Abstract
In order to have long-term impact ESD concepts, practices and policies should move into societal, policy and research arenas with high visibility and traction. In the process of going ‘transboundary’, the ESD label may fade but the practice and organization of social and collaborative learning may gain.
As long as ESD remains in its ‘splendid isolation’ where its promises are debated among its aficionados, ESD will not gain the traction and momentum necessary for longer term impact. Without increased momentum, ESD is likely to succumb to the competition of concepts, ideas and practices that have greater appeal. And therefore, ESD’s chances of reaching the year 2020 may not be that good.
This scenario is not inevitable. In order to ‘survive’, ESD and similar concepts and movements 1 should go the ‘transboundary’ way. They should move vigorously into societal, policy and research arenas with higher visibility and traction. Of course, there is the risk that by doing so, sooner or later the label ‘ESD’ may disappear. This may be an acceptable price to pay, provided ESD’s defining transformative characteristics continue to permeate the practice and organization of individual, social and collaborative learning. 2
Transformative Education/Learning and strong Sustainability
ESD’s three constituent components are education/learning, sustainability and development. The substance of ESD resides in the intimate connection between the content of sustainable development and the methods of education and learning. Sustainable development can be understood and acted upon through an appreciation of the dynamic, complex and systemic relationship between the planetary ecological substrate and human societies in their social, economic and cultural make-up.
Prevailing dominant social, economic and political paradigms, systems, structures, policies and behaviour do not necessarily promote social and economic justice. There is often a fundamental mismatch between those causing the degradation of lifesupporting ecosystems and maintaining unjust social and economic structures, and those bearing the brunt of its negative consequences. In many instances, social and economic vulnerability and poverty go hand in hand with environmental vulnerability; they feed on each other. Sustainable human societies are characterized by social justice, economic equity and enhanced human capabilities. They allow individuals and groups to make considered choices for advancing current and future common welfare while maintaining ecological integrity.
Development processes are continuous learning processes. Educational institutions (from pre-school to university, from skills training to adult education) have a critical role to play by enabling learners to actively engage in these processes. But they have no exclusive claim to being places of learning. Wherever people interact, ‘clash’ and explore the conditions of their existence—in families, communities, cities, work places and associations—learning can take place. As a consequence, ESD’s transformative content and methods need to be brought to all tables and forums where not only strict educational issues are debated and decided upon but also wider sustainable development and sustainability issues.
Transboundary ESD
By crossing borders between societal sectors, academic disciplines and professional groups, between the local and the global, between public, private and civil groupings and between different levels of government, inter alia, ESD can help people to make sense of the environmental, social and economic (sustainability) issues that require choices for the future. This can be in relation to food production and land use; environmental degradation, biodiversity and climate change; urban planning and transport; poverty, livelihoods and employment; natural resource use and human rights; etc. ESD-inspired forms of learning allow societal stakeholders to come to grips with the complexity and contentiousness of such ‘wicked’ issues, while shaping conditions for sustainable life and livelihoods—for present and future generations, for the many and not for a privileged few.
Here I wish to mention four situations of how by ‘going transboundary’ ESD can produce desirable effects outside its immediate borders.
International Policy Agendas
It is encouraging to note that ‘education’, and to a lesser extent ‘learning’, prominently figure in the current proposals for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); 3 this is also thanks to the active contributions by ESD-related communities of practice worldwide. However, ESD practitioners and policymakers should remain vigilant concerning the further process, because the nature of the SDG formulation process—dominated by vested interests and power structures—may water down the initial transformative ambitions. Thus, the educational component of the SDGs may become restricted to vocational, technical and professional skills for ‘green’ economic growth, thus eclipsing education and learning for empowerment and transformative action.
How can this risk be countered? How can using ESD-inspired learning methods and approaches transform the nature of the actual SDG formulating processes? How can they help the stakeholders to ‘walk the talk’ rather than reproduce existing (power) structures and institutions? Though late, the end of the UN Decade on ESD conference in Nagoya could be the occasion to create a coalition of ESD-related groupings to convince the main stakeholders to introduce transformative learning in the current SDG formulation process.
