sustainability-related policy initiatives in their schools. Next, we discuss the interviewees’
indications of how their bodily interactions with place and other people contributed to shape
how sustainability was mobilized in policy across the sites. Finally, we elaborate on how the
affective mediations of eco-certification programs, as ‘apparatuses of power,’ appeared to
mobilize sustainability in education policy in the research sites. Through these examples, we
suggest how affect may be influencing the mobility of education policy on sustainability across
a range of Canadian K-12 education systems. Rather than trace sustainability from a single
point of policy origin into education sites across Canada (i.e., as in ‘follow the policy’
approaches), we instead indicate the ways in which sustainability is moving into policy from
various locations (global and local), incited through a range of affective mechanisms and
atmospheres, as well as resisted through and by others.

Collective conditions of precarity and connection

We found that collective conditions of economic and environmental precarity both
provided impetus and delimited the mobilizations of education policy on sustainability
across some of the research sites. Additionally, a sense of commitment and connection to
land and life also affected the mobilization of sustainability in policy.
First introduced in Bourdieu and colleagues’ (Bourdieu et al. 1963) study on Algerian
workers, the term precarity was subsequently associated with labour conditions in
advanced capitalist economies (Bourdieu 1999) and the casualization of labour in post-
industrialist societies under neoliberal globalization (Kalleberg 2009; Louise 2009). The
unpredictability of economic, social, cultural and biological life under current capitalism,
it is argued, triggers affective responses such as anxiety and fear, rather than meeting
people’s desire for certainty (Giddens 1991; Neilson and Rossiter 2008). These conditions
are also an extension of longer trajectories of colonial capitalism, including histories of
settler colonization and slavery (Couthard 2014; Wolfe 2001). Berlant (2011, 24) identi­
fied ‘cruel optimism’ as a strategy for coping with an ethos of precarity, which she
characterizes as people’s ‘attachment to compromised conditions of possibility’ (e.g.,
belief in the fantasies of the ‘good life’ despite evidence of its impossibility or unlikeli­
hood, as a form of self-deception; see also Ettlinger 2007; Neilson 2015).
Our analyses of the administrators’ and teachers’ interviews suggested collective
affective responses associated with economic precarity may be inhibiting the mobility
of sustainability in policy. On several occasions, descriptions of the policy process in
divisions and schools quivered with affective references to the precarious conditions
within which their policy considerations took place. Contemporary schools, as well as
other social sectors, including in Canada, are grappling with the conditions of financial
uncertainty, and labour unpredictability brought about by neoliberal capitalism
(Carpenter, Weber, and Schugurensky 2012; Means 2013). School administrators and
teachers under these conditions often have to deal with retrenchment, and continuous
demands impinged upon the system because of new performance management
8 V. O. PITTON AND M. MCKENZIE

requirements, parental expectations, among many others (Ball 2003; Perryman et al.
2011). These conditions engender dispositions of worry, anxiety, and stress (Keddie,
Mills, and Pendergast 2011; Smyth et al. 2000; Troman 2000). Along these lines, we found
insufficient funding, together with a myriad of competing interests within the K-12
public system, elicited negative responses in the educational communities under study,
which challenged or delimited the possibilities for mobilizing education policy on
sustainability.
The words of one superintendent in the province of Manitoba serve to illustrate the
precarious feeling pervasive in his school division, that of a pressure to balance multiple
demands with limited resources, which he saw as requiring his resilience as a leader to
prevent policy inertia:

[T]here are many competing interests within the public education system. It was difficult for
me . . . to retain the focus around this issue [sustainability] on an ongoing basis . . . It’s just an
ongoing challenge. So you have to be very resilient in terms of maintaining the focus in this area.

