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Reconceptualising transnational education through decolonial approaches

by Nilakshi Das

Transnational Education (TNE) represents a rapidly expanding form of cross-border provision, underpinned by an economic imaginary that positions the UK as a ‘key player’ in the global higher education market. While earlier internationalisation strategies focused primarily on bringing overseas students to Britain, TNE reflects a shift towards delivering British higher education to students globally through offshore provisions. The rapid expansion of TNE has elicited growing academic debate about its potential to reproduce the political, economic and epistemic hegemony of the Global North, reinscribing earlier colonial hierarchies and patterns of dependency.

Before the emergence of TNE, the internationalisation of UK higher education was primarily organised through the academic mobility of overseas students, shaped by Britain’s imperial and post-imperial educational networks. During the 1960s, technical assistance programmes and scholarship schemes, such as the Commonwealth Scholarship programme, facilitated student mobility to British universities. In the 1970s, as overseas student numbers gradually increased, differential student fees were introduced alongside tightening immigration regulations, a shift that continued throughout the Thatcher government in the 1980s into the present day. By the late 1990s, the University of Nottingham had established one of the earliest overseas branches, with the general idea that the curriculum in the host country would largely mirror the home institution. From the 2000s onwards, TNE expanded in scope and provision through franchised programmes, joint and dual degrees, distance and online courses in new markets, particularly across the Middle East and Asia. These arrangements allowed UK universities to expand their global presence and competitiveness beyond traditional overseas student recruitment.

Political economy of TNE and latest policy ambitions

The latest articulation of TNE goals includes the Labour government’s new strategy for national renewal by ‘turbocharging education’ as an engine for economic growth, with a target of £40 billion in education exports by 2030. This decision reflects increasing political pressure to cut net migration by reducing overseas student recruitment. Recent policy recommendations have radically argued that universities should be ‘selling education, not immigration’, with growing concerns that student visas are being used as a backdoor route into the UK labour market. Against broader anxieties around immigration in which international students are repositioned as migration liabilities, TNE offers a politically viable solution by exporting education in favour of substituting inward student mobility. As universities’ budgets shrink due to ongoing visa restrictions for international students, TNE engagements are expected to further increase (Hartmann and Lee, 2026).

According to the latest data, the number of students studying entirely overseas through UK TNE increased by 8% in 2024/25, and has risen by 37% since 2020/21. TNE student numbers are now close to the number of international students studying in the UK, with approximately one in six students in UK HE being educated across overseas campuses. Yet, despite this rapid growth, there is a lack of public data on student experiences at TNE. While aggregate data records the number of students enrolled in TNE programmes and level of education, there is limited publicly available information on student progression, degree outcome and labour market prospects. The experiences of students and educators involved in these programmes often tend to remain marginal within UK policy debates.

As higher education increasingly operates through a ‘big business’ model, institutional priorities have rapidly shifted towards generating revenue and maintaining competitiveness. In doing so,commitments to uphold student welfare, equality, and meaningful international collaboration are often sidelined in favour of positional advantage. Therefore, the expansion of TNE under growing market competition raises further pressing questions about equity and power within global HE systems.

Towards a decolonial approach to TNE

Most of the latest policy and institutional analyses of TNE tend to adopt an instrumentalist perspective focusing on business indicators, such as risk assessment, return on investment, international branding and reputation, quality assurance and transnational management strategies. As a result, TNE is mainly understood through frameworks of foreign investment and transnational service delivery further entrenching the logic of the market that frames education as a tradable commodity rather than a global public good (Lauren Clarke, 2021). While these considerations are important for universities operating in a competitive global environment, they risk overshadowing broader questions about equity, inclusion and the social purposes of higher education.

Adopting a decolonial approach to TNE can help address questions around embedding Western systems and structures of education in the Global South. Debates around the coloniality of TNE are not entirely new. Some scholars have drawn parallels between contemporary TNE arrangements and colonial models of education between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Colonial education systems were often characterised by limited access for the local population, a lack of relevance to local realities, the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge systems, the exclusive use of English as the primary medium of instruction, institutional authority with control originating from colonial centres and limited curricula featuring vocational degrees (Teferra and Altbach, 2004). TNE arrangements have been articulated as operating through a similar binary model in which a ‘core’ of sending institutions from the West sets the agenda for a marginalised ‘periphery’ of receiving partners, perpetuating historical legacies of colonialism (Caruana and Montgomery, 2015).

Against this background, there are growing calls for more introspective approaches to TNE that challenge post-colonial structures of dependence and compliance, while remaining attentive to the risk that transnational partnerships may reproduce these hierarchies through networks of alliance with local elites in host countries. Ravindra Sidhu advocates an ‘engaged pedagogy’ and an ‘ethics of care’ in the design and governance of TNE partnerships, emphasising the need to recognise the histories, aspirations and agency of local communities involved in these programmes.

