Critical Reflections on the UNDESD: From the Perspectives of Informal Education in a Community Development Context

Introduction

The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD) ended in 2014. Countless success stories were presented at the final conference in Nagoya. These included stories about initiatives, projects and efforts by networks to promote education for sustainable development (ESD), but also the significant impact of the UNDESD on the broader global community of sustainable development in the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). According to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), ESD was successfully promoted in two ways. First, the UNDESD infused the concept of sustainable development into education. The Nagoya conference showcased some of these efforts, including regional strategies, initiatives, projects and networks ¹ . Second, the UNDESD infused education into sustainable development. The UNDESD impacted on the wider global community in achieving sustainable development, particularly through the discussion process of the UNCSD ² specifically at the UN World Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in 2012. The Future We Want clearly states that ESD should be promoted beyond the UNDESD (UNGA, 2012, p. 41). In the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), education is one of the key target goals. Both inside and outside of the UNESCO, educational success facilitated further active debates, and political and theoretical discourse development among the key stakeholders on ESD during the UNDESD. Based on the evaluation of the UNDESD, UNESCO developed Global Action Programme (GAP) on ESD (2014a), which presents five key strategies for ESD promotion after 2014. UNESCO captured these successes in a two-way approach in ESD and continued it for both the GAP on ESD and SDGs by 2030 (UNESCO, 2014a, p. 14).

This article proposes the need for careful reflection on what the UNDESD regarded as ‘success’ at the end of the decade from informal education in a community development context, and particularly, marginalized peoples’ perspectives. It focuses on the gap between what the UNDESD highlighted (the areas of formal education and schooling) and what it overlooked (informal education in a community development context). It finds the value of the unseen or unacknowledged part of ESD, argues why and how the gap was caused, and proposes a possible strategy for the next stage.

Rhetoric–Reality GAP

At the start of the UNDESD, UNESCO promised to integrate a socially critical and transformative approach to ESD. The action plan for the UNDESD clearly stated that ESD aimed to integrate socially critical and transformative principles through all forms of education, including formal, non-formal and informal, through lifelong learning (UNESCO, 2005). As the preposition for in ESD suggests, ESD conceptually draws mostly upon the theoretical discourses of a critical approach to environmental education (EE), particularly education for the environment and education for sustainability (EfS) developed by scholars such as Fien (1993a, 1993b) and Huckle (1996a) over 20 years ago. This explains why ESD is education for sustainable development, rather than education about or education through sustainable development (Hopkins, 2012; Fien & Tilbury, 2002).

However, the UNDESD implemented ESD policy in an unbalanced way. What the UNDESD saw as successes were mostly efforts made by formal educational organizations or involved schooling efforts in both non-formal and informal education areas. Many unseen efforts to achieve sustainable development were made by community development organizations, including international, government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). But these were hardly understood or known from ESD perspectives during the UNDESD. The UNDESD did not cover all forms of education and could not involve stakeholders from community development. The UNDESD achieved the active participation of formal education but did not engage with the area which modern education thinking could not cover. Despite attempts by many stakeholders ³ , acknowledgement of the contribution of non-educational community organizations to ESD often went unrecognized. Strong emphasis on formal education or schooling created a centre–periphery in ESD.

Value of Informal Education in a Community Development Context

Informal education in a community development context carries key components of a critical approach to ESD. In this area, efforts are made in a real-life context and they target the vast majority of people who are not engaged with school education. Community development NGOs play a significant role directly tackling the problems of a local community, particularly, marginalized people, who are not reached by governments or international organizations. The learning process is informally and unstructurally embedded in the process of community development. Stakeholders learn from each other, take action and create a new knowledge for the local community by critically integrating both academic and other knowledge, including indigenous and local knowledge, which is mostly tacit and embodied. This process itself is a ‘praxis’ (Freire, 1972), which educators in EE and EfS see as the goal of socially critical and transformative education to achieve sustainable development (Fien, 1993a; Huckle, 1993).

Three key elements explain why informal ESD in a community development context can become a praxis. First, it is a lifelong learning process. While formal and non-formal education institutes have become major players in ESD for children, youth and some target groups, the vast majority live without any contact with formal and non-formal education institutes. This majority is adults who have direct engagement with real life at the local community level. Sustainable development relates to all people and involves all aspects of their lives; learning must, therefore, be part of a lifelong process (UNESCO, 2005, p. 6). The role of informal education needs to be recognized, and the efforts by the formal and non-formal organizations strengthened by linking with social movement by the community organizations (Noguchi, Guevara, & Yorozu, 2015).