Both the repetition and the choice of words (e.g., ongoing) point to the immanence of the
precarious conditions within which his policy work is situated and conditioned. His
reference to ‘resilience’, which is a term that psychology scholars typically associate with
the individual’s capacity to adapt successfully to adverse circumstances (Ong, Bergeman,
and Boker 2009), is indicative of collective conditions of precarity which are experienced
as demanding individual coping mechanisms to maintain personal and/or professional
efficacy.
The explicit reference to resilience from this superintendent, however, deserves
further inspection. One can situate this linguistic choice within the discursive repertoire
of school leadership teams currently expected to operate under neoliberal managerial
practices. Appeals to resilience, Joseph (2013) argues, constitute a governance tool that
stresses individual responsibility and facilitates accountability. If one follows this line of
argument, school leaders under neoliberalism are expected to demonstrate adaptability
in the face of challenging circumstances and assume responsibility for handling a myriad
of needs. These expectations exert pressure on school leaders who feel compelled to
balance multiple – and sometimes competing – stakeholder demands.
A high school principal from Manitoba responded somewhat differently to the
challenge, with a focus on having to manage the demands of a sense of precarity,
alongside a deeply felt sense of stewardship towards his staff. As per his own recognition,
as a result he acted as a ‘gatekeeper’, filtering new policy initiatives at his school, where
‘teachers [were] stretched pretty thin’ and the pressure to introduce sustainability into
policy was ‘a stressor within the system’. ‘Filtering out’ sustainability, or in other words,
making it ‘immobile’ in policy in his school, constituted a way of safeguarding staff from
work overload, and functioned as a valve regulating the flow of new policy initiatives
within this setting. While in this case such regulation was reported by the principal as
conducted in accordance with the school’s priorities and possibilities, one cannot over­
look the influence that the principal’s orientation towards sustainability might have upon
his decision to mobilize a policy initiative in this area, or not.
The sense of economic precarity was also linked with expressions of concern and
frustration, and as having a detrimental impact on the mobility of sustainability in policy
in some sites. Illustrating this, a high school principal from New Brunswick described in
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 9

a despondent tone his frustration because he tried to bring sustainability into his school,
but ended up giving up due to the lack of resources for implementation. One can
consider this school administrator’s frustration and sense of powerlessness by looking
at the contextual conditions where his efforts took place. New Brunswick lacks sustain­
ability-specific policy at the provincial ministry of education level (Beveridge et al. 2019;
McKenzie and Aikens 2020), which adds to the lack of resources experienced by school
administrators in this province. As a result, some sustainability initiatives (e.g., environ­
mental science courses) were more commonly initiated within schools, rather than at the
school division or ministry levels. This type of school-level policy initiative, though, fully
depended on the will and efforts of individual instructors or school principals. Without
provincial or school division policy directing engagement with sustainability, along with
associated resources for implementation – e.g., a Ministry administrator from this
province referred to limited professional development opportunities – sustainability
uptake became contingent on the ‘above and beyond’ actions of particular teachers or
staff in developing courses or other sustainability initiatives.
We also identified collective affective responses linked to precarious environmental
conditions. While environmental precarity has been linked with capitalism and economic
precarity in some parts of the world for centuries (Ranjan and Kaushik 2006; Morgensen
2011), this is increasingly the case more globally due to climate change and loss of
biodiversity (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018). Under the unprecedented
intensification of the scale and frequency of ecological disasters, people are more commonly
experiencing effects, as their living conditions become more precarious and projections for
the future look grim. Environmental threats incite a series of affective responses and coping
mechanisms. Besides intensifying conditions of anxiety and fear associated with economic
precarity, environmental precarity is also associated with denial and inaction due to
discomfort or unwillingness to adapt (Marshall 2015; Norgaard 2011).
We found evidence of some of these indications of shared conditions of environ­
mental precarity in the study data in relation to sustainability (im)mobility. Some
administrators, for instance, expressed how their policy efforts were rooted in a sense
of concern about the current state of the environment and its implications for future
generations. A staff member of the teacher federation in Ontario acknowledged that
one of the pro-environment principles introduced in its policy handbook in the 90s
became more salient in their initiatives as a sense of emergency in the face of environ­
mental endangerment grew stronger over time. This principle, which asserted, ‘the
utmost respect for the rights and dignity of each individual and for the environment in
which the individual lives’ (Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation 2014–5,
Policy 3.1.1), became a driver in lobbying the ministry of education to develop
curriculum guidelines and programs to raise environmental awareness and foster
sustainable development. This teacher federation leader also recognized that the fed­
eration’s more recent ‘commitment to guaranteeing the achievement in maintenance of
an environmental condition supportive of healthy living’ (Ontario Secondary School
Teachers’ Federation 2014–5, Policy 9.6.1.3) was based on their collective worry that
‘there may not be a society out there for us to live in’ if one does not protect the
environment.
Interestingly, an administrator from a school division in BC suggested that developing
a sense of environmental precarity in students is an inappropriate impact of education
10 V. O. PITTON AND M. MCKENZIE

