September 2022

Background and aims

The purpose of this policy is to guide AJEE’s processes and publications, so they support and promote earthly ecological knowledges that actively engages with the diversity of human and more-than-human life. This will require doing our best to decolonise all aspects of the journal’s practices and publications, including eschewing all forms of colonisation, particularly extractive colonisation. We aim to maximise socio-politically diverse contributions to the journal. We will practice affirmative, generative, and strengths-based approaches.

Working towards diversity and inclusion for AJEE will include prioritising the voices, experiences, and knowledges of: Indigenous and/or First Nations peoples from around the world; peoples from the Global South; and those of the many diverse peoples often marginalised in the Global North.

The aims of this policy are:

• For AJEE to be known and respected by diverse communities as a platform that offers meaningful discussion of the environmental education issues that matter to them.
• To ensure that prospective authors are treated fairly and have their work considered equitably during the review and publishing process.
• To ensure that the journal practices social justice and inclusion. This will require:
  • Ensuring no discrimination within the journal’s practices and publications.
  • Fair representation of minorities/marginalised communities, as authors and research subjects, in terms of both quantity and quality.
  • Publishing ideas and practices that contribute to eco-social justice.
• To encourage diversity among the journal’s Editorial Executive and Editorial Board.

Why do we need and want a Diversity and Inclusion policy?

Issues of discrimination and social inequality abound throughout many societies and sectors of societies. Academia is no exception. Academia, its research methodologies, and epistemologies, are the result of embedded historical and ongoing practices of empire and capitalism including neoliberal ideologies. Without an active, formalised and conscious effort to prevent and address this, AJEE may potentially participate - including unintentionally - in discriminatory and colonising practices.

At this critical point in planetary history (climate crisis, mass extinction, etc.), we know that environmental education, as a crucial pillar in the journey to a more sustainable world, is fundamental to the survival and quality of life of many peoples and species, and vital to the restoration of diverse narratives now needed for planetary healing and flourishing. Environmental education therefore needs to be for everyone and by everyone. There are multiple solutions to climate breakdown, and this journal provides academic focus to understanding ways forward.

Therefore, if we are to work towards climate and eco-justice, AJEE needs to publish diversified, broadened, and amplified contributions to the field. It is critical that diverse and inclusive theories, ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, and ethics are engaged, respected, and promoted in environmental education theory and practice. Effectively incorporating and advocating for diversity will contribute to the advancement of the field, through attracting new audiences, practitioners, knowledges, and perspectives with which to support our communities.

We identify the following as potential discriminatory and/or colonising issues in academia that AJEE can address, respond to, prevent or carefully account for in its work:

• The bias of privileged researchers, which by its nature can be unintentional. This may result in the following problems within academic literatures:
  • Underrepresentation of perspectives: This is where privileged researchers only conduct research within their ‘same’ communities, ignore representation of different communities, and then generate conclusions said to be applicable to all (i.e. as if generalisable or universal). This can centre and normalise privilege and erase difference and alternative understandings, experiences, and practices. When multiple researchers do this, the literature on the topic as a whole can perpetuate and amplify underrepresentation.
  • Misrepresentation: This is where privileged researchers attempt to conduct research within communities as outsiders through they may create or perpetuate problematic assumptions and practices regarding those communities that contribute to stereotypes, misinformation, stigma and/or inequality. Again, when multiple researchers do this, the literature on the topic as a whole can perpetuate and amplify these issues.
• Discrimination against or exclusion of researchers from linguistically diverse and/or minority or other diverse backgrounds. This may happen at the point of screening, through the review process, or potentially after publication. This can take the form of overt or active discrimination, or it could materialise unintentionally through systems that are not designed thoughtfully, and which can therefore be exclusionary.
• The exclusion of the intellectual contributions from authors for whom English is not their native language, through unsupportive publication processes.
• Invisible norms and cultures of academia and the field, that can make it challenging for early-career researchers, and those without standard Western middle-class tertiary or post-graduate education, to understand expectations and navigate academic and Western educational cultures easily.

Our responses

Awareness and culture

AJEE commits to embedding and raising awareness about diversity and inclusion in our everyday practices and culture. We commit to continuing to identify, prevent and redress issues of exclusion, discrimination, or inaccessibility. We will seek to boost diversity among our Editorial Executive and Editorial Board through succession planning in ways that will result in creative, transformative, innovative and unique perspectives being represented in AJEE.

Promotions, communication and soliciting journal articles

• AJEE will solicit guest-edited special issues that focus on issues of diversity, inclusion and justice in environmental education.
• AJEE will ensure journal promotional materials, including our website, do not discourage, and actively encourage, authors from diverse backgrounds, and authors writing about/with diverse communities, to submit manuscripts to the journal.
• AJEE will collaborate with Cambridge University Press to provide best practice in terms of disability accessible technologies used on our website, article management platform, and published journal articles.

Editorial processes

• Whenever there is a tricky or concerning editorial situation regarding diversity and inclusion, we will raise this with the AJEE Editorial Executive in one of our regular meetings or via email, to establish an equitable resolution.
• AJEE will continue to consider ways of publishing diverse and non-traditional forms of academic research, so as to be inclusive of diverse ways of knowing, being and doing.
• AJEE Editors will carefully construct their own and evaluate reviewer comments before sending these to the author. We will be mindful to check the reviews are not discriminatory. If they are, we will consider whether to delete those elements of the review or rescind the review. We will consult within the Editorial Executive for support in these decisions.
• AJEE will ensure that when a manuscript is submitted that focuses on a marginalised or minority community, at least one reviewer is a person from that community (or as close to as possible). If no-one in that situation is available, we will do our best to find reviewers who are professionally and personally literate in the communities’ experiences and/or knowledges and are respected by such communities.
• AJEE will be mindful of the structural disadvantages that academia exacerbates for some people, and that they may need additional support, encouragement or extensions of time, to be able to confidently publish their best work.

Manuscripts where English language competency is an issue

As an action item of this Diversity and Inclusion Policy, we will organise a supplementary discussion and conduct further research into the best ways to support authors for whom Standard English language competency may be a barrier to their research being published. Our hope is to incorporate a process that supports authors while not being overly burdensome on reviewers or the Editorial Executive.

Ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological diversity

In recognition of the ongoing epistemological, ontological and methodological impacts of colonisation, as an action item of this Diversity and Inclusion policy, we will organise a supplementary discussion regarding editorial decisions and the direction of the journal’s intellectual contribution to environmental education research. For example, there are methodological and epistemological approaches which are common in the Global South but sometimes seen as dated in the Anglophone world. Our aim will be to support authors from around the world while ensuring the journal is advancing environmental education scholarship commensurate with the times we live in.