EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT:

CONFIGURATION AND MEANING

To John Smyth†

Edgar González-Gaudiano1

Abstract

The inception of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development
(2005-2014) has excited controversy over the validity of the concept of education for
sustainable development (ESD) as well as reactivating a critical review of the
environmental education field as a whole. This article analyzes the peculiarities of ESD,
the conditions that gave rise to it, the characteristics of its proposed configuration and
the implications for environmental education.

UNESCO and ESD

Numerous debates and controversies have arisen during the last ten years over education
for sustainable development (ESD) and its inclusion in the dominant neo-liberal trend of
the economy. Environmental educators have become involved in interpellation on
behalf of this new concept; a large group of them perceive ESD as a higher evolutionary
level of the environmental education field, which brings more coherence to
environmental conservation initiatives not only in terms of environmental policy but
also social, economic and political policies. Let us see.

A great many proposals on ESD recognize a conceptual gray area that derives from the
confusion over the very concept of sustainable development. As far as UNESCO is
concerned, however, ESD comprises ten emerging fields which have created a new
multi-dimensional, multifaceted field which, according to UNESCO, is in keeping with
the profile of the modern world.2 It is a simplistic and yet effective strategy in the eyes
of the public at large.

1. Reduction of poverty
2. Gender equality
3. Promotion of health
4. Environmental conservation and protection
5. Rural transformation
6. Human rights
7. Inter-cultural understanding and peace
8. Sustainable production and consumption
9. Cultural diversity
10. Information and communications technologies

1
Secretariat of Public Education advisor, Federal Government of Mexico.
2
The proposal of the issues comprising ESD was not a result of the creation of an implementation plan,
but a proposal that UNESCO had already made at the third Prepcom of the WCSD on March, 25, 2002.
See: Enhancing Global Sustainability. Position paper and proposal by UNESCO.
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001253/125351e.pdf

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Who would disagree with the integration of environmental conservation and protection,
the reduction of poverty, human rights, cultural diversity, gender equality or questioning
consumerism? In fact, this integration has been a deliberate attempt by many
environmental educators in Latin-America and the Caribbean to bring about a better
response to the complex challenges of education in a world scarred by all kinds of
crises. It is curious that a solution to the conceptual indistinctness of ESD should be
sought by proposing a configuration that even includes labile demarcations among its
constituent elements. I will analyze this below.

One de facto problem that the implementation of the DESD faces is that apparently only
we environmental educators have become involved in debating its pros and cons.
Educators in the other fields involved either appear to be uninformed or have shown no
interest in the inception of a Decade that concerns their work. It is an accepted fact that,
in the thirty years since its birth, the results of environmental education have been
precarious and have done very little to affect the accelerated process of global
environmental degradation that has been principally brought about by a clearly
augmenting rhythm of development. After these thirty years, environmental education is
still an emerging field.3 It is emerging politically due to its position with respect to the
core of educational practices and environmental management, where it is still a
peripheral issue; it is emerging conceptually not only because its questions continue to
be relevant today, but also because it constantly questions and challenges the values that
determine social rank in the world.

However, it has to be admitted that on a world level, mutatis mutandis, environmental

education has been positioning itself —not without difficulty— in both environmental
and educational management policies, as well as attracting a growing contingent of
experts. This is why such an impact has been made by UNESCO‘s attempts to defer
signing environmental education‘s death certificate at the Rio Summit (1992) and more
particularly at the Thessaloniki Conference (1997).

The ten years between Rio and Johannesburg clearly revealed that the relative weighting
acquired by the environmental factor in the two previous decades was in definite
regression. It built momentum with the world prominence that the fight against
terrorism acquired in the wake of the lamentable events of the 9th of September, 2001.
The substantial reduction in money available for financing projects (GEF), resistance to
ratifying environmental conventions and governance crises in United Nations
environmental organisms are but a few examples of this debilitation.

The insignificant agreements on educational matters included in the International

Implementation Plan that was accepted at the Johannesburg Summit had practically
been approved by the time the Fourth Preparatory Meeting was held in Bali, Indonesia.
Education was not, by any means, a major concern or topic of debate during these talks.
This has meant that the approved ‗commitments‘ do not establish definite goals, except
for those already agreed upon in the Dakar Action on Education for All initiative that
were only supposed to be ‗floor‘ objectives but have since become ‗roof‘. Furthermore,

3
A process is ―emerging‖ not because it has just appeared, but because it constitutes a new configuration
of signified that poses new questions and produces destabilizing effects of different kinds and varying
intensities that compete to replace the former entrenched configuration or configurations. It is therefore a
process of the redefinition of meaning. It also refers to how marginalized the process is with respect to the
core of the structure.

