The climate-nature emergency and higher education

Abstract

The Climate-Nature Emergency (CNE) is an existential crisis that makes urgent the need to fundamentally transform the dominant model of social and economic development. Amid the wreckage created by competitive accumulation and hyper consumption, the crucial need is to develop a sustainable moral order, embodying constructive human-nature and human-human relations. Following Durkheim, the main components of a moral order are the state, which is the crucial repository of collective interest, and individuals who take responsibility for self-improvement and the implementation of social values. The CNE foregrounds the capacity of states everywhere to both organise centrally and foster devolved community agency that can effectively address local problems and disasters. Working with government, higher education has a central role to play in advancing and defending science, fostering skills and knowledge in government, and in developing reflexive agents effective in social action in all of the local, communal, national, regional and global scales. The CNE also calls up the need to overhaul the curriculum to render it consistent with ecological survival. Higher education has an advanced capacity to cooperate across national borders and can assist nation-states in the difficult but vital process of building stable global cooperation. In addressing these issues, China and higher education in China have strong endogenous traditions, ancient and recent, on which to draw, including the consensual role of the Sinic state, which when functioning effectively draws on widespread public support; governance through deep devolution within the framework of central policies; Confucian self-cultivation with its capacity to foster consciously reflective lifelong learners; and tianxia an approach to global cooperation founded in moral values and norms of conduct rather than coercion. When combined with the Western respect for personal freedom and initiative, these qualities have much to offer in addressing the CNE, not only in China but across the world.

Introduction

This paper discusses the challenge posed for higher education by ‘global sustainability’; or rather, the ‘climate-nature emergency’ (CNE), the term which better captures the present ecological juncture. As Sharon Stein and colleagues have pointed out, the question is not ‘education for sustainable development’, but ‘education the end of the world as we know it’ (Stein et al., 2022). The climate-nature emergency is a problem shared by all nations, all organisations and all persons. It is political as well as ecological, and it is much more important than any other issue or challenge now faced by humans (Monboit, 2023b). It is existential – this problem goes to the question of whether humans themselves, and the conditions of life that enable human society, will continue to exist. Those who research higher education need to acknowledge that there are larger questions than the future of higher education itself. Nevertheless, the sector has a role to play in relation to the CNE.

Higher education is the home of basic science; it is society’s primary site of people formation through immersion in knowledge; and along with government and other sectors it is a key influence in the evolution of social relations. It must be a central part of the solution.

The paper begins by reviewing symptoms of the climate-nature emergency, in order to underline the magnitude and urgency of the problem, the imperative it creates. The next section argues that the CNE calls up the need for a new moral order and discusses the components of that moral order, including government/the state, the individual and local communities, and global cooperation, noting the implications of each of these scales or domains of action for higher education. The three domains are not singular in character everywhere but differ across the world. This diversity is inevitable to the CNE, and also a significant resource, in that different global societies and traditions bring various strengths to the table. The following section expands on the role, potentials and limits of higher education and its contribution to tackling the CNE in the three domains. The conclusion follows. The paper does not provide new empirical data on the CNE and higher education. Rather the paper offers a new argument. The facts are well known: the unresolved question is what to do about them. The paper is a critical commentary, normative and charged with purpose, that draws existing information together with key concepts and perspectives.

The climate-nature emergency

Consider these indicators, which graphically illustrate the CNE:

• September 2023's average global temperature was 16.4 centigrade. This was recorded at the beginning, not the peak, of a warming El Nino cycle. It was 1.4° above the 20^th century average for September, and 0.5 degrees above the previous record level for September. July 2023 was the hottest month on record (Carrington, 2023a; Overall, 2023 was the hottest year on record. The average global temperature for 2023 was 1.48 C above the historic average for 1850-1900 and 0.17 C above the previous hottest year in 2016 at the peak of a previous El Nino (Carrington, 2024). Because the El Nino cycle has a larger impact in its second year, 2024 will be hotter than was 2023. There will be more and more extreme hot weather events and fires across the world;

• Ice melting in West Antarctica, Greenland and mountain glaciers is happening at a quickening rate. The melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now locked in.

