Educating for a Just and Sustainable World

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Research

What we do - Research

Research

Good Practice 

CGE has maintained a research focus as part of its work for over three decades to enhance good practice in global education and strengthen the policy environment in which it is delivered.  In fulfilling this aim the CGE carries out research in three specific areas.

  1. We monitor and evaluate our global education activities both internally and externally to assessthe impact of our work on learners. This form of research is carried out internally by the Centre’s staff and externally by independent consultants.
  2. We commission research on global education practice to illuminate the links between the island of Ireland and the global South and to influence debate on the practice of global education by documenting and disseminating learning we acquire through our work.
  3. We commission research on global education to advance policy and practice in areas of social justice, sustainability and equality.

Poverty in Northern Ireland: From the Local to the Global

In 2025, CGE commissioned Queen’s University’s School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work to carry a systematic literature review from 2020-2024 titled Poverty in Northern Ireland: From the Local to the Global.  The research was a comparative study of Northern Ireland poverty in a UK, all-Ireland and international context by drawing upon international comparators from Europe and the rest of the world. The report makes informed recommendations that could support effective anti-poverty policy interventions in Northern Ireland.

Conflict, Climate and Migration in the Context of Gaza

In April 2024, CGE contributed an opinion piece under the title: Conflict, Climate and Migration in the Context of Gaza to the Development Studies Association of Ireland which considered the human toll of Israel’s war on Gaza’s civilian population since October 2023.  It also considered the carbon footprint of Israel’s war drawing upon ‘A Multi-temporal Snapshot of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Israel-Gaza Conflict’ carried out by academics from Lancaster University and Queen Mary University of London.  It found that carbon emissions resulting from ‘aircraft missions, tanks and fuel from other vehicles’ including US cargo planes ‘was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal’.

International Development and Development Education: Challenging the Dominant Economic Paradigm?

In 2022, CGE compiled a research study in partnership with Financial Justice Ireland, which explored the extent to which the international development and global education sectors on the island of Ireland are engaging with the neoliberal economic system as the root cause of poverty, inequality and injustice. The research that “neither the international development nor the development education sector give anywhere near adequate attention to explorations with the public of the economic causes of poverty, inequality and injustice and of responses, through education, to the global neoliberal system”.