ABSTRACT
This contemporary social-ecological condition is characterized by powerful changes in the way that we relate to each other and to the environment. This has led to increased ecological vulnerability, which is also accompanied by ongoing, and increased societal vulnerability. Nevertheless there remain opportunities for developing new social-ecological relations, and for social-ecological learning and change. From a southern African point of view, where most of the chapters of the book have been produced, this would seem to require a strong project of recovering ontology, and a challenging and broadening of dominant ways of knowing. Bhaskar’s view of agency as radically transformed transformative praxis, oriented to rationably groundable projects, implies a role for education and social learning, as transformative praxis involves knowledge, values, skills, beliefs and motives that are learned in various socio-cultural and educational contexts, both formal and informal. This chapter introduces the rationale for working with critical realism in environmental education research in a southern African context, suggesting that in order to coherently critique beliefs, and engage in transformative educational praxis attempts, we need a notion of the (real) world, and we need tools and approaches for engaging with change in ways that are not relativist or positivist. The chapter also points to how chapters in the book seek to engage with the limitations of a history in which Western epistemological disciplines (dominant via continuities of colonization) tend to ignore the ontologies of a wider range of more complex forms of epistemology and reason, providing an additional justification for working with critical realism in environmental education research. The chapter suggests that critical realism provides explanatory tools and forms of reasoning that allow for making the complexities found in our contexts more visible and open for dialogue, engagement, learning and reflexivity.
