4 - Winning Differently: Awarding Education for Affluent and Subsistence Lifestyles

Summary

This chapter offers a comparative biopolitical analysis of the prestigious UNESCO-Japan Prize on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), which honours outstanding ESD initiatives around the world. The chapter demonstrates how awarded initiatives unfold in different socio-economic contexts across the globe. In so doing, something significant is said about the global ESD enterprise and what is conceived of as ‘best practice’ in relation to populations living under different conditions.

The chapter starts with a short introduction to the prize and our means of exploring it. Thereafter the chapter proceeds with short analytical accounts of all awarded ESD initiatives, located in different regions around the world, in the period 2015–21.1 The analysis brings attention to: the target beneficiaries and their assorted living conditions; the addressed sustainability problems; the overall rationalities and the educational techniques used; and the (alleged) outcomes of each awarded initiative. The chapter then zooms out to draw comparisons between and trace across the awarded ESD initiatives, whereby a global biopolitical pattern of distinctions emerges. While this biopolitical pattern is laid bare, the chapter also brings attention to other rationalities at play that disrupt, or at least complicate, the general picture. The concluding section summarizes the main arguments by pointing to the peculiar combination of unity and separation, and the commensurate inability to challenge inequality, that is characteristic of the global ESD enterprise.

The UNESCO-Japan Prize on Education for Sustainable Development

The UNESCO-Japan Prize on ESD is a prestigious award that was established in connection with the inauguration of the GAP at the 2014 World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. According to then Japanese Minister of Education Hakubun Shimomura, the prize was instituted to enhance the visibility of the GAP (UNESCO, 2014c ), but it continues to play a significant role in the new ESD for 2030 framework. Initially, the prize consisted of three annual awards of US$50,000 each, all funded by the Government of Japan. The prize was awarded every year between 2015 and 2019 but, following an Executive Board decision in 2019, is now granted biennially.

The prize is awarded to organizations, institutions or individuals for prominent ESD initiatives. Hence, laureates are awarded for specific projects or programmes related to ESD; it might be important to emphasize this, as winning organizations often have many other activities running in parallel.