Who are we?

We are a transboundary and transdisciplinary collective leveraging the potential of higher education for transformative change. Our goal is to transform higher education to accelerate a just transition and advance climate justice.

We are a union with members representing higher education institutions, diverse and creative communities, civil society organisations, and others. The union was formed on the island of Ireland but welcomes members from all parts of the world.

Key Objectives

(1) activate transformative change toward a thriving future for all life by expanding scholar-activism and mobilising collective action within and beyond higher education institutions

(2) promote a culture of care within higher education communities by prioritising well-being, compassion, empathy, reciprocity, and relational knowledge, (i.e. interconnections among humans and with the beyond-human part of earth’s systems)

(3) leverage the influence and reach of higher education for just policies and practices contributing to global just transitions and climate justice movements internationally

(4) mobilise global solidarity and collaboration across national and regional boundaries within and among higher education communities

(5) co-create educational structures that acknowledge global injustices and co-create with students and communities learning opportunities to enable and equip collective understanding of the polycrisis facing humanity, and multiple possibilities for responding to the polycrisis on the basis of justice.

What do we do? Resist, Reclaim and Restructure

Resist: The Climate Justice Universities Union resists the complicity and complacency within higher education that supports the status quo and business as usual. The Union resists the corporatisation and commercialisation of higher education institutions and the neoliberal market-based competitive pressures dominating university operations, curriculum and research. Thus, the union seeks to democractise the university.  The Climate Union resists curricula that ignore or only tokenistically address ecological crises and the associated injustices.  The Climate Union resists teaching students a narrow neoliberal economic perspective based on market-fundamentalism, techno-solutionism, and growth without acknowledging breadth and diversity of understandings of the economy, including indigenous and non-European ones.

Reclaim: The Climate Justice Universities Union is reclaiming the common good mission of higher education. The Climate Union strives to model and facilitate deliberative and experimental democratic processes, transparency, and decision-making in higher education and beyond. The Climate Union is working to reclaim the public infrastructure of higher education by sharing resources among different institutions and communities, fostering collaboration rather than competition. The Climate Union works to recover, amplify, and integrate the importance of indigenous languages, knowledges and cultures in how universities contribute to responding to polycrises.

Restructure: The Climate Justice Universities Union strives to restructure research, learning and community engagement, and policy influence in universities to support transformation toward an inclusive, non-extractive and non-exploitative future. The Climate Union creates opportunities to reimagine the role of higher education in responding to disruptions and advancing structural and systemic social change, and focusing on social and economic, and not just technical, innovation.  

How do we engage?

We collaborate, experiment and grow together. We share resources and strategies. We strive to build coalitions among diverse communities within and beyond higher education. We collectively strategise toward higher education playing a larger role in imagining and co-creating transformative approaches to the worsening planetary and humanitarian crises facing us.