policy, saying that, ‘[we] are at risk of terrifying our children into inaction’. Instead, she
suggested the sustainability action plan of her school division served to neutralize such
‘eco-phobia’ – a fear of ecological problems (Sobel 1996) – by aiming to teach students to
appreciate the natural world. Her words throughout the interview articulated a form of
optimism that emphasized holding onto what is good about the present time, which
could be regarded as a way of naïve way of coping with a crisis. Faced with precarious
conditions, an optimistic outlook anchored in the present seems to make life bearable
and can open possibilities for action and intervention, though can also be ‘cruel’ in that
hope in and of itself is not effective in enabling change (Berlant 2011). This approach was
evident in the school division’s sustainability action plan, which stressed the need for
overcoming fatalism about the environment and avoiding the spread of despair among
students.
This approach shaped the school division’s policy initiative on sustainability, which
emphasized the importance of students’ appreciation of the environment while also
downplaying their responsibility for current challenges or possible systemic larger scale
action:

. . . what’s coming out in our action plan is something really teachers just do, that connection
to nature without saying that ‘oh by the way, climate change is taking all this away . . . Just go
out and show them how to love a penguin or an orca whale and just let that be. And then
later in life they’ll decide how to save the orca whales. (BC school division sustainability
coordinator)

However, this seems at odds with the provincial curriculum, according to which all
students are expected to develop social responsibility competencies that include identify­
ing how their actions and the actions of others affect their community and the natural
environment (British Columbia Ministry of Education 2015). In relation to the school
division action plan, one could argue, there was a reinterpretation of the ministry’s
framework in regional policy to promote a more comfortable disposition to care without
worry or larger responsibility, with an intention to prevent paralyzing eco-phobia but
perhaps at the same time being naively optimistic.
What we have presented so far has aimed to illustrate how the anxiety and stress
attendant to economic precarity impacted the mobility of sustainability in policy in some
schools and divisions, as well as how fear and despair associated with environmental
precarity shaped the development of sustainability in policy in others. However, other
collective conditions such as a sense of commitment and connection to land can also
influence the mobility of education policy on sustainability.
Shared conditions of connection to environment also appeared to influence the
mobility of sustainability. For instance, a BC school division sustainability coordinator
suggested that ‘a strong green impetus here in Vancouver and west coast of British
Columbia in general’ alongside the municipal initiative to make Vancouver the greenest
city in the world (City of Vancouver 2009) were key factors leading to the creation of the
division’s Sustainability Framework (Millsip 2010). Elaborating on this he said, ‘there
were lots of pushes for green and sustainability’ in the province preceding its creation (e.g.,
greenhouse gas reduction targets, climate change accountability framework, ministry of
education’s Sustainability Education Framework). It is important to note that the ‘pushes’
alluded not only to the political forces advancing green ideas and sustainable practices,
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 11

but also to a shared ‘west coast’ structure of feeling (a ‘strong green impetus’) that
preceded and permeated the policy environment.
Other collective orientations towards the environment shaped education policy in the
territory of Nunavut as well. For instance, a ministry administrator from Nunavut
elaborated on how the ‘responsibility to maintain, look after and be respectful of the
land’, one of the eight Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit principles referred to as Avatittinnik
Kamatsiarniq, was fundamental in forming land-based education policy in the territory.
This respect and care for the land, animals, and the environment, which was articulated
in the education framework for Nunavut’s curriculum (Nunavut Department of
Education 2007), became the foundation from which environmental initiatives were
developed in schools. A high school principal, for instance, elaborated on how the
Inuit connection to and stewardship of the land enshrined in territorial policy catalyzed
the ‘schools’ involvement in community activities, things like the city clean-up . . . the shore
line clean-up’. In his view, these initiatives align with ‘the way the Inuit feel . . . about how
the students should participate in the outside world’. That is, they were concordant with
a collective orientation to land that was mobilized through education policy and curri­
cula, and resulted in land-based practices across school sites in Nunavut.