The ice sheet of West Antarctica would push up the oceans by 5 m if lost completely. Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting. The analysis shows the rate of melting of the floating ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea will be three times faster this century compared with the previous century, even if the world meets the most ambitious Paris agreement target of keeping global heating below 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels (Carrington, 2023b).

The collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelves will mean that the glaciers on that side of Antarctica are freed up to melt into the sea. That unstoppable melting may be largely completed by 2100. It will inundate the whole or large parts of cities including Cairo, Lagos, Maputo, Bangkok, Dhaka, Jakarta, Mumbai, Shanghai, Copenhagen, London, Los Angeles, New York and Buenos Aires. The Greenland ice cap may also have partly melted by 2100, with potential to raise sea levels a further 4–5 m. There are also growing concerns about the stability of East Antarctica’s much larger ice cover. More than a third of the global population lives within 100 kms of the coastline (Morton and Readfearn, 2023).

• Wildlife populations have fallen by 69 per cent since 1970, with a loss of 94 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the Amazon (WWF, 2022). Habitat loss to farming, logging and agribusiness is the key factor in pushing species to extinction. More than 19 out of every 20 mammals on earth are now human, their pets or their livestock;

• More than a quarter of the world’s population is trapped in zones threatened by desertification, which limits food and water, triggering conflict. More than 2.3 billion people now experience water stress and some forecasts state that by 2050 more than three quarters of the world’s population will be affected by drought (UN, 2024a). Large numbers of people are moving northward out of Africa but those who lack the resources to finance their mobility are trapped in desertifying zones;

• The proportion of people that face hunger on a daily basis stopped falling in 2015 and has grown significantly since 2020 (WHO, 2022), but the CNE threatens to trigger a much larger deterioration. The global food system may not be far from its tipping point, when extreme weather disrupts several major growing zones simultaneously;

• The two industries that drive the climate-nature emergency are fossil fuels and agribusiness. Fossil fuels control the policy of many Western and other governments and fund disinformation that is destabilising climate science, especially in the US (Monboit, 2023a). At least the fossil fuel sector is under worldwide scrutiny. The massive impact of agribusiness on land use, habitat and the production of greenhouse gas, the dangers inherent in the massive shift to meat consumption and single crop production (Monboit, 2023c), are almost never discussed;

• Some governments are backtracking on previously announced environment policy commitments. The UK, an early leader in advancing renewable energy, has now blocked new wind farms, radically reduced the land available for solar power installations, and slowed planned transitions to electrical vehicles and more energy efficient homes (The Observer, 2023);

• Each multilateral conference on the climate-nature emergency is less effective. The Cop28 biodiversity summit in December 2023 was hosted by the United Arab Emirates and chaired by the CEO of the state oil company Adnoc, Sultan al-Jaber (BBC, 2023). The UAE has a long list of net-zero busting plans for oil and gas expansion.

Extreme weather, desertification, plastic pollution, habitat loss and ice melting are in plain sight but the political remedies are not. Neither policies within single nations, nor combined global action, have stopped or even slowed the cessation of fossil fuel extraction and the absorption of new landscape by agribusiness. Fundamentally, as is shown by the abovementioned capture of certain major governments by business lobbying, effective political action is blocked by the Anglophone model of liberal capitalist development now dominant in most economic ministries. In this model, the state steps back while creating favourable conditions for the free accumulation of capital driven by economic self-interest; and the overarching policy goal is the maximisation of the rate of economic growth, which is measured in terms of capital accumulation. In the majority of countries, capital accumulation is not effectively reconciled by the state with social and ecological imperatives, for example as in policies that give priority to the rapid evolution of renewable energy and the manufacture of electronic vehicles. Rather, these states allow powerful economic actors to exercise primacy. When ecological policies are in play, these are an add-on to the priority, which is continued economic hyper-consumption and growth.

Failure of the economic model

The science about the climate-nature emergency is compelling. The fact that the wide circulation of the truth in this form has not been enough to secure the necessary action in those parts of the world which are primary in driving the CNE is corroding public confidence in states and political action, and the integrity of discussion and debate in the public sphere, weakening international cooperation, undermining the virtuous relation between expertise and government, and damaging science itself and the universities that house it. These problems are especially apparent in the Anglophone West but affect many other countries also. Strengthening the integrity of all of government/states, public action, science and higher education is essential to tackle the CNE. Underlying these issues is something more fundamental, the problems inherent in the leading model of economic development and the relation between politics and economics. This again has implications for higher education.

