‘Creatively brave’: how marketing became environmental pedagogy in Scottish education

Creativity occupies a prominent place in environmental and sustainability education, where it is presented as the capacity young people need to solve the world’s ecological problems. This article examines what happens when that creativity is derived from marketing and advertising. Drawing on documentary and network analysis (2018–2022, with a follow-up wave in 2024–2026), it traces how a Scottish creativity consultancy, Daydream Believers, imported the genre conventions of the advertising industry into resources badged as environmental learning, asking students to study award-winning corporate campaigns (including the Trash Isles plastic-pollution stunt and Lacoste’s Save Our Species promotion) and replicate their style. This material is situated against the institutional centre of Scottish environmental education, the Learning for Sustainability entitlement, and against a typology of three competing discourses of creativity in the field—critical and arts-based, Indigenous and decolonial, and instrumental-commercial—the first two of which are rendered invisible when corporate constructions dominate or co-opt them. The follow-up analysis examines newer environmentally badged resources (Solarpunk Island, #GetOnWithIt) and documents a trajectory from free downloads to credit-rated national qualifications, delivered in some seventy secondary schools and cited within Scotland’s national curriculum review, the Curriculum Improvement Cycle. Using Biesta’s purposes of education heuristic, I argue that what is being institutionalised is not creativity in any ecologically meaningful sense, but marketing as pedagogy. This displacement matters for accountability and for the critical ambitions of environmental education, but more fundamentally it forecloses young people’s subjectification and their capacity to imagine alternative ecological futures.