Education and Learning
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is about enabling “learners” to reach decisions and act on choices that enhance the sustainability of their and their communities’ own life support conditions and livelihoods, and those of other people and future generations.
Learning
ESD leads to transformative learning. ESD assists learners to develop their competencies for coping with crucial contemporary social, economic and environmental challenges. These are characterized by uncertainty and risk, poorly defined situations, diverging and contested norms and values, and competing interests and reality constructions. ESD privileges social and collective learning, learning that occurs in a social setting or context.
Learners learn from interacting with each other and with their environment. It is through this interaction that meaning making takes place and that understanding is achieved. Meaning and understanding are essential components of action competence – the ability to take responsible action vis à vis one’s “environmental” challenges.
Understanding
Educating for a sustainable present and future encourages learners to gain greater understanding of and insights in the interrelationships, interaction and dynamics of the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability and development, at the local and at the global level.
Agency
ESD is about the ways in which individuals, groups, communities, organizations – often with differing amounts of power and competing interests – are making and can make positive choices and decisions about the organisation and governance of their own lives, the lives of others and their common social, economic and ecological environment.
ESD supports learners and their communities to act upon such complex systems. It assists them in acquiring the tools of systems thinking and complexity analysis and the habits of continuous learning. It allows learners to model, test, adapt and adopt modes of action and behaviour in order to have a greater say about and influence on their current and future environments, “human” and “natural”.
ESD is about the ways in which learners’ choices and decisions have a positive affect on conditions of social justice, economic security and equity, wellbeing and health, cultural integrity and the sustainable use of biophysical resources, now and in the future.
Poverty alleviation
Poverty alleviation can be more effective to the extent that in addition to its social and economic characteristics, also factors having to do with ecosystems are systematically addressed. Through social and collective learning poor people and communities can work with nature and natural capital in order to enhance the integrity and continuity of life support systems. Thus, they can increase their resilience and adaptive capacity to actively engage in shaping the life conditions for themselves and future generations.