In the classical liberal capitalist model human freedom is secured by the freedom to trade and accumulate wealth. Economic freedoms of markets and property are positioned as foundational to all other freedoms, including social, civil, cultural, personal and political freedoms, and freedom from hunger and fear. This is an impoverished foundation for freedom, as the CNE has shown. The freedom of capital to operate without regard to the eco-system degrades all other conditions of freedom. It not only protects the ecologically destructive activities of fossil fuels and global food companies, it legitimates their perversion of politics, which ought to embody the common interest, and their political and ideological manipulation of the climate-nature debate, including growing attacks on the integrity and validity of the science which plays a crucial role in informing the world of its predicament. Liberal capitalism has facilitated the widespread denial of the scale and urgency of change needed. In short, the dominant Western model is rapidly driving everyone over the cliff.

As Merz and colleagues (2023) state, the colonisation of thought and action in human populations, by self-serving economic interests, has led to a ‘human behavioural crisis’:

Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change… we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot… current interventions are largely physical, resource intensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviours)… Even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress. We explore three drivers of the behavioural crisis in depth: economic growth; marketing; and pronatalism. These three drivers directly impact the three ‘levers’ of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. We demonstrate how the maladaptive behaviours of overshoot stemming from these three drivers have been catalysed and perpetuated by the intentional exploitation of previously adaptive human impulses… we propose an interdisciplinary emergency response to the behavioural crisis by, amongst other things, the shifting of social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste (Merz et al., 2023, p. 1).

The CNE signals the end of structuring human societies on the basis of economic maximisation, though this is not yet fully understood. It means politics and government must become the central means of organising society, rather than market forces and the self-realisation of persons and communities through consumptive production. It prompts the need to transform people’s agendas and behaviours to reduce, not increase, the human footprint and the pressure it is placing on planetary systems. It requires fundamental changes in both collection action (state policies, programmes and their implementation within the population) and in individual lives. It also makes it imperative to secure stable harmonious cooperation within and between nations. This in turn suggests the need for more socially responsible higher education, and more developed relations between on the one hand science and higher education and on other hand collaborative political and global-political action.

Response to the CNE: Moral and global order

The necessary response to the CNE is about knowledge, values, and human/nature and human/human relations. It goes to the heart of human goals and conduct and the ordering of society.

The CNE highlights the importance of not just economy, or ecology in itself, but the moral dimension in social life. In responding to the CNE it is essential to develop an effective basis for combined action, so as to secure large-scale transformation within a short-term to medium-term horizon, grounded in shared objectives, commitments and values - while respecting and working with people’s individual rights and trajectories and the differences in their traditions and political cultures. This calls up the need for a new moral order in human societies, which are primarily organised on the basis of nation-states, and a new consensus across all societies at planetary level. Higher education is crucial in developing both.

Moral order

The behavioural crisis is a crisis of moral order; specifically, a crisis of the present order focused on the accumulation of capital and prestige on the basis of property, consumption and family size. This in turn creates an imperative to develop a revised moral order based on planetary and social health. The question of moral order preoccupied traditional thinkers in both China and the West, but in the period of high imperial/capitalist development that began in the 19th century has received less attention, in contrast with the near universal focus on economic augmentation and prosperity. There are university departments of business studies all over the world but in the high capitalist era little attention has been given to moral philosophy and its implications for social organisation. Among intellectuals the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is an exception (Smolentseva, 2023).

Durkheim played a key role in developing the scientific study of societies, pioneering techniques of what is now called sociology and influencing many subsequent social theorists (Lukes, 1972). In his lifetime the influence of Christianity in the West was visibly weakening as industry, science and modern education took hold. Durkheim posed the question of what held together secular societies in the absence of the values, roles and ties fostered by religion. He began to develop components of a theory of moral order. For Durkheim morality is sustained at the level of society by rules of conduct which proceed not from an abstract system of beliefs or doctrines but in a practical manner from society itself. Morality sets limits on human behaviour which otherwise could be harmful for both individuals and the common good of society (to this we can also add nature). Individuals, mastering self-discipline, commit to the group and follow the rule of conduct, including moral ideals which are not fixed doctrines but are multiple, dynamic and continuously evolving (Durkheim, 2005/1920). The central concept in Durkheim’s understanding of morality is moral duty or moral obligation (Durkheim, 1992/1957). This includes both particular rules concerning family or professional obligations, and universal moral obligations to oneself and others, the aspect of morality which has the highest value for Durkheim (Smolentseva, 2023).

