Adult education and citizenship education in global times

The purpose of this paper is to show how extant policies at global, regional, national, and local levels frame adult education (AE) programmes for citizenship education (CE) in Italy and Nigeria. In our theoretical framework, we combine Biesta’s conceptualisation of public pedagogy with Schugurensky’s multidimensional conceptualisation of citizenship as status, identity, civic virtues, and agency. For the comparative empirical analysis, we compared two country cases – Italy and Nigeria – by examining policies and programmes that frame CE. Our findings show that in both countries, international and regional policies influence CE programmes. However, whereas Italy’s CE policies and programmes promote global citizenship (GC) and sustainability, policies and programmes in Nigeria focus more on social empowerment and human rights awareness raising.