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little can be expected of voluntary contributions and ‗commitments‘ that do not involve
the developed countries, as if the problem of environmental deterioration were only due
to poverty.

With the promotion of ESD it is clear that UNESCO‘s flirting to embody the United
States have provoked a prompt reply to the discomfort caused by environmental claims
in the world of ‗business as usual‘. It would not be rash to expect the same thing to
occur with environmental education, where UNESCO has been the task manager of
Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 as it was in the International Environmental Education
Program (IEEP), which is to say that UNESCO‘s efforts will produce next to no results.
The four million dollars that the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) poured
into UNESCO each year during the IEEP‘s twenty-year implementation were used to
finance an inefficient bureaucracy and an editorial program which promoted precisely
the view of environmental education it later came to consider as outdated and which
aligned itself primarily with the standpoint of the developed countries, meaning
educational proposals with a welfare approach.

In other papers (González-Gaudiano, 1998 and 1999), I have stated that the IEEP
editorial series was written basically by environmental educators from developed
countries, which makes evident the institutional disdain with which the developing
countries are treated. The few articles from this series that were assigned to educators
from developing countries were given to English speakers (from Jamaica and India),
and the drafts they produced were revised and approved by Professor Willard Jacobson,
a specialist at the University of Columbia, who wrote the final version. Paradoxically,
the experiences of the developing countries disdained by the IEEP, which emphasized
the relationship between environmental problems and their social context, especially
rural areas, which were gained outside of schools because of their precarious
institutionalization and whose proposals were therefore targeted on the adult population,
and which constructed environmental education overlapping a farther-reaching
community project are precisely what is now being promoted as education for
sustainable development. In the words of Annette Gough (1997, 36) ―This silencing of
non-Western perspectives in the dominant discourses of environmental education is an
ongoing issue and a challenge for the future of environmental education.‖

It is very easy to perceive the lack of willingness to really head up an active process
which could be expected to make a difference at the end of the Decade; so far, at least in
Latin-American and the Caribbean, UNESCO has not issued any information about the
Decade and the issue has not been included on any of the meeting agendas at the Forum
of Latin-American and Caribbean Ministers of Education held every two years.

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ESD, a new discourse configuration4

In this context, ESD appears as an elusive thematic group of issues with a tendency to
configure new discourse; that is to say, it is an incipient system of meaning in the throes
of development since its differential thematic identities have been, in many aspects,
constitutively autonomous. These identities are interrelated in different ways and
degrees, even to the point of being disconnected (disperse) as a systematic set. An
image that may help us to represent this is the notion of the archipelago (Lyotard, 1988
apud de Alba, 1995, 146-147) used to describe the dispersion, diversity and multiplicity
of discourse configurations metaphorically. Although configuration is a notion used by
a great many writers (Bordieu, Laclau, Ricouer, Foucault, Derrida, etc.) with many
different senses, at the moment we are interested in taking it to mean discourse
configuration that explains the nature of the relationships among a constellation of
elements (Buenfil, 1995, 30), in this case, of ESD. By discourse configuration we mean
a structural arrangement that demonstrates the open, unstable, relational and dynamic
(in movement) nature that underlies a discourse configuration (Gómez-Sollano, 2001,
60-64).

As the relatively autonomous identities of this discourse configuration are different

from each other, they are in a certain way antagonistic and exclusive. However, it is
very important to notice that in this system of signified known as education for
sustainable development, what we see as a component that might interconnect diverse
elements is the fact that they are fields of social intervention which have generated
different ways of disagreeing with the status quo. They are fragmented fields which
uproot entrenched social beliefs. They are precisely the fields specific to many of those
who attend the Puerto Alegre Social Forum.

The creation of this chain of equivalences around a common core of dissention with the
status quo paradoxically weakens individual differential identities and a hint of
universality and legitimacy is introduced. This is especially significant for
environmental education whose field is ―Environmental conservation and protection‖.

