The Common Ground Project in south-west Victoria is a community-led regenerative food, farming and education initiative where young people learn about regenerative agriculture:
Our regenerative farm aims to bring life into the soil and our community. We do this by restoring microbial diversity and improving ecosystem health, while producing healthy and accessible food for all.
Nutritious food is directly linked to the health of the soil that produces it, so we farm with the health of the soil and community in mind.
Farm It Forward, in the Blue Mountains, connects young growers with underused suburban backyards, turning them into productive garden plots and building intergenerational relationships in the process:
..a charitable youth organisation running socio-environmental care programs for high school aged young people that focus on culturally aware and trauma informed youth support through growing, cooking and eating nutrient-dense fresh food.
Farm My School at Colac Secondary College works to turn school grounds into working market gardens, embedding food production and ecological learning in the everyday life of a school:
..a groundbreaking model of food education that transforms under-utilised land within schools into regenerative market gardens that feed, educate, and connect communities.
Inspired by a vision for a healthier future for our communities and planet. We’re redefining how farming and food production can shape education, inspire, and foster stronger connections within communities.
These are different projects with different theories of change, and each is worth knowing on its own terms. What they share is that they are doing something a formal system can find it difficult to do: teaching young people to learn with food, soil, season and community, in ways that are relational, place-embedded and intergenerational. For Donna Haraway (2016, p. 58), sympoiesis – ‘making with’ – reminds us that nothing makes itself. Learning of this kind is not something an individual does only to acquire a skill or capability. It is made with human and more-than-human others, communities, systems. It is intergenerational and collective in a way credential architecture, which certifies the bounded individual, is often structurally unable to grasp.
The practices emerging in these food and farming projects make visible a kind of intergenerational, more‑than‑human learning that sits beyond the logics of most mainstream education policy. What happened to this intergenerational ethic across the education policy landscape?
Intergenerational Ethics in Education
The erasure of intergenerational ethics from dominant education policy is well documented. It connects to a particular history – one that can be traced from the early promises of Sustainable Development to its gradual subjugation of clear commitment to future generations. As I have argued in my PhD thesis, neoliberal approaches to education reproduce techno-centric and anthropocentric narratives of the future, and erase knowledges of an intergenerational ethics and more-than-human relations.
In 1987, The Brundtland Report offered what became a commonly cited definition of Sustainable Development as ‘a form of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. This was, at its heart, a particular kind intergenerational claim – a recognition that the present cannot simply colonise the future as a knowable resource. The Rio Declaration (1992) carried this forward, with Principle 3 stating: ‘The right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations.’
Yet this intergenerational commitment was made progressively absent. As Jeffrey Sachs (2015, p. 5) observes, the definition of sustainable development evolved into a more practical approach, focusing less on intergenerational needs and more on a three-way framework linking economic development, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. In moving from intergenerational equity to this normative triad, the SDGs displaced concern for future generations. As Spijkers (2018, p. 10) noted in 2018, ‘there is not a single explicit reference in the SDGs to “intergenerational equity”.’
This shift has carried with it discursive and material effects. As Barbara Adam (2010, p. 369) argues, the standpoint of ‘present future’ treats the ‘not yet’ as a free resource base: future generations cannot charge us for the use of their present. They have no voice or vote to register their concerns. The SDGs condense the temporal logics of neoliberal capitalism: one in which futures are made knowable as objects of optimisation and colonisation (Facer, 2019), stripped of the relational depth that would require us to account for those who will inhabit them.
Keri Facer (2019, p. 4) is precise about what this means in education. When we treat ‘the future as knowable’, it becomes an imperative to ensure young people are skilled for an assumed future of technological dominance and neoliberal competition. John Urry (2016, p. 8) describes the danger:
‘seeing the future as empty makes it ready for exploitation since those in the future cannot get their own back for the future world that they will inherit.’