Durkheim highlights two social dimensions or scales of action (Marginson, 2022b): the state and the individual person. The two indispensable elements of a moral order are individuals with free agency with responsibility for their actions, and the state as the expression of common values and pivot of shared action. In a functioning moral order social conduct is regulated from both outside and inside the individual.

The state and the individual agent

The moral role of the state is crucial. It is ‘the organ of social thought’ and ‘the organ of moral discipline’ with the responsibility ‘to work out certain representations’ which ‘hold good for the collectivity’ in maintaining social morality. When there is social disorder the weakening of the state is associated with an increase in immorality as members of society lack ‘a strong sense of there being anything above them to which they are subject’. Only the state has the authority to call people to their duties (Durkheim, 1992/1957; Smolentseva, 2023). The state is the only place where the collective human will can be effectively drawn together and expressed. In the absence of a global authority which can directly mobilise people in the face of the CNE, the nation-state is more crucial. Coordination by economic markets, civil society and communications corporations offers useful tools but cannot substitute for political coordination by the state. At the same time the CNE is forcing an evolution in the role of the state. It requires political society across the world to confront the limits of modernity, with its focus on short-term, localised, incremental accumulation and consumption and weaker focus on the long-term and system maintenance of the whole. This increases both the moral authority and the moral responsibility of the state.

However, a moral order cannot work by prescription and coercion. People comply voluntarily with their obligations on the basis of autonomy, learning and self-development. Self-cultivation or self-formation is an essential component of modern moral order, as also in traditional Confucian thought (Marginson, 2022a). In the context of the CNE this becomes more important. The ultimate resource is the capabilities of people as agents committed to self-criticism and self-improvement, working together effectively at grass-roots level to meet emergencies and to transform behaviour, disciplining each other on a voluntary basis. States must become more effective in coordinating and mobilising people on the basis of understanding, consent and the will to act. There is an inevitable tension between top-down and bottom-up but if this tension becomes primary, if states and individual agents pulling against each other becomes definitive of the politics of the CNE, then there is no solution.

Hence the task of rebuilding a consensual moral order of society to meet the climate-nature challenge is a challenge for every political system, though it plays out in each country and language/culture in distinctive ways: every political tradition is different and there is no one formula for government. In many countries, making a moral order also requires building or rebuilding the political system. In many countries, especially in the Euro-American West, there is an evident fragmentation of trust, consensus, political cooperation, and openness to others. The obvious failure to tackle the CNE, and the hollowness of governmental promises to do so, feeds the widespread feelings of insecurity and instability, and fosters a retreat into self-centredness and cynicism - towards not only government but to all modes of collective commitment and transformation. There is also a retreat into bordered forms of identity and a nativist othering of people who are different, in what seems an increasingly menacing global setting. All of that must be turned around.

Taken together, these considerations demonstrate that future political organisation will need to be better at both society-wide organisation and deep devolution. Hence higher education is implicated at both ends of the moral order. It has a key role in providing conditions for the self-development of individual persons as bearers of moral obligation. It also contributes to the reproduction and operation of state/government as the ultimate regulator of collective conduct, through the preparation of state officials, and the provision of expert advice in matters of science, technology and social organisation.

Global order

The ultimate problem is that of effective global action. It is indispensable in tackling the CNE but a tremendous leap from present worldwide relations. The weakness and ambiguity of international efforts to secure global agreement has been a primary factor in fostering the widespread insecurity and cynicism about collective government action that is evident in some political cultures. The problem here is not simply one of direct capture of the tools of global cooperation by economic interests hostile to nature, as at the COP28 summit. The weakness is structural. In the multilateral framework of the United Nations (UN) and parallel global bodies national sovereignty is supreme. There is no global authority with the capacity to modify the behaviour of strong nation-states and of the economic interests operating from within their borders. At best the UN framework is a forum where the strong nations can announce consensus. But how often does this occur, when national interests and political cultures are at stake? Within multilateralism, nations will always put their own interests ahead of the common good. Multilateral moral authority cannot resolve the CNE.