4
Robert Prescott in The Wellbeing of Nations 2002 apud in Tilbury & Wortman (2004) states, ―… at
present no country is sustainable or even closer …Nobody knows how to meet these new demands. There
is no proven recipe for success. In fact, no one as a clear sense of what success would be. Making
progress towards ways of living that are desirable, equitable and sustainable is like going to a country we
have never been to before with a sense of geography and the principles of navigation but without a map or
compass. We do not know what the destination will be like, we cannot tell how to get there, we are not
even sure which direction to take…‖ The introduction of this study mentions that ―The Wellbeing of
Nations addresses that shortcoming by combining indicators of human wellbeing with those of
environmental sustainability to generate a more comprehensive picture of the state of our world. … The
author combines 36 indicators of health, population, wealth, education, communication, freedom, peace,
crime, and equity into a Human Wellbeing Index, and 51 indicators of land health, protected areas, water
quality, water supply, global atmosphere, air quality, species diversity, energy use, and resource pressures
into an Ecosystem Wellbeing Index. The two indexes are then combined into a Wellbeing/Stress Index
that measure how much human wellbeing each country obtains for the amount of stress it places on the
environment.‖ That is to say, it is not simply a case of an opinion but of research that permanently
monitors indicators.

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In the reference which is made to it in the text of the international implementation plan,
this field is defined in the following terms:

“Environmental Conservation and Protection: There can be no long-term

economic or social development on a depleted planet. Education to develop
widespread understanding of the interdependence and fragility of planetary life
support systems and the natural resource base upon which human well-being
depends lies at the core of education for sustainable development. Key resource
priorities identified by the World Summit on Sustainable Development include:
water, energy, housing, agriculture and biodiversity – the issues that came to be
known at Johannesburg as the WEHAB Agenda. ‗Environmental literacy‖
depends upon such understandings – and EFA (Education for All) and UNLD
(United Nation Literacy Decade) are central to developing the capacity for such
learning. It also entails the capacity to identify root causes of threats to sustainable
development and the values, motivations and skills to address them.‖ (UNESCO,
2003)

This way of looking at the problem allows us a glimpse of the dominance of the concept
of the environment as a natural resource, a condition sine qua non of economic and
social development, to use one of Sauvé‘s categories (1997, 13-15).

As we can see, not only environmental education, but also the specific set of assertions
of each differential identity are subsumed in this differential system, which obscures,
deforms and co-opts them, becoming a ‗empty signifier‘. On the subject, Laclau (2000,
113-134) points out that it is: ―… and empty place that brings equivalencies into the set
of demands‖.

The fact that it is an empty place stems from the ‗dissention with the status quo‘ that
becomes the factor governing the articulation of the chain of equivalences; it is
somewhat abstract and specific to each identity. The fact that it is a empty signifier does
not imply that it has no signified, but that movement is produced whereby the signifier
becomes detached from its specific signified and assumes numerous signified from a
long chain of equivalences. This is what has happened to the signifier ‗ecology‘ since it
began to symbolize multiple processes, policies, discourses and products that are not
necessarily connected to the original sense.

The status quo represents a nodal point, a master signifier, another void that means
something different for each differential identity. In other words, the search for gender
equality and the recognition of cultural diversity, by way of example, have been
specific, historically-determined struggles which configured their own very personal
discourses and strategies in opposition to the status quo.

A problem that should be mentioned with respect to the two previous fields is that the
clamor to respect the traditions and customs of indigenous peoples in Mexico has had to
come to terms with certain realities; for instance, the fact that these cultures do not
usually manifest socially equitable traditions and customs as regards gender. This is an
example of the contradictions that might be identified in the set of signs: contradictions
that are determined by the order of the assertions and claims that each identity has
denominated as central and of the highest priority.

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Thus, each link in the chain of equivalences, though it may conserve its main
differential traits, it acquires a ‗relative universalization‘ and in consequence the
capacity to represent the differential system as a whole (Laclau, 135). Therefore, due to
deficiencies in its own content, education for sustainable development is represented by
the contents of each and every one of the differential identities that comprise the chain
of equivalencies. Referring once again to Laclau (137), this confirms that all articulation
is contingent, and that the articulating moment as such is going to be an empty place,
where attempts to fill it with meaning will always be transitory and subject to
permanent questioning.

Information and Communication Technologies

The disruptive component of the ESD thematic differential system is Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT), since it is not a social area but an instrument.
Different antagonistic positions have been adopted on ICT. I shall take the categories
popularized by Umberto Eco in his now classic essay (1999) as a starting point for this
brief analysis: the apocalyptic and the integrated.

Apocalyptic standpoints have acridly censured ICT as supposedly intrinsically and

perversely anti-educational and dehumanizing. It has been condemned as the
deculturizing vehicle of excellence responsible for the alienation of contemporary
society. As of the eighties, criticism of the role of knowledge in advanced societies
under the impact of technological transformation augmented. Lyotard (1979) in ‗The
Postmodern Condition‘ emphasized precisely that technological development ensures
the expansion of global capitalism and analyzed the combined impact of new
technologies on the two main functions of knowledge: research into and the
transmission of learning (Peters and Roberts, 1998).

