Framework

The Maastricht Declaration and the Dublin Declaration
The 2002 Maastricht Declaration is considered the starting point f the international interest in Global Citizenship Education. On the initiative of the Council of Europe’s North-South Centre, national delegates and Civil Society Organisations from more than 50 countries gathered in the Netherlands that year. Together, they developed an ambitious strategy to strengthen and improve Global Education.

The Maastricht Declaration defines Global Education as follows:

Global Education is education that opens people’s eyes and minds to the realities of the world and awakens them to bring about a world of greater justice, equity and human rights for all.

In 2022, the Maastricht Declaration gave way to the Dublin Declaration, which defines Global Citizenship Education in the following way:

“Global Education is education that enables people to reflect critically on the world and their place in it; to open their eyes, hearts and minds to the reality of the world at local and global level. It empowers people to understand, imagine, hope and act to bring about a world of social and climate justice, peace, solidarity, equity and equality, planetary sustainability, and international understanding. It involves respect for human rights and diversity, inclusion, and a decent life for all, now and into the future. Global Education encompasses a broad range of educational provision: formal, non-formal and informal; life-long and life-wide. We consider it essential to the transformative power of, and the transformation of, education.”

The Dublin Declaration was drafted at the initiative of the Global Education Network Europe (GENE). This is the European network of ministries, agencies and other national bodies responsible for Global Citizenship Education. Enabel, represented by BeGlobal, is also a member. You can read more about this in our magazine on the Dublin Declaration.

Read the full Dublin Global Education Declaration here.
Find out more about the Council of Europe’s North-South Centre here.
Find out more about the Global Education Network Europe here.

UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education
In 2012, the Global Citizenship Education got a real boost. Then-Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, declared it one of his three major priorities for education worldwide. He emphasised that education is about much more than literacy and numeracy. On the path to a more just, peaceful and tolerant global society, education should also be committed to global citizenship.

Since then, UNESCO has been taking the lead in promoting Global Citizenship Education worldwide. UNESCO understands the following by this:

Global Citizenship Education aims to empower learners of all ages to assume active roles, both locally and globally, in building more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive and secure societies.

Read more about how exactly UNESCO interprets Global Citizenship Education here.
Find out more about UNESCO’s work on Global Citizenship Education here.

OECD and Global Competence
OECD provides the latest milestone in the international promotion of Global Citizenship Education. Indeed, since 2018, its well-known Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been testing students’ Global Competence, among other competences. Learning to participate in more interconnected, complex and diverse societies is no longer a luxury, according to PISA. It is a pressing necessity, in which schools have unique roles.

Global Competence is defined in the PISA survey as follows:

Global competence is the capacity to examine local, global and intercultural issues, to understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others, to engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions with people from different cultures, and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development.

The Framework developed by PISA should help explain, develop and assess global competence among adolescents around the world and how it evolves. An initial assessment in 2018 mapped the Global Competence of 15-year-old students from dozens of countries and economies. In 2020, PISA announced the results. Unfortunately, Belgium’s Flemish, French and German-speaking Communities did not participate in this survey.

Read more about PISA’s Global Competence Framework here.
Consult the results of the first Global Competence Assessment here.

In Belgium, originally, Global Citizenship Education was largely linked to development cooperation. Global Citizenship Education now has a broader scope. It is no longer just about raising awareness about development issues and activities in the South. It is also and above all about instilling an understanding of global challenges and developments. And the understanding that these can only be addressed through international solidarity and cooperation.

In Belgium, the federal government is responsible for development cooperation. Within the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, the Directorate-General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD) promotes Global Citizenship Education initiatives, both inside and outside education.

DGD does this not only through the BeGlobal programme, which is part of the Belgian development agency Enabel. DGD also supports several NGOs on both sides of the language border that work daily to strengthen Global Citizenship Education.
Because BeGlobal is part of Enabel, it is in a privileged position, close to global challenges, to understand the reality of each individual and base its knowledge and expertise on extensive practical experience.

Read more about the policy of the Directorate-General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD) here.

Read more about the GCE commitments of the Belgian development agency Enabel here.

In Flanders, Global Citizenship Education inspired the new attainment targets for citizenship. The Flemish government formulated 16 new key competences for education in 2019. Citizenship – including a necessary global dose – constitutes one of the transversal or cross-curricular key competences. The difference with the former cross-curricular learning objectives lies in the fact that the attainment targets for citizenship are imposed to the school no longer as an obligation of efforts but as an obligation of results. UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education is explicitly mentioned as an inspiration for these new attainment targets.

In addition, the educational projects of the largest education providers in Flanders highlight the importance of Global Citizenship Education. From their own perspectives, active citizenship (GO!, City schools Antwerp) and inspiring citizenship (Catholic Education Flanders) emphasise the need for more global awareness and critical citizenship at school.

Moreover, in quite a few schools, principals, teachers and pupils are putting their shoulders to the wheel in pioneering global citizenship initiatives and projects. Global Citizenship Education is thus becoming more established there. There is a growing realisation that this is not just another task for schools, but just a fundamental aspect of education in the 21st century.

Read more about the Flemish government’s attainment targets for citizenship here.

Read more about the citizenship concepts of the Flemish Community public education provider GO!, of the Antwerp City schools and of Catholic Education Flanders here.

In Wallonia, …