And as Robertson (2021, p. 180) argues, we must become attentive to both accumulation and social cohesion at the same time, and alert to the ways universal, technocentric futures shape our orientations to labour, our encounters with difference, and our actions.
The Common Ground Project, Farm My School and Farm It Forward are faced with these contradictions – insisting on the importance of place, community and the needs of historically disadvantaged, marginalised and vulnerable young people, including unborn generations as ethical obligation – while precarious funding, policy pressures and curriculum constraints can make such commitments difficult to sustain.
More-than-Human and Sympoietic Learning
Young people’s engagements with community‑led food and farming projects reveal orientations to learning and future‑making that differ sharply from the techno-centric futures imagined in policy – shaped by classed, gendered and cultural inequalities, but also by a growing desire for place-based practice and ecological responsibility. Faced with housing insecurity, rising living costs, and unstable work, many are valuing applied, hands-on forms of learning – vocational, applied, community-based. Others are refusing technocratic futures on ecological, cultural, and mental-health grounds: questioning the environmental cost of large-scale computation, the impacts of generative AI systems on art and music, and the psychological harms associated with AI-driven misinformation (ABC News, 2026). These concerns signal counter-conducts: refusals of the inevitability of technocentric futures, exposing the inequalities and extractive logics embedded within them.
Where young people are refusing technocratic futures, some are choosing instead to think-with and make-with for planetary survival with the plants, animals, food, farming and more-than-human energy systems.. These practices are grounded, place-based, and often improvised: emerging in community gardens, farms, bushland, kitchens, local spaces and online networks.
This brings us back to the question raised at the outset. The challenge is not simply how universities, TAFEs or schools might ‘partner with’ community learning organisations in order to position themselves within tertiary harmonisation. That framing keeps institutions at the centre and communities as their resource. The more generative question is what it would look like for marginalised young people, diverse communities of human and more-than-human others, and intergenerational knowledges and ontologies to lead.
References
ABC News. (2026, May 17). AI psychosis is rising: Chatbot delusion and alternate‑reality harm. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-17/ai-psychosis-is-rising-chatbot-delusion-alternate-reality-harm/106683436Adam, B. (2010). Future matters: Futures known, created and minded. In M. Gross & H. Heinrichs (Eds.), Environmental sociology: European perspectives and interdisciplinary challenges (pp. 361–382). Springer.
Ball, S. J. (2009). The education debate. Policy Press.
Brundtland Commission. (1987). Our common future. World Commission on Environment and Development.
Facer, K. (2019). Learning to live with a lively future: Education, temporality and the political imagination. European Journal of Education, 54(4), 503–515.
Haraway, D. J. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159–165.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Kelly, P., Goring, J., & Noonan, T. (2021). Neoliberal capitalism, education and work. In P. Kelly, J. Goring & T. Noonan (Eds.), Rethinking young people’s marginalisation (pp. 85–104). Palgrave Macmillan.
Kelly, P., Harrison, L., & Campbell, P. (2015). “Don’t be a smart arse”: Social enterprise based transitional labour market programs as neo‑liberal technologies of the self. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(4), 558–576.
McQuilten, G., Spiers, A., Humphrey, K., & Kelly, P. (2022). Art-based social enterprise, young creatives and the forces of marginalisation. Palgrave Macmillan.
Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. (1992). United Nations.
Robertson, S. (2021). The global governance of education and labour. Edward Elgar.
Rose, S. (2025, November 25). ‘It fully changed my life!’ How young rewilders transformed a farm – and began a movement. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/25/it-fully-changed-my-life-how-young-rewilders-transformed-a-farm-and-began-a-movement [the-guardi…ournal.com]
Sachs, J. (2015). The age of sustainable development. Columbia University Press.
Spijkers, O. (2018). Intergenerational equity and the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainability, 10(11), 1–14.
Urry, J. (2016). What is the future? Polity Press.
Banner Image: Frank Holleman via UnSplash