8 - Conclusion: Towards Affirmative Alternatives

Summary

The starting point of this book was a concern with how cosmopolitan ideas of human unity in global policy discourse on ESD are reconciled with the fact that the world is enormously unequal. With this puzzle in mind, the book has explored how ESD is unpacked in different socio-economic and geographical contexts around the globe and how inequality is handled in these processes. To accomplish this venture, the book developed and employed a comparative biopolitical approach, inspired by Foucauldian theory and CCS methodology. This final chapter concludes the book. The first part of the chapter summarizes and discusses the main findings. Contributions to previous research and missing pieces are also brought to the fore. The second part of the chapter addresses ESD policy and practice by raising the issue of what affirmative alternatives there might be to current modes of neoliberal biopolitical differentiation in global ESD implementation – that is, alternatives that take seriously UNESCO’s vision of a more just and sustainable world.

Education for sustainable development in an unequal world

This book has, in various ways, demonstrated how neoliberal biopolitical modes of governing, differentiated adaptation to local living conditions, and glaring inequalities between populations interlace in global ESD implementation. The subsections that follow attempt to outline the main conclusions.

Unity and separation

When tracing the phenomenon of interest – ESD – and comparing how it is articulated and enacted in different ways between and across sites and scales, an interesting and disturbing pattern emerges. What comes forth is that the global educational quest for sustainable development comprises a peculiar combination of unity and separation. On the one hand, humanity is jointly invited, mobilized and urged to take on a shared responsibility for the well-being, indeed the very survival, of the planet. ESD is thus presented as a cosmopolitan enterprise responding to the existential threats facing our species and fellow life forms on Earth. On the other hand, humanity is simultaneously divided in terms of the lifestyles, tasks and responsibilities that are assigned to rich and poor populations in the name of ESD. This differentiation can be understood biopolitically. It can be discerned already at the global policy level as demonstrated in Chapter 3, and it is evident in how ESD is enacted in different socio-economic and geographical contexts around the world, as shown in Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7.