The voices and perspectives of politically, socially, economically and culturally marginalized people need to be heard and responded to in any sustainable development efforts for the local community. There is no agreed definition of marginalization but UNESCO defines it as ‘a form of acute and persistent disadvantage rooted in underlying social inequalities’ (UNESCO, 2010, p. 135). Marginalized people are the ones who suffer most from these problems, which often results in further marginalization of the most disadvantaged. They often bear the burden of the heaviest developmental problems and are the least resilient in major conflicts and crises. Their difficult situation is exacerbated in this process—the accumulated educational, health and livelihood problems are obstacles for them to respond to their problems appropriately and to improve their situation. These multiple layers of disadvantage accumulate as negative effects which are further aggravated by rapid development.

Second, it provides a realistic context where ESD can be understood by linking learning directly with the problems. On this point, Fien and Tilbury (2002, p. 6) argue that what really brings effective change is not governmental conference agreement for structures, but people who live in a real-life, local community context. Reality exists only in a real-life context at the local community level. Any theories and concepts for achieving sustainable development could become meaningless unless these are contextualized in real life. Any ideas, thoughts and concepts for sustainable development are realized only when people do it by learning and learn it by doing in a real-life context. Informal ESD in a community development context looks at unstructured and informal learning processes embedded in efforts to achieve a sustainable community development. It is a praxis where community people are learning by doing to tackle real-life problems.

Third, it tries to comprehend the meaning of ESD from the local community reality, particularly from the perspectives of the marginalized. Formal and non-formal education also relate to the local community. Non-formal education can be ‘institutionalised, intentional and planned by an education provider, as an addition, alternative and/or complement to formal education within the process of lifelong learning of individuals’ (UNESCO, 2014b, p. 132). Learning contents and approaches are influenced by the intentions of government, educational institutes and educators relating to what they want to do about the local community, such as the priorities of international and national policies. These learning contents and approaches create the teacher–learner relationship, and the intention of the teachers tends to come before the learners can conscientize (Freire, 1972) their problems. It creates not only a hierarchy between teacher–learner, but also risks missing the issues that the teacher cannot understand from their educational or schooling perspectives but that are nevertheless important to marginalized people.

Cycle of ‘Dilution–Deletion’

Over the years, environmental educators have pointed to a rhetoric–reality gap in the theory and policy implementation for EE and EfS (Fien, 1993a; Huckle, 1996b). The critical approach has been incorporated into the policy documents, but it has often been ‘diluted and deleted’ during the policy implementation (Fien, 2004, p. 4; Greenall & Curriculum Development Centre, 1981; Fien & Tilbury, 2002). Now, Huckle and Wals (2015, p. 493)criticize the UNDESD’s failure to redirect education to face the global reality. The global reality exists in the local community, which the UNDESD overlooked in policy implementation. As a result, it failed to face the global reality. The failure comes from an imbalance in policy implementation during the UNDESD. The UNDESD also showed another repeated pattern of dilution and deletion in the forms of imbalance in the policy implementation in the areas on which ESD should have focused.

Why has the same pattern been repeated in the history of education related to sustainable development? There are two reasons for the dilution and deletion of a critical approach in ESD. First, political and economic powers around educational policies, as educators have pointed out over the years, play a role. These powers, most of which support modernization or economic growth, have formed a particular understanding and approach to EE, EfS and ESD, in terms of concept (sustainable development), process (education) and content (knowledge). Their concept of sustainable development is predominantly interpreted as technological or weak, which in turn emphasizes a technological (Orr, 2011) or weak (Huckle, 1996a) approach to sustainable development, minimizing negative environmental impacts through new technologies and legal frameworks. This approach is top-down, driven by experts, and by scientific and technological advancement and environmental management. The technological or weak interpretation of sustainable development makes the approach to education expert-oriented in ESD. Education is interpreted as curriculum-based teaching by school teachers, and ministries of education. The ESD gains less attention from those who are involved in non-educational organizations, in which the process of learning is understood as informal education.

‘Dilution and deletion’ seems to be part of the inescapable nature of politics, which seeks to accommodate all views and makes it impossible to present a favourable view of sustainable development or philosophy of education (Fien, 2004, p. 4; Greenall, 1981; Fien & Tilbury, 2002). Considering the highly political context in which ESD has grown and been promoted, the failure of the UNDESD could be predicted from the beginning. For the UNDESD, ESD had to be planned and implemented ‘in a politically acceptable manner that did not to offend anyone’ (Hopkins, 2012, p. 24). Political pressure from the member states of UNESCO drove the UNDESD to take a formal education-centred approach for the promotion of ESD. The success of the UNDESD was determined by whether or not it could impact on the member states’ education ministries and their policies ⁴ (ESD-J, 2013, p. 19). UNESCO was also under the pressure, so that it had no choice except to focus on the educational area which these ministries could understand and know from a common education perspective—formal education and schooling. As a result, ESD has tended to be interpreted as formal education, and diverse forms of education, learning processes and knowledge that are outside modern education thinking, such as local and indigenous knowledge, have been overlooked.

