• Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a vision of education that seeks to empower people to assume responsibility for creating a sustainable future. Central to ESD is the concept of culture as an essential underlying theme. Various approaches to ESD encourage people to understand the complexities of, and synergies between, the issues threatening planetary sustainability and understand and assess their own values and those of the society in which they live in the context of sustainability.

    ESD became a formal instrument for sustainable development following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (the Earth Summit) and again at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg – which was where The Web of Hope was born. In recognition of the importance of ESD, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2005-2014 the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

    The UN’s Agenda 21 identified education as an essential tool for achieving sustainable development and highlighted four areas of action for education. These were:

    • Improve the quality of basic education;
    • Reorient existing education programmes to address sustainable development;
    • Develop public awareness and understanding; and
    • Provide training for all sectors of private and civil society.

    If ESD is to be an effective tool for engaging people in negotiating a sustainable future, making decisions and acting on them, it must first address the way we think about sustainable development and about education in general. Essential to ESD are the following skills (Adapted from Tilbury, D. and Wortman, D (2004), Engaging People in Sustainability):

    Envisioning – being able to imagine a better future. The premise is that if we know where we want to go, we will be better able to work out how to get there.

  • • Critical thinking and reflection – learning to question our current belief systems and to recognize the assumptions underlying our knowledge, perspective and opinions. Critical thinking skills help people learn to examine economic, environmental, social and cultural structures in the context of sustainable development.
    • Systemic thinking – acknowledging complexities and looking for links and synergies when trying to find solutions to problems.
    • Building partnerships – promoting dialogue and negotiation, learning to work together.
    • Participation in decision-making – empowering people.

    These skills should be learnt and applied according to the cultural contexts of different groups and stakeholders.

    The very concept of ESD challenges the way most people think about the world today. Economic growth and increased consumption patterns tend to characterize the aspirations of a large proportion of the planet’s society. ESD aims to challenge these aspirations by encouraging us to imagine a different future and reflect on how our values, beliefs and current behaviour might affect our collective ability to realise such a future. To do this requires that we also change our view of the purpose of education. This transformative aspect of ESD makes the concept difficult for many to grasp.