On the other hand, those who adopt integrated standpoints view ITC as the opportunity
to overcome ancestral arrearage, to redress inequalities and homogenize differences.
They have overflowing confidence in the potential of ITC and, in their delirious
exaltation, conceive it as the resource for restoring to educational processes the promise
of social and individual transmutation. In other words, according to the integrated point
of view, digital technology systems and products represent the bridge to a promising
future of plenty.5

From a perspective that seeks to overcome this marked bipolarity, Carbajal (2002, 158-
159) proposes a configuration called ‗hybrid-agonal‘ which, while recognizing the
―expressive diversity that abounds in the contemporary mass media, particularly in the
computer networks that comprise the Internet,… give rise to critical reflection on the

5
In fact, the Dakar Education for All Initiative warns of the risks of ICT and recognizes that it could
―help increase inequalities, loosen social ties and threaten social cohesion―. But UNESCO resolved this
in its DESD Framework for a Draft International Implementation Scheme. July 2003 (page 11) saying
that these risks ―are also found in progress in illiteracy and education for sustainable development
wherever the local context is sensitive … [which is just a case of] … knowing how to coordinate the use
of ICT with traditional learning instruments (paper and pen, chalk and word, for example)‖. See:
http://portal.unesco.org/education/es/file_download.php/2ae4e58335ab3033695a382a5d463espanolDraft
Scheme.doc.

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technological dimension, especially technologies which, like the Internet, put pressure
on the very structure of society.‖

Vattimo (1998, 78) supports these arguments and in ‗The Transparent Society‘ holds
that: a) the mass media play a determining role in the birth of a postmodern society; and
b) the mass media characterize said society, not as a more ‹transparent›, more
‹illuminated› society, more conscious of itself, but as a more complex, even chaotic
society; and finally, c) it is precisely in this relative ‹chaos› that our hopes for
emancipation lie.‖ (Free translation)

If we adopt an intermediate yet critical posture, on the one hand ICT offers advantages
regarding the emergence of forms of expression and unheard-of cultural exchanges that
have opened up the world for everyone, while on the other it has been and is being used
for the transmission of the globalization process of capitalism and its concomitant
ideology: neoliberalism. Again, in the words of Carbajal (159-160), ―the complex
Internet is a field of social interaction where multiple interdependencies are at play,
where precarious equilibriums and invisible forces operate, … [where] social subjects
are created who participate in the games of meaning that come to life there and in the
permanent interaction that is configured there.‖

Foucault described a mechanism for a reclusion model designed by Jeremy Bentham

(1748-1832) called the Panoptic. This mechanism consisted of the physical
reorganization of jail cells so that prisoners could carry out all of their activities without
any contact among them. All of the prisoners were controlled by one single guard.
Bentham‘s description is as follows:

"A prison... should be a round building, or rather, two buildings, one contained
inside the other. The prisoners‘ rooms would make up the circumference of the
building with six heights [six floors or levels], and we can imagine these rooms as
little cells open on the inside… A tower occupies the center, and houses the
inspectors‘ room… the inspection tower is also surrounded by a gallery covered
with a transparent grill that allows the inspector to oversee all of the cells without
being seen, and in this way see one third of the prisoners at a glance… but even if
he is not there, the aura of his presence is as effective as his actual presence…
Between the tower and the cells there must be an open space or a round well that
prevents the prisoners from attempting aggression against the inspectors… The
whole of the building is like a hive whose cells can all be seen from a central
point…‖ (Free translation).

Focault asserts that the panoptic ―…presents the problem of totally organized visibility
by means of dominating, vigilant observation. It puts into effect the project of universal
visibility, which would take advantage of a rigorous, meticulous power…‖ Without
daring to imagine an international conspiracy, I wonder if the purpose of introducing
information and communication technologies into the thematic set that comprises
education for sustainable development might not be to turn it into a panoptic in order to
oversee identities discordant with the system.