Bodily encounters of people and place

Following Anderson (2014), ‘bodily encounters’ refer to interactions with other people
(and we add place) that develop or shift affective orientations, including in ways that
influence policy processes. Examination of such bodily encounters involves paying
attention to ‘the emergence of affect from the relations [with place and] between bodies,
and from the encounters that those relations are entangled within’ (Anderson 2006, 736).
In our case this included attending to how such affect then influences policy development
and mobility in the administration sites under study. More specifically, we explore how
the affective bodily encounters of ministry, school division and school administrators,
and with place, influenced the mobilization of sustainability in policy in their settings.
In some cases, we found that the passions and particular bodily interactions among
people and with place led to policy change. A community member, for instance, spear­
headed the development of a Sturgeon curriculum in BC. Later, teachers who also shared
the collective concerns about the river and its endangered inhabitants piloted and
reviewed this curriculum, where they were ‘connecting with . . . the river and the watershed
and then the Sturgeon’ (BC high school teacher). These bodily encounters, one could
argue, operated outside of the intentions of ‘apparatuses of power’, and influenced the
uptake of sustainability in these schools and ultimately the school division. The involve­
ment of the school division ranged from participation in the initial discussions to later
active involvement in programs and funding. As one school division staff commented:

[W]e have Nechako White Sturgeon in that river which is a very ancient fish. But it’s
decreasing rapidly in population because of farming practices and the dam and many
different reasons. So now they have created a Sturgeon curriculum, so we’ve just started
using it.
12 V. O. PITTON AND M. MCKENZIE

The development and mobilization of this curricular initiative did not initially involve
governmental policy actors or state apparatuses, but rather, began with individuals with
strong connections to the local river who were committed to its protection.
Encounters with other policy actors (e.g., through conferences, workshops, public
deliberations, leadership teams) can also elicit affective responses in individuals that
mediate their policy work. Illustrating this, the recollections of a director from a school
division in Manitoba, suggest how her passionate interactions on sustainability with the
board and leadership team contributed to building a broader emphasis on sustainability
in the school division’s policy work. In her interview, she presented sustainability as an
ethical concern pertaining to future generations and emphasized the school division’s
responsibility to ensure not only that students develop competencies in this area, but also
‘contribute to equitable quality of life for all now and in the future’. While this director
recognized the early influence of an education for sustainability workshop back in
2004–2005 on the division team, as well as a more recent training program informed
by UN policy priorities, she stressed on multiple occasions how her unwavering commit­
ment and close interactions with her team shaped how strongly the board engaged with
sustainability. Ultimately, these efforts crystallized in the division’s Education for
Sustainable Development framework, an articulation of 12 goals aligned with the inter­
nationally developed ‘whole school’ approach, which in part suggests the mobility of
sustainability approaches in education from global to local, through individuals’ encoun­
ters in workshops and trainings.
In a similar vein, a ministry level administrator from the same province acknowledged
that meetings with parents, students and other members of the school community
created momentum for their policy work on sustainability. These encounters put in
motion a shared commitment to work together to protect the environment. As this
administrator argued, the ministry worked ‘in partnership with the school and school
divisions and the community, the parents, the students to bring them on board’. Through
participation in these meetings, teachers and school division administrators became
passionately engaged with sustainability practices, and thus, they committed to their
enactment in their own settings.
We have discussed so far how collective affective dispositions can mobilize education
policy on sustainability, as well as how the smaller scale bodily encounters, or relation­
ships of people and place, can influence how sustainability moves within and across sites.
Now we shift to consider how ‘apparatuses of power, whether by design or unintention­
ally, can spur a range of affective responses in administrators, educators, and students,
and thus also influence the relative mobility and uptake of sustainability in policy.