Drawing insights from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship that emphasise justice, inclusion and agency will enable TNE strategies to better examine their implications on student success, outcomes and experiences as well as their wider impact on local communities and higher education systems in host countries. At the same time, greater attention to the national and cultural contexts in which TNE operates, particularly where differing political and institutional norms raise ethical challenges around academic freedom, governance and accountability, can support more informed institutional decision-making and partnerships. These perspectives will ensure that the expansion of TNE is not guided by short-term commercial imperatives but by broader commitments to equity and responsible global engagement, avoiding polarised strategic approaches (Sanderson, 2023).

Nilakshi Das has recently completed her PhD in History of Science. Her PhD was funded by the ESRC and jointly undertaken at the University of Leicester and the University of Warwick. Nilakshi holds an MSc in Education from the University of Oxford and an MA in Sociology from the University of Manchester, funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Historical Research.


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The urgent need to facilitate environmental justice learning in HE institutions

by Sally Beckenham

The crises we are facing globally, from climate change and climate change dispossession to drought and food insecurity, are intersecting social and environmental issues, which need to be recognized and addressed accordingly through integrated and holistic measures. This can only be achieved by eschewing the tendency of existing governance and economic systems to silo social and environmental problems, as if they are separate concerns that can be managed – and prioritised – hierarchically. Much of this requires a better understanding of environmental injustice – the ways in which poor, racialised, indigenous and other marginalized communities are overlooked and/or othered in this power hierarchy, such that they must face a disproportionate burden of environmental harm.

This is happening with disconcerting regularity around the world, often going under the radar but sometimes making headlines, as for example in May this year, when institutionalised environmental racism in the U.S. manifested in the placement of a copper mine on land inhabited by and sacred to the Apache indigenous group (Sherman, 2025). With limited political power to challenge it they are left to face dispossession, loss of livelihood and physical and mental health ill-effects (Morton-Ninomiya et al, 2023). We have seen this making headlines closer to home recently too, with evidence suggesting that toxic air in the UK is killing 500 people a week and most affecting those in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas (Gregory, 2025). An environmental problem (such as air pollution) cannot be disentangled from its social causes and effects. Or to put it another way, violence done to the environment is violence done to a particular group of people.

A transformative response to our global challenges that re-centres environmental justice will require a paradigm shift in the ways that we govern, construct our societies, build our communities, run our economies, design our technologies and engage with the non-human world. The role of higher education will be critical to even a modest move in this direction. This is because, as they are probably tired of hearing, this generation of students will shape our collective futures, so it matters that they are literate in the deep entanglement of environmental and social justice challenges. Moreover, as Stickney and Skilbeck caution, “it is inconceivable that we will meet drastic carbon reduction targets without massive coordinated efforts, involving policymakers and educators working in concert at all levels of our governments and education systems (Stickney and Skilbeck, 2020).

In Ruth Irwin’s article ‘Climate Change and Education’ she alerts us to Heidegger’s treatise in Being and Time (1962) that the effectiveness of a tool’s readiness is ‘hidden’ – only revealed when it ceases to function. Climate might be viewed as a heretofore ‘hidden’ tool, in that it affords opportunities for human action; it has “smoothly enabled our existence without conscious consideration” (Irwin, 2019). Yet its dynamic quality is now an overt, striking, looming spectre threatening the existence of all life on earth; the ‘environment’ writ large is revealing itself through ecological and social breakdown, surfacing our essential reliance upon it as natural beings. Thus unless higher education is competent in dealing with the issues of environmental crisis at all of its registers – social, environmental, political and ecological – the institution of education will be unable to fulfil its fundamental task of knowledge transfer for what is a clear public good (Irwin, 2019). Put another way, “HEIs have a responsibility to develop their educational provision in ways that will support the social transformation needed to mitigate the worst effects of the environmental crisis.” (Owens et al, 2023).

Indeed, HE requires a paradigm shift in itself given that these realities are unfolding alongside widespread scrutiny of higher education institutions; including about decolonising the academy (Jivraj, 2020; Mintz, 2021), free speech on university campuses and how they are preparing students to meet these pressing issues (Woodgates, 2025). To keep pace with these changes and meet such challenges, educators from across disciplines will need to commit to embedding environmental justice education more widely across programme curricula, session design and teaching practices. It must be recognised as a vital – rather than token – component of environmental education. Doing so fully and effectively also requires us to recognise that environmental justice education encompasses not only subject matter but pedagogical practice. This is the case for all academic disciplines – including those that might seem peripheral to the teaching of environmental issues.

