7 - Biopolitical ‘Effects’ of Education for Sustainable Development

Summary

This chapter explores the biopolitical ‘effects’ of ESD interventions in terms of the subjectivities and conceptions of sustainable lifestyles that they produce in different socio-economic and geographical contexts. In so doing, the chapter brings attention to how students, as active agents, engage in different ways with the ESD interventions that they are subject to, and how they understand themselves and others in relation to these educational efforts to invoke sustainable development.

The chapter begins with a brief introduction to the empirical material upon which it is based as well as some reflections on the methodological challenges involved in studying biopolitical ‘effects’. The chapter then proceeds with a comparative biopolitical analysis of such effects in discrete socio-economic and geographical ESD settings. This analysis brings attention to the different conceptions of sustainable lifestyles that are produced among students and how they understand their everyday lives, and constitute themselves as agents, in relation to sustainable development. Specific attention is further drawn to the notions of responsibility that are produced and internalized (or not) and where students locate agency and responsibility for sustainable development. Thereafter, the analysis closes in on the students’ engagement with democratic decision-making within ESD activities, and how they think about themselves as contributors and shapers of sustainable development through these initiatives. Penultimately, attention is drawn to how students situate themselves geographically in relation to sustainable development and how they engage with the key rationale of ESD suggesting that the local community is the most promising arena for transformative action. The final part of the chapter summarizes the main arguments.

Studying biopolitical ‘effects’ in local school settings

Studies concerned with biopolitics and governmentality often remain focused on how strategies of government target certain populations and individuals. Indeed, this has also been our focus in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 of this book. In the present chapter, however, we seek to look into the ‘effects’ of the governing rationalities and techniques of ESD in terms of how students engage with them and what subjectivities and conceptions of sustainable lifestyles that are produced in these processes. Studying such ‘effects’ is certainly not a straightforward enterprise as it is difficult to conduct a tidy analysis of what power produces (Hellberg, 2015). We need to pay close attention to the articulations of perceptions and experiences among students in an empirical material that is very complex and sometimes ambiguous.