Eco-certification programs and other apparatuses of power

The term ‘apparatuses’ alludes to techniques that wield power with affective effects on
particular targets (Anderson 2014). Our study considered the affective mediations of
a broad range of apparatuses that influenced particular orientations to sustainability in
the schools, school divisions, and ministries of education (e.g., funding, personnel,
training opportunities, awards, among others). This included, for example, (required)
professional development opportunities for school division leaders in some provinces,
sustainability-specific staff hires at various policy decision-making levels, grants for
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 13

school leadership prioritizing sustainability, school recognition awards from provincial

and national bodies, and other levers and techniques of motivating policy actors to
mobilize higher level sustainability priorities in school division and school policy deci­
sion-making.
We elaborate further here in particular on eco-certification programs, an ‘apparatus’
with significant influence in affective mobilization of sustainability in policy in and across
the sites under study. Eco-certification programs are becoming an increasingly familiar
staple in K-12 schools in Canada and internationally The Sustainability and Education
Policy Network 2014. Dominant programs in Canada include the EcoSchools in Ontario
Ecoschools with over 1,900 schools from 58 school boards certified (Ontario Ecoschools
2018), and the Eco-Globe Schools in Manitoba, with at least 42 schools certified (Manitoba
Government 2018). Building on the now global Eco-Schools program that developed in
Europe in the 1990s, these programs share a focus on recognition to promote the
incorporation of sustainability in schools and school divisions, including offering award
designations to schools that meet specific criteria (Eco-Schools 2018). Lysgaard, Larsen,
and Jeppe (2015) argue this reward system incites feelings of satisfaction and intrinsic
motivation to develop and maintain green initiatives in policy and practice.
The role of eco-certification programs in mobilizing sustainability in policy was
suggested in the sites under study through material conditions of the school (e.g., in
the form of stickers or awards on the wall), as well as being a pervasive element in
conversations with the interviewees. Administrators from certified schools and from
school divisions where certifications were prevalent described these programs not just as
a yardstick against which their schools’ operations and programs were measured, but also
as affective drivers of sustainability engagement in an increasing number of schools and
classrooms. Illustrating this point, a principal from Ontario regarded eco-certification
designations as transformation catalysts that brought about a sense of satisfaction and
moral realization within his high school: ‘They’re celebrated . . . [I]t’s the culture that
changes . . . feeling the highest reward for doing good work is not what you get for it, it’s
what you become by it’.
Another principal from a primary school in Ontario argued that achieving a new
certification level incited both a sense of achievement and enthusiasm, which ended up
shaping a passionate engagement with sustainability in his primary school:

[W]e started out as bronze . . . so everyone very quickly, what do we do to be more than that?
And now we’re silver, so the big thing is what do we do now to be gold? [T]hey’re always
looking at what the next step would be . . . that passion that they have for almost anything
they start is pretty much seen throughout our sustainability within the school too.

The satisfaction engendered for earning higher levels of certification prompted collective
affirmations of pride as well. Evidencing this, a school division director from Manitoba
referred to his division’s pride by drawing comparison with other schools in the province:

We had two of our schools identified at the transformation level. So we were pretty proud of
that. Very few schools in the province have achieved the transformation level.

A similar narrative from a principal in Manitoba sheds light on how eco-certification

spurred a sense of accomplishment, and by so doing, steered the sustainability efforts in
his primary school:
14 V. O. PITTON AND M. MCKENZIE

[O]ur school was recognized as an Eco-Globe school 2014 Transformational Leader. We

were the first rural school in the province to receive that recognition and we were the third
school in the province to receive the recognition . . . So that has been at the forefront of our
focus.

Affirmations of achievement in this and other schools appeared to correlate with

dispositions of competitiveness and drove the development of new policies and practices
in sustainability at the school and school division levels. Eco-certification programs
triggered these dispositions and actions through incentives such as public recognition
or publication of results across schools, districts, and provinces/territories. The remarks
of a high school principal from Ontario depicts how the rewards-based nature of this
apparatus can feed into dispositions of competitiveness:
We are the first school that has been deemed to be the platinum level in the scores . . .
I believe we’re doing as well as - or better than most schools are doing, so I think we should
get some sort of recognition for that.

