Shaping the GAP: Ideas for the UNESCO Post-2014 ESD Agenda

Environmental Challenges: Causal and Enabling Orientations to Social Change

Unwittingly, society continues to contribute to the environmental risks that it must face. These include human-induced climate change, the rapid depletion of natural resources, increased frequency of natural disasters, loss of biodiversity, increased poverty and economic systems that depend on the continuous growth of consumerism. ¹ Risks that are exacerbated by the way people live on Earth require a response that is people-centred in orientation. In other words, human-created problems require human-centred solutions, often with ways of thinking different to those that created the problems, and different models of training and educational objectives (Orr, 1994). Education for sustainable development (ESD) is emerging as a strategic vehicle to address such issues and reorient learning for a more sustainable world.

UNESCO is committed to a post United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD). The DESD commenced in 2005 and will culminate in 2014. The new programme, post DESD, is known as the Global Action Programme (GAP) on ESD and it seeks to generate and scale up ESD action (UNESCO, 2013; Wals, 2009). The GAP is planned at all levels and areas of education and learning, so as to accelerate progress towards sustainable development. Essentially the GAP has two objectives; to reorient education and learning so that people have an opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that empower them to contribute to sustainable development. It also aims to strengthen education and learning in all agendas, programmes and activities that promote sustainable development.

Such issues are helping inform a global debate that engages with a new development agenda to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) after 2015. The post-2015 development agenda is likely to be more strongly influenced by sustainability issues and will be defined by the UN member states. At the Rio+20 World Summit in 2012, the UN agreed to clarify and define sustainable development goals (SDGs). It was decided to establish an ‘inclusive and transparent intergovernmental process open to all stakeholders, with a view to developing global sustainable development goals to be agreed on by the General Assembly’.

The SDGs will consider all dimensions of sustainable development—social, economic, ecological—and aim at replacing the MDGs as a new, worldwide agenda, that will be implemented after the MDGs.

The key question in these debates is how to enable society to move in a sustainable development direction? This article explores how ESD activities may be viewed on a continuum from ‘causal’ approaches, ² seeking to cause change in others or ‘enabling’ orientations where efforts are made to enable people to implement the principles of ESD and respond to the environmental challenges they face from their own context. Causal and enabling approaches are essentially part of a range of options that may be applied according to the context and content of planned learning. In seeking to cause change in others, for example, by seeking to change attitudes and values, there is a risk of perpetuating an ‘us to them’ and excessively top-down orientation. An enabling orientation, on the other hand, seeks to work from the perspectives that participants bring into the learning contexts. It seeks to both ‘mobilize’ these perspectives and engage with them in a systems-wide or holistic space as participants develop understanding towards more sustainable practices. Causal approaches have their place in ESD most notably when information and facts need to be communicated and shared. Unfortunately, such approaches are limited when the goal of ESD is transformation and meaningful social change. An enabling orientation to change, for example, through which people are supported to make lifestyle choices towards sustainability, rather than simply be the recipients of information and facts, is much more likely to achieve meaningful change than simply making them aware of issues. Enabling orientations are thus able to support more sustainable pathways in one’s daily living (Share-Net, 2013; Taylor and Westerman, 2013). They tend to make more meaning for learners by making useful connections between theory and context-relevant practice, thus enabling application to new contexts.

Causal approaches to change sometimes make the assumption that fear and concern is a viable and even desirable state to encourage. Unfortunately, such ‘causal and fear-based’ approaches also run the risk of creating ‘action paralysis’ where anxiety overwhelms the ability to make wise decisions and may even cloud reasonable decision making. Although it is healthy to explore the ‘footprint’ or impact one’s actions have on the Earth’s limited resource base, the negative implications are often over-emphasized. Working with colleagues in India, Rob O’Donoghue (2009), collected and recorded ‘hand-print’ stories which portray the positive things one can do to off-set the destructive impact of one’s ‘footprint’. Stories of change include reusing shower and bath water for food gardening, growing tree mother seedlings and worming waste. The ‘hand-print’ initiatives are examples of an enabling orientation to learning in that the participant in the learning is central to the decisions and actions that are close and meaningful to them. Participants are not simply carrying out the instructions or communicated messages, which experts are seeking to cause them to implement.