Within higher education, and in other domains, many turn first of all to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN, 2024b). The SDGs are useful in foregrounding a shared commitment to ecological survival and equitable global development. Their best features are that they acknowledge and facilitate plural power in a less Western world (Marginson, 2022c), and place education and science at the centre of policy. But the SDGs are just a starting point and in themselves are limited. The danger is that the SDGs are seen as sufficient in responding to the CNE. The contrary is the case. The SDGs can be associated with token acknowledgement of the longer-term problems while maintaining business as usual. The SDGs do not take countries, institutions of higher education and individuals forward to the hard decisions on energy transition, sustainable agriculture, reining in consumption and restoring biodiversity, let alone issues of global governance. As noted, multilateralism does not compel nations to put their own interests first; and the SDGs largely leave untouched the freedom of business corporations to wreak havoc. Fossil fuels, plastics and meat producing giants can sign up to the SDGs and some of them have done so, as was on display at COP28.

What are the alternatives to multilateralism? The need is for a global centre able to move individual countries into transformative action while providing a framework for cross-country negotiations that respects and values diversity. That global centre must exercise a genuine political potency, sustaining deep conformity through the consent of diverse agents. Given that imperial models of political and economic control are unattractive and unworkable the only option is global leadership through a moral authority that exercises power on the basis of pooled sovereignty, while developing a deeper consensus over time.

There is one precedent for such an approach. Ancient Chinese civilisation developed two major ideas about the ordering of large human spaces. The first was tianxia or ‘all under heaven’, the inclusive and cosmopolitan world as a whole, with no exterior, and governance on the basis of shared values and benefits, which shaped statecraft in the Western Zhou dynasty (1047-771 BCE). Within the family of ideas about tianxia, there were and are both world-centred and China-centred approaches (Yang et al., 2022). Second was the centralised nation-state which emerged in the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE) and was consolidated in the Han dynasty that followed, which Fukuyama (2011) refers to as the world’s ‘first modern state’ (p. 99). The Qin and Han dynasty replaced a tianxia politics of the world as the primary spatiality with a politics of the nation. However, the tianxia idea has continued as a strand in Chinese thinking and writing and has affected governance within China and across borders.

Central to tianxia is governance by virtue. The basis for the Zhou Dynasty’s success in overturning the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE), and its long continuation after that, was its grounding in virtue. The original Zhou kingdom included only 50,000-70,000 people. The Yin-Shang political centre in North China’s Central Plain had a million or more. But Zhou had the moral authority to ‘use the small to govern the great’. It developed an institutional order that ‘did not rely solely on military threat for governance’ (Zhao, 2021, p. 43). The Western Zhou was based on a consensus about shared values, rituals and benefits. Virtue alone was not enough: the Zhou dynasty also regulated the distribution of material rewards, including land. But values were central. They included inclusion, respect for diversity, mutuality and respect for others, a regime of he er butong (harmony with respect for diversity) and governance based on the consent of people which could be withdrawn when rule faltered.

Contemporary thinking about tianxia has been advanced by the philosopher Zhao Tingyang. Zhao adopts the perspective of ‘thinking through the world’ as a basis for conceiving governance, rather than universalisation on the basis of a single nation-state, as in imperialist thought (Zhao, 2021, pp. xiv, 114). The whole world is ‘the thinking unit’ (p. 1). Thinking through the world is contrasted with ‘thinking of the world’, in which the world is understood as an object rather than a subject in its own right, and is readily plundered and damaged without regard for the common good (Zhao, 2011, p. 3). Zhao (2021) argues that three core elements in the classical notion of tianxia are integral to a potential modern order of tianxia. The first is the principle of internalisation. The world has no outer boundary and all territories, nations and peoples are included within tianxia. There is no ‘other’. The second principle is a ‘relational rationality that gives priority to minimising mutual hostility over the maximising of exclusive interests and stands in contrast to individual rationality and its pursuit of the maximisation of self-interest’ (p. xv). Instead of international conflict, the ‘focal point’ is ‘coexistence’ (p. 4). The third principle is ‘Confucian improvement’, meaning ‘one improves if-and-only-if all others improve’ (p. xv). When thinking through the world, the world becomes a single entity with sub-collective agents, including the different nation-states (Zhao, 2019). At the levels of nation, locality and individual the good of tianxia takes priority over parochial interests and all have a common responsibility to serve the world. This world imagining again suggests a unity grounded in harmonious cosmopolitanism (Duara, 2017; Beck, 2016; Sun, 1906/2011), resonating with the practices of education for global citizenship already pursued in many countries.