EJE in HE is a developing area of scholarship and field of study that has gathered pace only over the last decade. Much of the research to date has been focused on the US, where studies have shown that environmental justice remains marginal to or excluded from the curricular offerings of most environmental studies programmes – let alone those not directly related to environmental education (Garibay et al, 2016). A report by the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE), which studied the policies of 230 public U.S. HE institutions and 36 state boards of higher education, found that only 6% of institutions with climate change content in their policies referred to climate justice issues and indigenous knowledge practices (MECCE Project & NAAEE, 2023). Other work has shown that STEM education has tended to frame questions around exploitation of natural resources or technological development as disconnected from social and economic inequalities, though this is starting to be challenged (Greenberg et al, 2024).

Emerging research into EJ in HE encompasses pedagogical approaches (Rabe, 2024; Moore, 2024); classroom and teaching practices (Walsh et al, 2022; Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022; D’Arcangelis & Sarathy, 2015), the relationship between sustainability and climate justice education (Haluza-DeLay, 2013; Kinol et al, 2023) and curriculum development (Garibay et al, 2016). In identifying what EJE looks like these studies foreground the importance of community-engaged learning (CEL), providing students with the opportunity to learn about a socio-environmental problem from those with lived experience; critical thinking with regards to positionality, power structures and (especially indigenous) knowledge systems, and a deep concern with place. These critical components are crucial because tackling an act or acts of environmental injustice against marginalised populations often cannot be achieved without addressing systemic power imbalances.

What also links these studies is an acknowledgement of the complexity of EJE. It is a difficult subject and practice to grapple with for several reasons. Firstly, it means exposing students (and educators) to “an onslaught of bad news,” (Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022) which can elicit feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, so it is little wonder that expressions of anxiety and alarm are growing within these cohorts (Wallace, Greenburg & Clark, 2020) and that needs to be borne in mind. Secondly EJE requires us to find a way to meaningfully connect with philosophical, discursive, historical and practical questions about power, ethics and the relationship between human beings and the natural environment, within the disciplinary parameters of a specific curricula. This means doing difficult work not only to change current systems and processes (Forsythe et al, 2023) but also to make transformative rather than piecemeal efforts. For example, this might mean actively absorbing students into a community partner’s work in an engaged rather than service-learning model, or moving beyond a simple ‘guest lecture’ format to invite more in-depth input into modules or programmes from a community partner.

This is a challenge that we shouldn’t understate for many academics and institutions already coping with high workloads (Smith, 2023), stress (Kinman et al, 2019) and job insecurity across a beleaguered sector (The Independent, 2024; The Guardian, 2025). Through this emerging EJE scholarship literature, we are starting to see that, “promoting opportunities for HE educators to develop and enact critical and transformative environmental pedagogy… is a complex business mediated by a variety of (personal, material and social) factors. It involves negotiating conflict, and understanding and confronting entrenched structures of power, from the local and institutional to the national and global.” (Owens et al, 2023). 

A third (though by no means final) challenge in teaching and learning EJ in higher education is in finding and making space for it in a landscape that is strongly oriented towards sustainability education. Although there is certainly overlap – for example to the extent that the liberal logic underpinning the latter also informs distributive justice – sustainability education has different intellectual and ideological origins to EJ scholarship. Both are valuable, but we should be questioning whether we can justify a lack of explicit EJ practice and framing simply because we are already having sustainability conversations, and instead find space for both. It can be easy to (inadvertently) depoliticise environmental education by avoiding the perceived messiness and complexity of justice in favour of the more technocratic and measurable ‘sustainability’ (Haluza-DeLay, 2013).

My research seeks to develop a better understanding of the state of environmental justice education in the HE landscape, beginning by mapping its development in the UK. This will reveal the extent and means by which EJE is being incorporated across programme curricula, session design and teaching practices in the UK HE context. In doing so we can identify the intersections of EJE with other dominant pedagogies, including sustainability education and solutions-focused approaches. To pursue a provincialising agenda and avoid the parochial perspective that EJE is the preserve of HEIs in the global North, there is also much value in exploring what EJE looks like in HEIs in the global South, and where cross-cultural lessons can be shared. The questions we need to be asking are:

  • How is environmental justice being taught and learnt and where do we go from here?
  • How are educators overcoming the challenges involved in engaging with EJE?
  • What best practices could we champion?

Sharing methods, strategies and pedagogical approaches for EJE cross-institutionally and cross-culturally will be a step towards helping us build a better collective, collaborative response to the urgency of our intersecting socio-environmental crises.

Dr Sally Beckenham is Lecturer in Human Geography and Programme Lead and Admissions Tutor for the BA Human Geography & Environment in the Department of Environment & Geography, University of York. She is also Chair of the Teaching Development Pool and member of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC). She is an interdisciplinary political geographer with degrees in Modern History, International Politics and International Relations, and welcomes collaboration. Email: sally.beckenham@york.ac.uk Bluesky: @sallybeckenham.bsky.social.