Series Editor’s Preface

Summary

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is a key agenda of policy and programmes worldwide, embedded as a target within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for Education. Simply summarized by the authors, ESD is the idea that educational institutions and programmes should develop human abilities for addressing such global challenges as environmental sustainability, diminishing biodiversity, climate change and violent conflict. This book offers an illuminating critical perspective on ESD as a global regime of institutions, programmes and practices (Tikly, 2020), by rigorously probing inequalities in how ESD is conceived and implemented. It does so through deploying Foucault's theory of how populations are made governable, most particularly the concept of biopolitics (Foucault, 1998).

The research reported in the book draws on Bartlett and Vavrus’ (2017b) heuristic of comparative case study to attend to historical genealogies of ESD, the vertical influence of policy agendas as well as horizontal differences between cases. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the UN agency tasked with leading on ESD and so, appropriately, the first case presented in the book is UNESCO's ESD for 2030 framework. The other two cases are also international in their reach. Through reviewing winners of the prestigious UNESCO-Japan Prize on Education for Sustainable Development from across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, patterns are identified in the forms and priorities taken by ESD initiatives serving variously wealthy communities in different parts of the world. The final case, Eco-Schools, is not led by UNESCO but, as the largest ESD programme in the world, has enormous international reach and significance. Eco-Schools is also a key partner of UNESCO and officially recognized by the organization as a model initiative. The three chapters comparing Eco-Schools across Rwanda, South Africa, Sweden and Uganda make visible the neoliberal biopolitics of ESD governance and its effects on different populations. ESD initiatives implemented for socioeconomically deprived populations are shown to focus mainly on knowledge for making responsible choices for self-reliance and petty entrepreneurism with the resources available locally. By contrast, ESD for wealthier populations focuses on making responsible choices for consumption for the benefit of the planet and distant communities. The biopolitical framing allows the authors to probe how these inequalities reinforce social divisions; to raise questions around the morality of responsibilizing communities and children for global problems of unsustainability; and to problematize the democratic potential of participative decision-making within the parameters of depoliticized educational programmes.