While this apparatus spurred feelings of satisfaction and pride which contributed to
mobilizing sustainability in policy in and across sites, there were also instances of
disengagement and even resistance to this kind of initiative. A principal from
a primary school in Manitoba, for instance, justified his hesitations towards eco-
certification programs by arguing that it was not part of the school’s philosophy: ‘[I]t’s
not really part of Montessori practice that we get extrinsic rewards for things that we do’.
Likewise, a principal from BC argued that his primary school refused to engage with these
certifications as a matter of principle:
We don’t have that at our school . . . it shouldn’t be the reason why you do stuff . . . people are
doing things like the enviro hikes . . . without having to do it for those rankings.

Both principals referred to intrinsic motivations for advancing sustainability in policy

and practice, not extrinsic ones such as rewards or public recognition. They appealed to
moral considerations for such engagement (i.e., doing what is right; consistency with
their values or philosophy), although there was acknowledgement of the instrumental
role of such forms of recognition for motivating people with the power to mobilize
sustainability in education policy and practice.

Conclusion
In this article, we set out to explore the influence of affect on the mobility of education
policy on sustainability. Drawing from affect theory and the policy mobilities literature,
we sought to reach a better understanding of the affective work, conditions, and cap­
abilities that can mediate the movement of sustainability into and across sites of educa­
tion policy-making. In line with this, our empirical study considered why and how policy
actors’ responses to affective collective conditions and their bodily encounters with
people and place shaped the mobility of sustainability in K-12 education policy in
Canada, as well as how techniques such as eco-certification programs also contributed
to circulate sustainability initiatives across the policy landscape.
As discussed previously, policy actors’ affective experiences of precarity resulting from
limited budgets and incessant performance management demands seemed to influence
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 15

negatively the uptake of sustainability in policy in some schools and divisions. On the
other hand, a shared sense of precarious environmental conditions and associated fear
and worry created a sense of urgency that many policy actors identified as a catalyst for
policy development and uptake in their school divisions. Moreover, administrators in
some schools and divisions alluded to strong shared attachments to place, and commit­
ment to safeguard all forms of life as the impetus for policy creation and mobilization.
Walking the land, hunting, navigating rivers, and many other encounters with the
natural world were also highlighted in the interviews as having contributed to shape
administrators’ and teachers’ engagement with sustainability in their policy work and
practices respectively. In terms of the affective influences of encounters with people on
policy mobilization, the enthusiasm and commitment of some policy actors in leadership
positions seemed to elicit (or reinforce) positive affective dispositions towards the
environment among other administrators and teachers. This then seeped into their
stance towards enacting sustainability-related policy in their schools and divisions.
Finally, apparatuses of policy such as eco-certification programs also helped sustainabil­
ity to travel from ministry and school division priorities to school level policy and action,
including through affective dispositions such as competition and pride.
In sum, this paper suggests how collective affective conditions of economic and
environmental precarity and environmental connection, affect-mediated interactions
with place and other policy actors, and the affective work of apparatuses of power
influenced the mobilization of sustainability in education policy in and to the schools,
school divisions, and provincial and territorial ministries of education under study.
While our research focused on sustainability in the Canadian K-12 policy landscape,
using this methodology of affect to consider influences on policy mobilities would apply
to other sites and topics as well.
Our work contributes to the incipient and sparse literature focused on the affective
dimensions of education policy in general, and policy mobility in education in particular.
This paper not only explores the affective work of educational actors ‘doing policy’ (Ball
et al. 2011), but also considers how affective conditions move policy actors collectively
and individually to adopt or reject certain initiatives. As a case in point, this article
contributes to the literature seeking to understand the material presence of atmospheres
in educational places such as schools (e.g., feelings of progress in data-driven school
improvement initiatives; Finn 2016), and how students, teachers, and other actors’ felt
experiences may engage with or challenge those initiatives. Aligned with this, our work
provides further evidence to a growing body of research on the affective mediations of
education policy and practice through the interactions of individuals (or groups) with
other actors, materials or places (Lindgren and Linda 2018; Mulcahy 2012; Sellar 2015;
Singh 2018). Moreover, this paper extends the literature on affective technologies of
power used to influence students, teachers, and administrators’ practices (Sellar 2015;
Staunæs 2016; Taylor and Gulson 2012; Zembylas 2018).
Future research could bring new insights and understandings of how and why
teachers, administrators and educational leaders might adopt certain policies and
practices – and when they do not, why might that be – by considering the affective
dimensions involved in the mobility of education policy in other contexts and under
different circumstances (e.g., during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic).
Furthermore, other studies could expand our work by exploring whether the affective
16 V. O. PITTON AND M. MCKENZIE

