1 - Education for Sustainable Development: A Global Enterprise in an Unequal World

Summary

The world is facing enormous and urgent challenges. Although this statement may seem exhausted, and perhaps comes across as cliché, that does not make it any less true. Climate change, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, depleting resources, poverty, inequality, violence and more haunt societies and ecological systems around the globe. The United Nations 2030 Agenda, and the associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), constitute a joint effort by the global community to meet these challenges and to support transformation towards more sustainable ways of life. Education for sustainable development (ESD) has gained increasing political appreciation in this context, and is often referred to as a key enabler of all the SDGs (see, for example: UN, 2017a; UNESCO, 2017a, 2020a). The idea that education can and should contribute to sustainable development is in fact so strong that the means has come to be recognized as an end in itself, as articulated in the SDG target 4.7.

In recent decades UNESCO and partners have also, in a series of consecutive global initiatives, promoted the worldwide implementation of ESD, most recently in the ESD for 2030 framework. A recurrent message in the discourse surrounding these initiatives is that ESD unites humanity in a common pursuit of a more just and sustainable world. Calls for ESD are made ‘in the spirit of our collective humanity’ (UNESCO, 2014a, p 3, authors’ emphasis), and it is claimed that the challenges ahead ‘requir[e] everyone’s attention and involvement’ (UNESCO, 2016a, p 3, authors’ emphasis). ESD thus addresses all of humanity, and our entire existence as a species is presumed to be at stake. The message is straightforward: ‘for our very own survival’ (UNESCO, 2020a, p iii, authors’ emphasis) as a species, ‘we must urgently learn to live differently’ (UNESCO, 2020a, p 6, authors’ emphasis).

This message also raises questions, however. How is this idea of human unity in ESD discourse reconciled with the fact that the world is enormously unequal? How is the global ESD enterprise pursued in a world that is severely segmented socio-economically? Or, to put it otherwise, how is the gulf that separates rich and poor people’s living conditions handled in the global educational quest for sustainable development? These pertinent and highly topical questions, which have rarely been foregrounded in scholarly or policy discussions about ESD, are at the heart of this book.