| This special issue entitled ‘Environmental Education and Education
for Sustainable Development’ was organised and edited by Dr Edgar Javier González-Gaudiano
who, as his brief biography indicates, works as an advisor for the Secretariat
of Public Education, in the Mexican government. He has long been active in the
field of environmental education, working for a variety of non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) and, in particular, with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and UNESCO. He is
an acknowledged authority in the field, having written many articles and books
on topics related to environmental education. He is also the founding editor of
Tópicos en Educación Ambiental. I had the good fortune to meet Dr González-Gaudiano
in Mexico City in 1998 and since then we have become good friends and worked collaboratively
together on a number of projects. It was with great delight that I was able to
persuade him to edit a special issue on environmental education and sustainable
development. For this special issue Dr González-Gaudiano has brought together
six contributions, including his own, from distinguished scholars and specialists
located in Spain, Mexico and Canada. These articles all concern sustainable
development and its relation to environmental education. González-Gaudiano, starting
from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), analyses the
configuration of ESD as a discourse and the conditions which gave rise to it.
He signals its development and ‘demise’ in terms of major conferences from Rio
to Johannesburg and indicates how it is still an emerging discourse relatively
insulated from the concerns of most educators. He also emphasises the extent to
which, as a field, environmental education today reflects the dominant neoliberal
climate and how it has proved resistant to non-Western perspectives. This lack
of environmental value diversity in the cultural sense is surely a major blind
spot, especially when ‘development’, even when wedded to the concept ‘sustainable
development’, has become a term now synonymous for many in so-called developing
countries with a history of exploitation, with aid politics, with structural adjustment
policies and the very diminution of ‘the commons’ environmental education was
originally designed to enhance and protect. Bob Jickling also wants to question
‘sustainable development’ or at least to take a critical stance towards it as
a governing concept when it is understood in a global context. He offers us some
cautions about education for sustainable development (ESD), especially as a phrase
and prescription for ‘educational determinism’ and he counters with the idea that
‘education should provide the capacity to transcend this particular conception
– to reach outside and beyond sustainable development’. Both authors imply the
easy ways in which environment can become corrupted through its association with
‘development’. José Antonio Caride Gómez charts the shifts from environmental
education to education for sustainable development, arguing that the latter does
not replace the former and should not be seen in terms of an equivalence or reduction.
He provides us with frames of reference for understanding the origin and evolution
of environmental education as well as examining its realities and perspectives.
Lucie Sauvé, Renée Brunelle & Tom Berryman provide an analysis of international
documents related to the configuration of environmental education and they present
a critical view of how environmental education is and has been conceptualised,
charting the recent shifts towards economistic models and perspectives and the
need to introduce elements into national policy initiatives that enrich their
ethical basis. Pablo Ángel Meira Cartea provides an argument ‘in praise of environmental
education’, inquiring into why EE became ‘education for sustainable development’
under the auspices of the United Nations and other organisations and agencies.
He provides a detailed historical analysis and examines the theoretical literature
concerning their relations. José Gutiérrez & Mª Teresa Pozo in their essay
‘Stultifera Navis: institutional tensions, conceptual chaos, and professional
uncertainty at the beginning of the Decade for Sustainable Development’ begin
with the weight of diverse expectations invested in the Decade of Education for
Sustainable Development that have contributed to the methodological tensions and
epistemological conflicts that now bedevil the field of EE. These articles
by noted international practitioners and leaders in the field all point to the
political, institutional and epistemological difficulties experienced by an emerging
field and together cohere in a single chorus in calling for a strong programme
in environmental education aimed at revitalising the field and clarifying the
differences with ‘sustainable development’ and coming to terms with the criticisms.