Higher education and the state

In sum, the CNE calls up the need for more effective government on the basis of consent, able to foster a moral order while engaging populations in the transformation of economic life and social behaviours; a new person, able to take social responsibility as a moral agent and effective in collaborative responses and actions at grass-roots level; and a new kind of global order. Higher education is implicated in all three domains. How is it implicated?

A defining feature of the role of higher education that it is embedded in government-as-state, in varying ways across the world. Where nation-states go, education and science also go. Their contributions to the CNE are joined together. In the German model of university, Wilhelm von Humboldt placed the autonomous freedom to teach, learn and research at the service of the state. In the Nordic model, the state and the society are seen as one and the university is the servant of both (Välimaa and Muhonen, 2018). China has a three thousand year history of higher education that trains officials for the state, and core to the research mission of higher education in China is the provision of useful knowledge for the state, society and economy. Contemporary universities are autonomous but practice this autonomy inside the state (Marginson and Yang, 2022). Even in the United States, where the university is positioned as much in civil society and the market as in the state, the land grant tradition and the national research funding programme embody missions of social service fostered by the state (Kerr, 2001/1962). Everywhere, higher education not only has a direct role in relation to the CNE, it must also strengthen the capabilities and work of government which carries the primary responsibility.

At the same time, the core functions of higher education - where it makes its main contributions - are in student learning immersed in knowledge, and the creation and reproduction of knowledge; and the history of the university has repeatedly demonstrated that it performs these functions to full effect on the basis of organisational autonomy. The programming of teaching, learning and research from above is ineffective. These are expert missions. The practitioners know best and their contribution is maximised when their conscious reflexive agency is optimised, provided that the work of higher education institutions is not just internally governed but also externally responsible, goal-focused and transparent.

Political community

Under the conditions of CNE unexpected challenges, problems and disasters are the norm. While the big picture effects and large-scale disasters are publicised, most of the practical manifestations are local, such as fires and flooding, landslip, drought and the erosion of coastline. To meet the challenge of the CNE, states need to foster devolved local authority able to organise communities effectively within the framework of society-wide objectives and values. Graduates, with their enhanced agency and specialised knowledges and skills, will be crucial to local communities. Increasingly, many will exercise leadership functions, on a collaborative democratic basis alongside others in the local community.

The tradition of devolved governance and community-based action within central frameworks is long established in China, as discussed below, and also supported by UNESCO’s (2015) idea of education as a ‘global common good’ (Locatelli and Marginson, 2023). This is a framework for combining state and non state agents. UNESCO (2015) grounds the approach in Western European communitarianism: ‘The common good may be defined as “constituted by goods that humans share intrinsically in common and that they communicate to each other, such as values, civic virtues and a sense of justice” … a solidaristic association of persons that is more than the good of individuals in the aggregate’ (p. 77). This has implications for educational governance, which is necessarily participatory; and the governance of knowledge: ‘the creation of knowledge, its control, acquisition, validation, and use, are common to all people as a collective social endeavour’ (p. 80).

The common good framework offers a new basis for social responsibility among private actors and a bottom up framework for monitoring their embeddedness in shared projects. It is flexible in cultural terms, enabling collective values to be pursued in various societies with differing approaches to the role of the state. Tian and Liu (2019) argue that the common good approach is consistent with higher education in China – that the idea of the ‘common good’, based on active communities, resonates with the traditional collectivism and shared communal values of Chinese society, including grass-roots village organisation.