Second, beyond the economic and political powers around the policy, it could be argued that current theoretical discourses on education and sustainable development are not sufficiently potent or efficacious to be able to redress global problems. Very little research has been done on informal ESD. Of the research that is available, most relates to descriptive case reports that introduce sustainable development efforts with hardly any critical analysis of how and why they are educational; or they understand informal ESD by looking only at a part where the schooling concept can be applied. Otherwise, most theoretical discourses on critical approaches to EE, EfS and ESD look at a formal education context. These have broadened and widened the concept, processes and content of socially critical and transformative education, mainly by focusing on school education or a schooling context. In these works, educators have revealed the power issues that marginalize particular communities and their perspectives and knowledge in education, including women, queer, indigenous peoples and non-English-speaking groups (Gough, 1997; Russell, Sarick, & Kennelly, 2002; Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014). However, they have provided little guidance on appropriate pedagogical practice, especially in relation to informal learning through community development. The lack of a theory of informal education in a community development context has created a situation where community organizations struggle to find clues about the relevance of ESD to their practices in local communities.

Problems of Theoretical Framework

The theoretical problems of a critical approach in ESD could be explored by investigating the central conceptual ground of critical approaches. Most theorizing in environmental education and ESD has tended to draw on critical theories from the 1980–1990s. Critical theory aims for consensus based on an open and public argument which undermines the false consensus for more sustainable forms of development. Huckle (1993, 1996b) applied it in the learning and teaching methods for the critical approach to EE, EfS and ESD in a school education context. The relevance and applicability of it to the school education context have been debated and developed, covering issues such as peer learning, multi-stakeholder participation in the learning process, and the facilitation role of teachers. Wals (2007) elaborates it in the social learning process, which may in part share the same issues of informal education in a community development context.

Huckle summarizes discursive communicative action theory in four points:

Universal moral consensus is inherent in the nature and use of human language;

However, critical theory also has its limitations. These limitations point to the problems of power and marginalization in the modernization process and have not come close to the core of the knowledge of the local community, particularly of marginalized people. The local community, particularly marginalized people, has a different knowledge system, a different way of expressing the knowledge (often tacit and embodied), different learning processes (often unstructured) and a different approach to solve a problem from modern thought and its epistemologies. Application and relevance of the critical EE, EfS and ESD to community development are unclear and even problematic for several reasons.

First, there is a problem of power between the stakeholders. Marginalized people are forced into a modern social structure through a process of modernization or development and they are in a society in which modern knowledge is often regarded as superior to their own. They may feel inferiority about themselves and be discouraged from expressing their concerns in front of those who come from the majority with modern knowledge. Second, the language used for communication among the stakeholders is a problem. Marginalized people may not have an appropriate language to express their concerns, as their languages may have been lost in the process of modernization. They may even have to borrow a language from the modern knowledge, which is not only different from the knowledge of the marginalized but is itself an agent of assimilation and discrimination of the marginalized. Third, the differences in the knowledge systems are also a problem. Marginalized people may not find the words to express their concerns because their knowledge is tacit or embodied so that they have never consciously known it in their everyday life. Fourth, the informal learning process goes beyond existing education thinking and is not limited to dialogue spaces and workshops. Learning can happen in the workshops and dialogue spaces as well as through all the life processes. These four factors are mixed together and exist in power relationships between multi-stakeholders.

Without careful and in-depth understanding of the subtle difference in the knowledge, language used and the power balance between the stakeholders, the discursive dialogue could only trim a part of the vast knowledge systems of the marginalized where modern knowledge can understand and know, and integrate it recursively into the modern knowledge system. In this case, discursive dialogue happens only within the same dominant social structure and does not contribute to re-establishing the knowledge system of the marginalized. As a result, there is no dialogue between the different societies.

The social structure, which critical EE/EfS wants to transform based on consensus building, has been created by those who are in power and reflects the views and values of the majority of the society. On the other hand, marginalized people are forced into the current social structure due to colonization or modernization. If colonization or modernization did not happen, they would have developed their own social structure, where they could embrace a different approach to solving problems and a different knowledge system from that of the dominant people.