Inserting ESD-inspired methods into major international sustainable development-related agendas has been done before. A recent example is the agreement between the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Centre for Environment Education (India). 4 An earlier example is the introduction of ESD-related methods in a project under the Wetland Convention’s Communication, Education and Public Awareness (CEPA) Program in Japan (Ofie-Manu and Shimano 2010). The approach can be easily extended to international agendas dealing with sustainable consumption and production (UNEP), 5 climate change, food and agriculture, decarbonizing economies, de-growth, sustainable cities, etc.
Regional Centres of Expertise
Globally, Regional Centres of Expertise (RCEs) have a track record of mobilizing educational organizations, public authorities, civil society and private sector organizations for delivering sustainability-related education and learning within local and regional communities. 6 Their structure and mode of operations mirror the central ESD characteristics of inclusiveness, agency and transformation. However, by encompassing all ‘sustainability’ stakeholders in a given geographic area, RCEs may be running the risk of not walking their talk. The mere size and diversity of the assembled stakeholders may have the effect that RCE remains a mere platform or meeting place, a space for ‘show and tell’. This is useful, but is not necessarily transformative. Experimenting with ESD-inspired collaborative learning methods around critical sustainability issues of common concern could help to make the power differentials and opposing interests of the various RCE member organizations visible, and therefore transcend and transform them. By doing so, RCEs could become laboratories for transforming societal relations and, in the process, influence the behaviours, policies and structures necessary for moving onto pathways of sustainability.
Assessing the Quality of Education
ESD-inspired practitioners and policymakers may wish to connect more intensively than thus far to the ‘quality of education’ debate. The Education for All initiative and the Millennium Development Goals have strongly focused on enlarging access to education. Despite some successes, there are still great disparities in access to education between boys and girls or between mainstream populations and minorities. Even greater disparities exist between the numbers of school starters and school completers. The ultimate disparity is between what school leavers should minimally know or able to do and what they actually learn and master. Therefore, the great challenge is to improve what is actually learned in school, so that school completers have the ability, competence, skills, attitudes and agency to address the manifold (sustainability) choices facing them. ESD-related practice and experience have shown that this is possible. But this experience needs to reach many more people in order to have the desired impact on what happens in classrooms and seminar rooms the world over. Currently, at the global level, the Learning Metrics Task Force 7 —despite its drawbacks and risks 8 —seems to offer a better opportunity for the ESD-associated community of policymakers and practitioners to significantly influence the thinking about and the practice of formulating (sustainability-related) learning outcomes and the assessment (testing) thereof at the school, community, national and international levels.
Research
In order to convince the sceptics that ESD is not mere promise or ambition, more and sounder research is needed on how ESD-inspired content and learning methods can make a real difference in getting people to move onto paths of sustainability. But that is not enough. Also research itself should go transboundary. ESD-related researchers should join other disciplines in research programmes and projects that address issues of transformation towards sustainability. Transformation requires changes in power structures, institutions and decision-making processes as well as individual behaviour change, in combination. One example of a research initiative that aims at addressing this combination is the global research funding programme Transformations to Sustainability, which is intended as a major contribution to the work of Future Earth. 9 Not only does this programme support interdisciplinary research, but also it explicitly aims at engaging stakeholders (i.e., learners—people facing sustainability challenges, threats and opportunities) in co-designing and co-producing solutions-oriented knowledge and the development of networks of mutual learning. It offers a scaffolding for dialogue and joint problem solving and mediation between researchers, policymakers and practitioners, and those with vested and emerging interest in the sustainability issue at hand and its ‘solution’.
Going transboundary seems to be the recipe for ESD to permeate the world and for the world to permeate ESD. Doing so, ESD will reach the year 2020. There need be no doubt about this. That ESD itself is likely to be transformed in the process is not only a risk it should take, but also a logical consequence of what ESD stands for, namely transformative education.