Conference Program

Within contemporary national States, the inclusion of environmental issues within governments’ agendas, as well as the rise of collective actions to face climate change and ecological degradation, has favoured the emergence of what is defined as ‘sustainable citizenship’ (Micheletti et al., 2014).

As a ‘total relationship of being’ among individuals, the State, the market, and civil society, the idea of sustainable citizenship underlies a ‘lengthening in the chain of interdependence’ (Dunning & Hughes, 2013) between social agents and institutions. In this broad process, education plays a pivotal role. Particularly, schools and formal pedagogies are increasingly involved in addressing the more pressing preoccupation of our time, with key functions in socializing younger generations into the complexities of contemporary citizenship and appropriate behavior (Gabriel, 2024).

The Italian case is revealing. Law n. 92/2019 has introduced ‘civic education’ as a mandatory subject in both primary and secondary schools. The curricula revolve around three main topics: “constitution and legality”, “digital citizenship”, and “sustainable development”. Yearly, in each school, every class is required to implement educational activities on one of these topics, involving external stakeholders such as public authorities, associations and businesses.

The present paper elaborates the findings of an ethnographic research conducted in ten secondary schools of Milan to examine various initiatives dedicated to sustainability education (2022-2025) (Pedrini et al., 2025). Adopting an Eliasian perspective (Law & Mennel, 2023), this contribution aims to interpret the teaching initiatives on sustainability as a small-scale civilizing process.

Precisely, the analysis focuses on the discursive frameworks - e.g., ‘Agenda2030’, the ‘Green Deal’, and ‘changemaking’ - to which the observed projects refer, the techniques used to engage the younger generations, the practices of sustainability promoted, and the implicit construction of the figure of the desirable sustainable youth.

The argument stresses how school pedagogies absorb and reframe the demands, keywords, and methods of youth climate movements (Boltanski & Chiappello, 2007), by turning social critique within a ‘civilized’ perspective oriented toward social consensus. This reframing channels any expression of conflict into the realm of barbarism. From this interpretation, it emerges the identity of the ideal youngster: a climate-conscious subject committed to act for democratic transformation of society through productive-performative engagement within existing capitalist relations.

Moreover, a threefold ‘ambivalence’ – as integral to the critical Elias’ conceptualisation of the civilizing process (Burkitt, 1996) – are higlihted: first, the top-down imposition of democratization that is supposed to originate from below; second, the system’s capacity to appropriate every aspects of social critique and convey a ‘new spirit’ of (green) ‘capitalism’ (The Trilateral Commission, 2022); third, the contradiction between, on one hand, the demand for the individual’s total responsibility regardless of social disadvantages and priviledges, and on the other, the denial of any call for systemic challenge.

To conclude, while young people are expected, according to the established good manners, to learn to act decorously (Pavoni, Tulumello, 2023), governments legitimise authoritarianism as a dominant political culture, invest in society’s militarisation, and support wars initiated by Western countries worldwide.