Instead of dwelling on the negative effects of our actions (our ‘carbon footprints’), we are finding that positive actions, or ‘handprints’ for sustainability, are far more satisfying and effective in transforming our work and lifestyle choices for a more sustainable world. This article explores some outcomes of the DESD and develops pointers for enabling education processes in the next decade and the forthcoming GAP.

The GAP will focus on five priority action areas:

Advancing policy;

The GAP will be launched at the World Conference on ESD in November 2014 in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan.

DESD and Regional Centres of Expertise (RCES)

RCEs are one response that has been implemented by the United Nations University: Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), in support of the DESD objectives. An RCE is a network of existing formal, non-formal and informal education organizations, mobilized to deliver ESD to local and regional communities. A network of RCEs, worldwide, constitutes the global learning space for sustainable development. RCEs aspire to achieve the goals of the UNDESD by translating its global objectives into the context of the local communities in which they operate. RCEs have been initiated with the support of the Ubuntu Commission of the UN to operate as an open framework for collaboration on ESD activities in support of learning and change.

In recent years, the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) RCE, to whom Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (WESSA) is affiliated, has been an active instigator in encouraging the development of other RCEs in southern Africa. There are now 11 RCEs in the South African Development Community (SADC) region and 127 acknowledged RCEs worldwide (http://www.ias.unu.edu).

A ‘Sustainability Commons’

RCEs have the opportunity of experimenting in sustainable living. To this end, the KZN and Makana RCEs, in South Africa, have implemented a ‘Sustainability Commons’ which is a further opportunity for collaboration and exploring sustainable living. A ‘Sustainability Commons’ may be described as a rich and diverse pool of sustainability-focused learning, technologies and tools; whose resources are deployed locally for the benefit of the community and the environment. At a ‘sustainability commons’, people are able to try out the low-carbon technologies which are used to achieve more sustainable practices. The Share-Net printing room, for example, uses sunlight energy from photo-voltaic cells while the lighting is provided through roof-mounted refractive skylights. Rob O’Donoghue from the Makana RCE at Rhodes University, describes a ‘Sustainability Commons’ as more than a physical space. He describes it as a culmination of historical trends and practices within the field of climate change adaptation; an experiment in social learning and an argument for and against science and technology. It is a meaning-making exercise in facing environmental risks and a movement towards socio-ecological justice through sustainability practices.

Guidelines for Southern African ESD Policy and Practice

Southern Africa has a wealth of experience in addressing sustainable development issues through education. There are many projects, programmes and networks active in this area (e.g., the SADC Regional Environmental Education (EE) Programme; the Environmental Education Association of southern Africa, Eco-Schools, etc.). The UNDESD provided a unique opportunity to strengthen, extend and ‘mainstream’ this experience through coordinated support and orientation. The hoped for reorienting of education towards southern Africa’s sustainable development priorities did not achieve the significance it promised at the outset of the decade, however. This poor achievement of the DESD vision parallels the poor performance of environmental conventions over the past two decades since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

Notable exceptions included Lesotho who launched the Lesotho ESD Action Plan in 2009 in Maseru. This plan helped different ministries of environment, education and health as well as associated NGOs and civil society organizations to cooperate more systematically in achieving SDGs.

Capability and Freedom

Amartya Sen (1999) develops the notion of capabilities through which one can develop and respond to the challenges one might face, although such challenges are often unpredictable. One also needs to be reflexive and respond in different ways in different circumstances. ‘Responsibility’, here, is a term derived from the notion of an ‘ability to respond’. Capabilities seek to acknowledge the entirety of what a person is capable of being and doing and the nature of the options available to them. Consequently, the capability is not merely concerned with achievements; rather, the freedom of choice, in and of itself, is of direct importance to a person’s quality of life. The idea of developing and emerging freedoms, from within, is central to the developing capabilities of a person.