Moral order and student learning

A new moral order based on collective action by motivated citizens working within state-led frameworks begins in education. Such a regime in higher education has two aspects. First, the values and behaviours that are sustained in teaching, learning and research. Second, the evolution of students as conscious reflexive persons who take responsibility for themselves and the world: who manage their own learning while drawing on resources like teaching and information systems, and can take initiatives and develop solutions both individually and collectively and in any scale of action whether local, communal, national, regional or global.

In future it will be no longer possible to provide education programmes that worsen the CNE alongside those designed to minimise it or alleviate its effects. In all its programmes higher education will need to foster a relationship between humans and nature that is based on co-existence and mutual nurturing, rather controlling nature by limiting and displacing it. This means fostering in students full responsibility for the biosphere, including all the other humans in the biosphere, ‘thinking through the world’ as Zhao (2021) puts it. Students should develop themselves through integration with the world, not develop themselves through the self-transformation of the world. In most disciplines knowledge and pedagogy will have to be remade in the light of the CNE. Traditional and modern philosophy are essential to shaping the moral order and social action and will be elevated within universities and states. Close knowledge of science, technology, social science and communications will be essential to all graduates in future, rather than some graduates. The streaming of students between STEM and the arts/humanities/social sciences must be modified to optimise graduate agency.

All of this suggests that while higher education needs, more than ever, to focus on the evolution of students as autonomous self-forming persons (Marginson, 2023), agents capable of contributing to the fullest extent to collective action, there will need to be an enlarged mandatory element in first degree curricula. There is a tension here between socialisation and subjectification (Biesta, 2009): between the values-based curriculum and the formation of students as self-determining persons. This tension is not new to higher education. In the face of the CNE the challenge is to do both of these better than before.

Research and science

The role of science in truth telling in relation to the CNE is absolutely essential to meeting its many challenges. Governments and universities share the main responsibility to support and advance science and technology, including health sciences and social sciences, to communicate science effectively, and to defend science from attacks and disinformation.

Science is also a key medium of global cooperation, but the common global science system must be opened up and pluralised so as to admit diverse worldwide knowledge on a comprehensive basis (Marginson and Xu, 2023). At present 97 per cent of the papers included in the main bibliometric systems, Web of Science and Scopus, are in English. Knowledge in other languages, including nearly all endogenous (indigenous) knowledge, is excluded from the common conversation. Bibliometric knowledge is positioned as universal while endogenous knowledge is dismissed as merely local. Yet Anglophone and Western countries by no means monopolise all wisdom or have all the answers. Endogenous communities often nurture more advanced ideas of relations between humans and nature. In future is will be essential to reform the global science publishing and bibliometric systems to admit knowledge developed in all of the world's main languages, on the basis of multi-lingual publishing and translation. Publishers now have the software that makes this possible.

Global cooperation

While Zhao’s (2021) ideal world order is remote from current relations between states, which are based on a world organised as a jig-saw of territorial nations, in higher education elements of Zhao’s thought are closer at hand. Universities and scholars across the world have converged in many of their epistemic and organisational forms, and they readily sustain a collaborative regime across borders with common commitment to virtuous practices in education and science. They share the global science system (Marginson, 2022c) and practice often deep cross-border partnerships on the basis of voluntary consent. An outstanding example of global cooperation is the open data sharing in climate science.

Arguably, this quasi tianxia in higher education – though one as yet lacking the identifiable moral centre of the classical form of tianxia - is a laboratory for evolving consent-based links between states, modifying multilateral tensions. Unfortunately at present causality flows in the reverse direction, when co-operation in higher education is disrupted by geo-political conflict (Haupt and Lee, 2021). This needs to be turned around. Instead of a fractured global order damaging higher education, higher education should contribute to building a more harmonious global order.

Higher education in China

In all of the domains of CNE action that have been discussed in this paper – the formation and reproduction of moral order, a positive relation between humans and nature, the constructive relation between the state and higher education, the development of students as self-cultivating and self-responsible within an explicit framework of social values, and global cooperation that is also grounded in values - China and higher education in China have strong endogenous traditions, ancient and recent, on which to draw. It is not for an outsider to advise on how best to work those traditions but it is apparent the way forward lies in building on them, while also maximising scientific and technological capabilities.