Their work collectively bears on fundamental political, historical and conceptual
issues that will help orient educators towards workable curricula, to new policies,
and to a new clearing that may become the sustainable basis for further work. One
of the difficulties pointed to by González-Gaudiano and other contributors is
the ways in which the older, perhaps more emancipatory, conception of environmental
education has been substituted and replaced by ‘sustainable development’ and,
thereby, increasingly given ground and become indissociably entangled with prevailing
models of economic development. (I say ‘emancipatory’ but it differs from traditional
emancipatory movements because it lacks an emancipatory subject or agent and it
is not clear what ‘freedoms’ are predicated.[1]) This is even more pronounced
when neoliberalism as the prevailing hegemony demands market solutions to the
world’s environmental problems where models of sustainability are driven by a
new rationalism manifested in assumptions of individualism and self-interest. Clearly,
there is an environmental/ecological critique of neoliberalism that in the name
of the ecological complex of living organisms – the biota – and its major organising
principle of the network, immediately casts doubt on assumptions of individualism,
rationality and self-interest – the standard assumptions of a revived homo
economicus. These assumptions are called into question in relation to the
environment – natural or social – and arguments that build on this tradition:
not only arguments concerning the protection of ‘the commons’ but also arguments
that embrace a living complexity over timescales and cycles outside the natural
human lifespan, the individual biography, or, even, generations of human community.
These long timescales and cycles are now also increasingly complexified by a growing
spatial global interconnectivity fostered through advancements in transport, information
and communications technologies and the accelerated flows of capital, goods, services
and people that they permit. The resulting interconnectivity promotes new ecologies,
fostering some and, at the same time, destroying others. The point is, as these
authors demonstrate, environmental education needs to come to terms in a new marriage
with ‘development education’ at a time when ‘development’ has never been more
open to question, particularly because of its deep and problematic relationship
with ‘modernisation’. The point is worth expanding and elaborating. Modernisation
theory has been intimately associated not only with the rise of the United States
as a hegemonic world power but also with US financing of post-war reconstruction
in Western Europe at exactly the same time that the process of decolonisation
in Africa and Asia took place as an outcome of the disintegration of the former
European colonial systems. It was also associated with the emergence of ‘development
aid’ and its special blend of aid politics that blended a post-war realpolitic
aimed at the creation of ‘the free world’ with development ideologies crafted
around ahistorical narratives of ‘freedom’. Development in modernisation theory
has tended be depicted as a staged process impervious to history though hostile
to traditional societies. It has been considered a form of Westernisation, implying
a kind of world convergence where societies became more like each other. Above
all, from its early post-war beginnings it was tied to simple theories of capitalism
and grand narratives of ‘progress’ that demanded the adoption of capitalist relations
of production that exacted a price in the short term. The price for forced or
speeded-up and planned development was often environmental/social. Environmental
despoilation became the accepted short-term cost. Rarely if ever was it observed
that traditional societies were more environmentally balanced or more harmonious
than the ever-increasingly rapacious consumer societies of the West that themselves
increasingly relied on the institutionalised exploitation of Third World ‘resources’
and labour. This assemblage of development theory helped to legitimate ‘foreign
aid policy’, ‘international development’ and US expansionism and has itself gone
through many incarnations, most recently as a doctrine of ‘free trade’ in agreements
like the North American Free Trade Agreement and those of the trade round of talks
characterising the World Trade Organisation activities. It is these overly
rationalist and functionalist premises that interpret ‘economic growth’ on a naïve,
unreflective rationalist philosophy of history picturing world progress as driven
by a Western historical process motivated by the values of ‘freedom’, (technical)
‘progress’ and (technical) ‘rationality’ that have come under increasing scrutiny
and have been highlighted under the conditions of globalisation. The way in which
economic development theory as a world narrative tended to ignore the most obvious
aspects of its ideological purpose deserves comment. It also requires a critique
based on aspects internal to the discipline itself. In particular, the notion
of rationality and its role in mainstream economics with the revival of homo
economicus in rational choice theory has been subject to devastating critique. The
rationality assumption of neoclassical economics has been subject to scathing
treatment, for instance, by Vivian Walsh (1996) in his Rationality, Allocation
and Reproduction. He has showed how neoclassical economics that prided itself
on its neutrality and its avoidance of all metaphysical assumptions was merely
adopting one of its latest forms, the metaphysics of logical positivism. The distinguished
Harvard philosopher, Hilary Putnam (2002), has recently reviewed the history and
collapse of the fact/value distinction at the heart of positivist science and
economics to argue that science itself presupposes values, albeit epistemic ones,
that fall into the same boat as ethical ones when it comes to questions of ‘objectivity’.