Key projects of our KZN RCE are seeking to orientate their work around the building of freedoms.

Our Sustain-Ed project, for example, which offers accredited training, aims towards ‘training that achieves a sense of pride and purpose’ while much of the training emphasizes ‘practices’ or practical activities and solutions within the range of risks southern Africa is facing. Risks include water and sanitation, abject poverty, informal settlements to mention a few.

Eco-Schools, another partner in the KZN RCE, provide well-equipped and enthusiastic facilitators or ‘warm bodies’ across South Africa. These facilitators work towards supporting meaningful learning at schools and in neighbouring communities. An assessment framework that emphasizes how the school has changed to become more environmentally effective, rather than focusing on a hierarchical or ‘absolute criteria’, is followed. This approach to monitoring and evaluation further strengthens the social change dimensions of transformation within ‘school in community’ contexts.

Share-Net is a further partner of our KZN RCE. Through Share-Net, a range of inexpensive resource materials are developed and disseminated across southern Africa. In just the last six months, over 20,000 resources were purchased from Share-Net. Such materials are available copyright free and can readily be adapted and redeveloped to suit individual and local contexts. Materials are thus used in an adaptive and responsive manner and therefore support an enabling orientation to ESD processes.

The principle of work being ‘close and local’ also enables the development of freedoms where local engagements with issues and risks become important. The work thus seeks to address and build from local practice and experience rather than hypothetical theory. From Sen’s perspective, the end of development is the expansion of human freedom rather than economic growth at the societal level and income growth at the level of the private individual. The primary aim of educational institutions is thus the establishing of the conditions that expand people’s freedoms to do the things they have reason to value and because they feel they are the ‘right thing to do’. This differs from an instrumental or causal perspective of education which aims, for example, to develop specific skills for the labour market. The enabling of capabilities is thus a movement towards social, ecological justice and human freedom rather than simply economic development at the expense of the planet’s natural resource base.

Transformative Learning

Transformative learning refers to learning processes that are oriented towards change. In the field of ESD, a number of pedagogical approaches have been developed to strengthen and support transformative learning including action research and community problem solving. Active learning and practice-centred approaches further support transformative approaches to learning. Most recently, theories of social learning are being proposed which consider the significance of discontinuities in contexts of learning as valuable opportunities for learning and change. Such discontinuities often support those ‘aha’ moments when unexpected outcomes become apparent through a learning process that reveals a different way of understanding an environmental issue. Using citizen science tools such as a clarity tube or biomonitoring with a Stream Assessment Scoring System (miniSASS), for example, may reveal unexpected outcomes related to water quality. Through deliberation processes of dialogue and debate, supported by the developing scientific knowledge, transformative learning and understanding can grow and develop.

OPEN IN VIEWER Figure 1

An open process framework

Action competence and other methodologies that foreground democratic learning processes are also important dimensions of transformative learning. Such processes and methodologies engage the participants in decision-making processes, rather than assuming that they should simply implement externally derived solutions. Such pedagogical models are therefore potentially powerful ways of enhancing agency, the ability of people to develop their capacities.

Some Conclusions and the Road ahead

As pressure mounts on the natural resource base that supports life on Earth, many people and organizations are seeking educational solutions to the challenges that must be faced. The DESD was a major global initiative with this goal in mind. For many, the DESD has not achieved its goals although it was certainly a directional step of major significance. Innovations and educational orientations that have been highlighted above have played a significant role in the DESD. These include: ‘capability’, ‘transformative learning’, ‘reflexivity and critical thinking’ and ‘multi- and interdisciplinary’ approaches. The ‘open-process framework’ developed by Rob O’Donoghue and colleagues in southern Africa is a further example of engaging learning that enables more sustainable practices. Initiatives that are seeking to achieve quality education in the forthcoming decade would do well to consider these enabling orientations as plans are made to achieve the reorientation that society so urgently needs. RCEs provide a good opportunity for catalyzing these enabling orientations due to their flexibility, accessibility and inclusiveness.