The potential contribution of the Confucian heritage can scarcely be overestimated. Along with Daoism it foregrounds relations with nature; and it has special value for the formation of educated agents as reflexive learners. Confucian self-cultivation of educational subjects, much enhanced by the flourishing of schooling and higher education in the last generation, means that in developing persons and local communities able to act effectively in response to local CNE problems China is already ahead of most of the world.

China’s state tradition is also a special asset in the face of the CNE. In Sinic societies, human society is coordinated by politics and government, not by the economic marketplace, the military or religion as is often the case in other traditions (Gernet, 1996). China is not handicapped by the anti-statism endemic to Anglophone societies, which tends to work against effective collective action except when anti-statism is briefly suspended before an immediate common threat. At its best the state in China functions on the basis of active and widespread social consent on a continuing basis. China is also distinguished by having an education state to match educational self-cultivation at home. The modern Chinese state has used focused policies and investment to develop higher education and science on an unequalled scale and with a speed only matched perhaps by Singapore, a tiny system compared to China. In the STEM disciplines, including mathematics, physical sciences and engineering, China’s research is becoming the world leader (Marginson, 2013, 2022a).

China has a long history of effective devolution within central systems of governance, dating back at least as far as the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) (Wen and Marginson, 2023). One key to the evolution of universities and science after 1978 was the fostering of institutional self-government and the intellectual autonomy of science (Marginson, 2018). Scientists must be able to map their own pathway into investigations of the CNE if the most useful scientific insights are to emerge. Local autonomy is also foundational to the global cooperation essential to this domain of inquiry. Historically, including the modern period, a recurring problem in governance in China has been oscillation between periods of effective devolution, such as that in the modern universities, and periods when central surveillance and control have weighed heavily on local institutions, leaders, and sometimes individual scholars. The task is to optimise the relation between central agency and local agency. Both need to be enhanced in the face of the CNE. It does not have to be a zero-sum relation.

Concluding remarks

Everyone wants to control the future; to design the trajectories of themselves and their institutions to maximise their achievements and meet their goals. Yet in the last decade it has become apparent that the future is more uncertain, more in disequilibrium, harder to control than expected. The sense of growing chaos will increase. In the face of the CNE the old modernist ontology, that of perpetual predictable change with the only concern being to maintain and accelerate the linear movement, no longer holds. Nor should it. What is needed is a larger self-transformation, in the nation, the world, and higher education.

It is important not to underestimate the change needed, in all of society, government and higher education. It is easy to do this. Universities are good at altering themselves reflexively and have developed a knack of doing this on a superficial basis. The mission of all research universities is the continuous improvement of learning, research and social contributions: the never finished remaking of managers, faculty, students, facilities, programmes, brands and apparently, whole institutions. Self-criticism and targeted effort are standard tropes. Universities are open to the world and to diversity and always learning. This is classic modernism. Everything is always moving forward and much remains the same. To respond to the CNE effectively means to break with these habits and to become different.

To emphasise, this capacity for superficial change is a real trap. Higher education is so adept at being all things to all people. Almost any area of formalised social action can be given a branch of knowledge and a training programme. But the CNE demands that hard decisions must be made and implemented in a coherent manner. Universities must break with training and research that serves fossil fuel companies, plastics and agribusiness forms of food production. Universities must overhaul their political education programmes and their civics curricula. They must put as much effort into preparing graduates for grass-roots community organisation and disaster management as in preparing them for employability. It is vital to transform the values taught in economics and business studies. Whole higher education systems, not just individual universities, must devise new policies and implement them quickly and well.

To summarise a complex problem in a sentence: to meet the CNE the world needs to combine Chinese statecraft, social awareness and collective organisation, and self-forming Confucian agency, and the international room to move and mutual respect embodied in tianxia, with the European Enlightenment’s valuation of individuals and their scope for action. There are signs that Chinese society, which is now shaped partly by mass higher education, is evolving as a hybrid which combines Sinic collective values and self-cultivation with Western self-determination (Yan, 2009). If the party-state allows it to breathe, this hybrid evolution might be optimal for the future. Time will tell if it is successful. But it is certain the world needs it.