Creating a space where multi-stakeholders can get together and discuss local community problems is ideal. However, it is necessary to empower both the marginalized, whose knowledge is often embodied and hardly verbalized, and who tend to think their knowledge inferior, and those who never question the dominant modern knowledge and language and its superiority to different forms of knowledge and learning process. Without careful understanding about the power balance of stakeholders, languages and knowledge, discursive dialogues may bring little change in the dominant social structure. In such a case, the language and knowledge that the marginalized people expressed in the dialogue space tend to be understood based on what the majority of people can understand and know through the modern knowledge. Indigenous and local knowledge tends to be cut and even manipulated in favour of modern knowledge and, as a result, recontextualized in the knowledge system that supports the dominant social system. On the other hand, marginalized people may remain with smouldering resentment and unexpressed internalized knowledge. Discursive dialogue does not do anything for the possible social structure of marginalized people.

Decoloniality and the Path to 2030

How can ESD overcome the cycle of dilution and deletion? One possible strategy could be decoloniality (Ndlovu-Gatsuheni, 2013) as an approach to the research and practice of ESD. Decoloniality shares the same concerns as critical theory such as postcolonialism, postmodernity and post-structuralism. However, it comprehends the limitations of critical theory and aims to go beyond it. Both decoloniality and postcolonialism see coloniality as the ‘darker side’ of modernity (Ndlovu-Gatsuheni, 2013, p. 12). These approaches do not focus on the process of political and economic exploitation, assimilation and discrimination, which has happened or is still happening between developed and former colonial/developing countries. Both approaches attempt to shift the dominant Western, modern, colonial and male ways of viewing how to see the world and marginalized people (Ndlovu-Gatsuheni, 2013; Young, 2003). Postcolonialism investigates such negativity in all aspects of human society, including events, research, language, social/legal and economic systems and the ways of understanding and knowing the problems, and beings (Said, 1978). Decoloniality also sees how such power relationships remain in the minds, lives, languages, dreams, imaginations and epistemologies of the colonized countries and the peoples (Ndlovu-Gatsuheni, 2013, p. 11).

Decoloniality provides a different way to understand and know the problems and direction from postcolonialism. Postcolonialism identifies the power that causes injustice and social, economic and political disparities between the dominant power and the marginalized people. It dichotomizes the world, into colonizer or colonized, men or women/queer, modern or traditional/indigenous and developed or underdeveloped. It overlooks that modernity has ‘two faces’ (Ndlovu-Gatsuheni, 2013, p. 14), one that has brought liberal democracy and human rights, and another that has caused unsustainable problems. While criticizing the victims of the darker side of modernity, postcolonialism seeks the solution within modernity (Ndlovu-Gatsuheni, 2015, p. 314). In other words, it tries to see the problems and seek solutions by drawing on the epistemologies of the modern knowledge system. As Morris-Suzuki (2011, p. 17) argues, that postmodern and postcolonial critiques ‘have emerged and flourish within the same system of knowledge production as modern thoughts’.

On the other hand, decoloniality aims to go beyond the limitations of postcolonialism. It tries to understand the power problems, such as who generates which knowledge, for what purpose and from where. However, it also acknowledges both progressive and negative remainders of modernity, and attempts to generate knowledge of the marginalized peoples. By establishing its own epistemologies, decoloniality aims to go ‘toward pluriversality, a world within which many worlds fit’ (Ndlovu-Gatsuheni, 2015, p. 314). Decoloniality can provide a possible conceptual basis that can supplement and go beyond the limitations of current ESD theories. Ndlovu-Gatsuheni (2015 symposium statement) claims that the strategies for decoloniality are ‘unlearning’ (Spivak, 1988) and ‘unmasking’ (Fanon, 1986).

Decoloniality for informal ESD in a community development context can happen in the processes of community development where all the stakeholders need to unlearn and go beyond their socially and economically constructed position in this modern society. It reveals the power of modernity in understanding and knowing of the concept (sustainable development), the process (education) and the content (knowledge) in the relationship between the stakeholders, as the current critical approach to EE, EfS and ESD aims. The learning in community development is not limited to structured learnings or activities where only modern educational thinking can be applied. Decoloniality in ESD finds the limitations of language-based communication in bridging the different knowledge systems, particularly embodied knowledge, and seeks the possibilities of a non-verbal, tacit and practice-based approach in order to share the knowledge of the marginalized peoples. By establishing the knowledge and language for the marginalized, it aims to have a dialogue between different knowledge systems. Finally, it seeks the pluriversality in the world.

The global education community is facing a critical moment about where to go for further direction of ESD after Rio+20 and UNDESD. The ESD is incorporated into the framework for SDGs by 2030. UNESCO is keen to take the role to continue ESD promotion in this process, as they have developed GAP on ESD (UNESCO, 2014a). The GAP on ESD sees local community as the one of the key focus areas for the further promotion of ESD (UNESCO, 2014a). Importantly, without theorizing informal education in a community development context by taking the decoloniality approach, the dilution and deletion will be repeated, even at the end of 2030.