EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: THE HOPE OF THE
FUTURE
Poverty, climate change, frequent natural disasters and
dramatic social inequities are but a few of an unprecedented set of challenges the global
community faces today. In a world of 7 billion people, with limited natural resources,
individuals and societies have to learn to act more sustainably. Sustainable development can
be achieved but technological solutions, political regulations or financial instruments are not
enough. Long-term sustainable development can be achieved only if individuals and societies
change the way they think and act. Education is key to achieving this transformation.
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) helps
individuals and groups to find solutions for sustainability challenges. ESD means including
priority sustainable development issues into teaching and learning; for example, climate
change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, poverty reduction, and sustainable consumption.
It also requires participatory teaching and learning methods that
motivate and empower learners to change their behaviour and take action for sustainable
development. Education for Sustainable Development consequently promotes competencies
such as critical thinking, imagining future scenarios and decision-making in a collaborative
way.
Future dimensions are firmly embedded in the concept of ESD
through the Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development as “development
that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs”. This includes both envisaging alternative and preferable futures and
to anticipate and prevent future negative developments and consequences of global
sustainability problems/challenges. The need for ‘change’ and ‘transformation’ of the current
societal order has been emphasized at the highest level in recent years through, for example, two
UN documents about the global goals for sustainable development and the global action
program on education for sustainable development (UNESCO 2014; UN 2015). The question
then is how to work concretely with future dimensions in ESD.
Researchers have identified anticipatory thinking as one key
competence that ESD ought to promote. In this regard, it is vital to acknowledge that the
conceptualizations of ‘sustainability competence’ in the ESD field vary from more
deterministic ones to more holistic ones. However, the most common view seems to be to
perceive sustainability competence as a holistic, contextual, relational, and emergent thing —
emergent in the sense that we cannot tell for sure what a sustainable future should look like;
we can only tell what is unsustainable today. Hence, what seems to be in focus when
discussing sustainability competences is: “the complex combination of knowledge, skills,
understandings, values, and purposes”.
REFERENCES
23
Castro, P. Garrido, M., Reis, E., Menezes, J. (2009). Ambivalence and conservation
behaviour: An exploratory study on the recycling of metal cans. Journal of
environmental psychology,29,24-33
Hornsey, M.J., & Fielding, K.S. (2016). A cautionary note about messages of hope:
Focusing on progress in reducing carbon emissions weakens mitigation motivation.
Global Environmental Change, 39, 26–34
Ohman, J., & Ohman, M. (2013). Participatory approach in practice: An analysis of
student discussions about climate change. Environmental Education Research, 19(3),
324–341.