A second look

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What does this discussion contribute? Does it clear anything up? This discussion and
the others that comprise this volume lead us to a better understanding of the meaning
that should be given to education initiatives that take place in the context of education
for sustainable development. It is a political and theoretical analysis that is not usually
appreciated –unfortunately– by many educators, who prefer to focus on the practical
possibilities. The binomial, oppositional theory-practice is a false dilemmatic
relationship that has often been tackled from a wide variety of viewpoints. But if each
epoch constructs its intelligibility frameworks from those which make sense of
theoretical analysis, we will be forced to recognize that we find ourselves at a moment
full of unfamiliar, complex transitions; a certain solidity has been lost: plans replete
with absolute certainties, with the essential fundamentals that sustain a unitarian
historical course and a promising human project, with total fulfillment. In spite of this,
education for sustainable development is once again offered to us as the new integral
solution that will overcome the deficiencies and imperfections of previous solutions in
keeping with the characteristics of our times: a new Eden like those which have been
presented to us time and again, each with its own promises.

Is education for sustainable development a new fetish or is it about to become one?

Because that is the impression we get when it is presented as ‗this time we‘ve got the
answer‖; in other words, as a new ‗sorcerer‘s stone‘ that will solve all of humanity‘s
problems and not just those faced by education. Is environmental education really a
passé concept or, as we have suggested, are its questions still relevant? Is it necessary to
coin a neologism such as education for sustainable development to overcome
deficiencies and inertias, or is it a case of the same old worn-out maneuver of proposing
neologisms which, like one of Lampedusa‘s characters, impulse processes of ‗change so
that nothing changes‘?

Perspectives in Environmental Education

The previous discussion does not mean that I am petitioning for irreducible
environmental education. Environmental education is a field that has undergone
permanent construction and struggle. It is not that environmental education has suffered
or is suffering conflict; to the contrary, conflict constructs society and environmental
education has not been the exception. I have already said in other papers (1998 and
2003) that the environmental education field is the ripe target of numerous discourses
inspired by different ways of looking at the environmental problem; these discourses
respond to the various viewpoints with suitable pedagogic proposals. In this discursive
proliferation, environmental education is turned into a floating signifier as it acquires a
different load of meaning in each discourse (de Alba, 2003, 52).

This is translated not only into different conceptions of the environmental problem but
also of the function carried out by education in the field, in other words of its specific
pedagogic proposals to prevent, solve or mitigate the problem itself and its
repercussions. For example, the three-R proposal came from a conception of the
environmental problem based on the exploitation of resources; however, it does not
question methods of production and consumption but the ‗reduction‘ of waste.
Moreover, it places the final responsibility squarely on the consumer. This recycling,
reduction and re-use proposal in itself distracts attention from the imperious necessity of
adopting more radical measures, although it may be useful to view it as a primary

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intervention phase to be accompanied by comprehensive analysis to counteract the
alienation that comes with marketing strategies.

Thus, an open, unstable, multiple, relational discourse configuration has been set up
during the environmental education field‘s thirty years of existence; however, it has
been able to account for an educational myth and a political ideology still current today.
It is sufficient to go back to the Tbilisi founding statements (1977) and other similar
footprints to realize that their texts still question us.

A recurring answer from those who defend education for sustainable development from
the critics of environmental educators is that it is something different from a discussion
on questions of semantics. In this argument, by semantics we understand the
equivalence of meanings, but not in its widest connotation of the study of sign-using
behavior in general, linguistic meanings, transformations of signified and significant
relationships. From this perspective, it does refer to a semantic problem as regards the
construction of signified; however, in the light of what has been discussed here, in
addition to semantics, it is an ontological question, which is to say that it is constitutive:
a question of identity.

I find Buenfil‘s category (2003, 84) of ‗interstitial tactic‘ extremely pertinent as used to
refer to the set of modalities used by agents involved in the struggle to ―open the way,
create a new space, a name, reaffirm their existence, push themselves to the limit,
challenge those who reject the field and form alliances with those who support it from
opposing positions to us, seeking academic-political articulations that strengthen it‖.
Buenfil (85) also points out that these interstitial tactics are ―not necessarily deliberate
or planned by carefully selecting the measure in accordance with previously discussed
and agreed objectives but, on occasion, they involve dispersed, fragmented methods,
sometimes for survival and other times ingenious, outstanding improvisations.‖ (Free
translation)

The struggle will continue, now in the context of the Decade, which must be seen as an
opportunity for us to reconsider old arguments, to incorporate new approaches and
review our attitudes. I am profoundly convinced that the controversy between
environmental education and education for sustainable development will be beneficial if
we, as environmental educators, are capable of seizing the opportunity to renew the
discussion of how to give our activities pedagogic meaning and of using the impetus to
breathe new life, born of that fertile chain of equivalences, into environmental
education. The denial of environmental education‘s identity has provoked antagonism
with ESD, but this negation of our identity must not become a problem for us since in
the new constituent structures we can visualize other possibilities for the future.

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