work of a particular apparatus of power operates in the same way for different
educational actors or by examining whether an apparatus is ‘effective’ in shaping
and mobilizing collective affect by itself or in combination with other apparatuses of
power.
Additionally, this paper offers insights on the affective implications of policy that
might be useful for policy-makers seeking to introduce a new educational initiative. As
our study illustrates, efforts to mobilize a new policy orientation (e.g., sustainability in
K-12 education) could involve facilitating the emergence of atmospheres that displace
attachment to the current policy status quo (e.g., fiscal austerity that operates circum­
venting concerns for the environment). These atmospheres are mobilized creating new
conditions that facilitate a positive response to the policy orientation (e.g., proper
funding and support for the initiative, alongside a clear articulation of and commitment
to its values and goals). In our case, for instance, the subjective and collective affect
emerging from new atmospheres that mobilize concern for and connections to the
environment would require initiatives that i) create the material conditions necessary
to develop responsible relationships with land and climate in schools (e.g., infrastructure,
professional development, etc.) and ii) are articulated within structures of feeling that
challenge exploitative and colonial relations to place and people.
As previously suggested, encounters and apparatuses can rework collective affective
conditions that paralyze or disrupt policy mobility. As our study suggests, injecting
resources that build excitement for introducing sustainability into school operations
and priorities can counteract feelings of frustration and powerlessness in the face of
the precarity of education and societal systems. Moreover, intimate encounters with
nature and meaningful and sustained interactions with eco-enthusiast leaders and other
relevant policy actors in education might revert the immobilizing effects of denial
triggered by fear and anxiety about the planet’s future, building greater sense of concern
and care in driving commitment to perhaps get and keep sustainability on policy
decision-making tables. In closing, our work not only suggests educational practitioners
and policy-makers need to consider the affective dimensions that influence how they ‘do
policy’, but also stresses the ethical imperative associated with such work.

Note
1. Key informants included members of teachers’ unions and sustainability education teaching
specialist associations, as well as regional school eco-certification staff.

Acknowledgments
This publication draws on research from the Sustainability and Education Policy Network (SEPN),
supported by a Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (Grant No 895-2011-1025, Principal Investigator Dr. Marcia McKenzie). For more
information visit www.sepn.ca. We would like to thank research assistants and associates involved
in data collection; SEPN team members involved in the research design; and the administrators,
teachers, staff, and students who participated in the study.
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 17

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
[Grant No 895-2011-1025].

Notes on contributors
Viviana O. Pitton is a Research Associate with the Sustainability and Education Policy Network
(SEPN) at the University of Saskatchewan. She holds an Ed.M. and a Ph.D. in Educational Policy
Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published on topics related
to educational policies, neoliberalism, and globalization.
Marcia McKenzie is a Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University
of Saskatchewan, Canada, Director of the Sustainability and Education Policy Network (www.
sepn.ca), and leads the Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Education (MECCE)
project, a six-year global partnership project to advance the quality and quantity of climate change
education, training, and public awareness. She is co-author/editor of four books, including Place in
Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (Routledge, 2015); and Critical Education and
Sociomaterial Practice (Peter Lang, 2016); and is co-editor of the Palgrave book series Studies in
Education and the Environment.

ORCID
Viviana O. Pitton http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5934-8405
Marcia McKenzie http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8037-8059

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