Tensions and symbiosis for vocational education and training and just transitions: a practice theoretical analysis of beekeeping practices in Aotearoa New Zealand

Transforming Vocational Education and Training (VET) to address broader social justice and environmental sustainability goals associated with a ‘just transition’ requires reimagining VET beyond traditional orthodoxies. Contributing to this reimagining, this paper reports on research that applies the Theory of Practice Architectures as a site-ontological, practice-theoretical lens to examine the conditions of possibility within vocational practices – understood as the sites where transformations in VET and just transitions unfold. The study draws on a year-long ethnographic case study of the vocation of beekeeping, situated within a work- and study-based context in Aotearoa, New Zealand. By synthesising perspectives on a ‘relevant’ VET through an analysis of beekeeping practices and their associated practice architectures, alongside the suite of apiculture qualifications and programmes, the findings reveal tensions between the strategic priorities and provisional directions of the existing VET system framework and the practice arrangements and traditions shaping beekeeping practices. The paper argues that rendering such tensions visible, while foregrounding the transformative potential inherent in empirical, site-ontological accounts of vocational practice, can inform theoretical, strategic, and practical contributions to VET research, policy, and practice, and support the ongoing double transformation of VET.