He also effectively critiques the ‘completeness’ assumption of rational choice
theory. Philosophy and ethics are thus closer to economics than most mainstream
economists would admit. It is clear that assumptions governing disciplinary
perspectives are not often examined. They operate as taken-for-granted starting
points, the hard core of theory based on values, as Thomas Kuhn has argued, not
open to philosophical scrutiny. And in the realm of development studies its prime
object of study is first of all the discourse of Western developmentalism, based
as it is on unexamined assumptions of cultural and cognitive Western superiority
which were part of European colonialism and development essentially as a form
of economic growth based on the global expansion of the capitalist system since
the nineteenth century. Where theories of development closely modelled themselves
on Western modernisation and industrialisation, Marxist theories that took root
with critiques of imperialism and colonialism provided accounts of ‘dependent
development’ and emphasised that modernity comes at a price. Yet both neoclassical
and Marxist theories of growth and development shared a set of modernist assumptions
inherited from the Enlightenment; indeed, they shared assumptions of truth, reason,
progress and freedom while interpreting these concepts differently and giving
them different content within a broader theory of politics and change. Most recently
the modernity–postmodernity debate has been played out in development studies
as in other disciplines. In particular, the challenge from postmodernism and post-colonialism
has begun to impact on development studies. As Peet & Hartwick (1999,
p. 3) explain: Development theories differ according to the political
positions of their adherents, their philosophical origins, and their place and
time of construction. They differ also according to scientific orientation, that
is, whether predominantly economic, sociological, anthropological, historical,
or geographical. They mark out a history of development from the viewpoint
of geography, acknowledging without too much historical investigation that there
is a deeper conceptual history tied to the Enlightenment and to Enlightenment
values. They provide a rough chronological contemporary history of development
focusing on the primacy of economic theories of growth and development, sociological
theories of modernisation, Marxist and neo-Marxist theories, including dependency,
world systems and regulation theories, post-structuralism, post-colonialism and
post-developmentalism, and feminist theories of development. They end by embracing
‘critical modernism’ based on the prospect of radical democracy and the possibility
of alternative development. They assert a ‘critical modernism’ against
the post-structural critique of development, which considers developmentalism
as a discourse. They argue: ‘Our allegiance is to an alternative development founded
on a politics of radical democracy within a critical- and not post-modernism’
(Peet & Hartwick, 2002, p. 87). They expand their view as follows: postdevelopmentalism
rejects modern development; postmodernism evidences the most extreme scepticism
about the modern project of human emancipation; and … we do not think that the
‘postings’, especially Derridean deconstruction, are heirs to the democratic commitments
of the Enlightenment. (p. 87) They add that Foucault’s power/knowledge
applied as a critique of development by Escobar (1995) need not lead to the rejection
of developmentalism in toto. Post-developmentalism based on Foucault,
taking its inspiration from the thrust of decolonisation theory, aided by new
post-colonial emphasis on hybridisation and the importance of culture, can take
different forms and may still operate as a critique of modernisation theory rather
than pointing the way forward to practical strategies for ‘development’ in a world
of globalisation. Yet these political forms of post-developmentalism and ‘critical
modernism’ require a more nuanced interlacing with environmentalism, as much as
environmental education requires a new relationship and understanding of development
education. The contributors to this issue provide us with a useful platform
to begin the process of re-examining new perspectives, new relationships, as well
as sympathetic critiques of ‘sustainable development’ and the conceptual means
to begin to go beyond present flawed and constraining conceptions. Professor
Michael A. Peters
Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 360 Education Building, 1310 South Sixth Street,
Champaign, IL 61820, USA (mpet001@uiuc.edu). Note
[1] We might
begin by asking what unfreedoms are tied to environmental degradation, how they
constrain choices, especially future ones, and whether their removal advances
substantive freedoms – a conception derived from Sen (1999). References
Escobar,
A. (1995) Encountering Development: the making and unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Peet, R. with E. Hartwick (1999) Theories
of Development. New York: Guilford Press.
Putnam, H. (2002) The Collapse
of the Fact/Value Distinction and Other Essays. Harvard: Harvard University
Press.
Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Walsh, V. (1996) Rationality, Allocation and Reproduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. |
