Exploring the future of lifelong learning: advocacy, research and footprinting

This reflective think-tank contribution begins by comparing advocacy and research as distinct modalities of professional and social action. In practice they frequently elide and merge into one another. While alliance and complementarity between the two modalities is constructive for shaping policy and practice, it poses risks when governments and state apparatus play their own advocates, co-opting research into the endeavour. Established classification and distribution policy logics are ill-attuned to transversal and holistic agendas such as lifelong learning; this leads to competition between interest groups defined by educational sector and level, and it occludes life-course perspectives on learning that have the capacity to resituate understandings of shared interests. Transversal and holistic agendas demand forms and styles of evidence that can encompass these qualities; indicators and benchmarks as currently employed in educational policymaking are under-developed with respect to lifelong learning. The successful example of eco-footprinting could suggest a way forward that is not only evidentially more appropriate, but could also achieve greater impact for the development of lifelong learning policy and practice.