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Sustainable Development

Chapter · January 2008

DOI: 10.4135/9781849200486.n27

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Sustainable Development

(Chapter 26 in Arthur, J., Davies, I. & Hahn, C. (eds.) The Sage Handbook of
Education for Citizenship and Democracy, London, Sage Publications, 2008, pp. 342
– 354.)

John Huckle

The ultimate goal of education for sustainable development is to empower people with
the perspectives, knowledge, and skills for helping them live in peaceful sustainable
societies. UNESCO, 2001, p. 1

There is now a growing consensus that 21C civilisation is on a path that is not
sustainable. Dominant forms of political economy are failing to conserve ecological
resources and services; guarantee economic stability; reduce social inequality;
maintain cultural diversity; and protect people’s physical and mental health. We face
related crises of ecological, economic, social, cultural and personal sustainability yet
the means are available to set civilisation on a more sustainable path. Adopting more
sustainable forms of political economy involves the establishment of new forms of
global governance guided by new forms of citizenship. Education that features such
citizenships should lie at the heart of initiatives linked to the UN’s Decade of
Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) that runs from 2005 to 2014.

This chapter seeks to clarify the new kinds of governance and citizenship that may be
necessary to set civilisation on a more sustainable path and how these might be
developed through citizenship education as part of DESD. It begins with
considerations of philosophy and ethics.

Philosophical and ethical foundations

Central to the perspectives that ESD should develop is what Hartmann (1998) terms a
social-ecological theory of reality and the values that stem from it. Rather than
regarding nature and society as separate realms (modern dualism) we should

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acknowledge that reality is always the product of both ecological (bio-physical) and
social relations and processes. The phenomena of global warming illustrates how the
relations between objects in the bio-physical and social worlds enable ecological and
social processes, how these processes affect one another constantly, and how our
understanding of such phenomena can never be entirely neutral or objective because it
is always partly a product of those social or power relations it needs to explain. The
politics of sustainability is about the relations that humans are in with other human
and non-human agents, how we understand these relations, and what we can do to
ensure that they are more sustainable.

Hartmann argues that for a society to be sustainable (capable of evolving indefinitely

alongside the rest of nature) three sets of relations have to be maintained:

1. Social relations amongst humans based on mutual respect and tolerance. These
require equitable access to basic needs; freedom of thought and expression;
and democratic forms of decision making and governance in all spheres of life
including that of economic production and distribution.
2. Environmental relations between humans and their bio-physical environment
that ensure the survival and well-being of other species (biodiversity) and their
continued evolution alongside people.
3. Ecological relations between organisms (including humans) and their
environment that ensure similar environmental conditions and opportunities
(climate, water availability, soil fertility, radioactivity levels, etc ) to those that
have prevailed throughout most of human history.

The question then arises, what form of ethics, politics and governance should regulate
social and environmental relations and their impact on ecological relations?

As regards ethics, a socio-ecological theory or reality, based in dialectical materialism

(Harvey, 1996) or the new physical and life sciences and systems theory (Capra,
2003), recognizes that people are part of ecological relations (members of a biological
species, dependent on ecological resources and services to supply their needs), yet
partly independent of such relations as part of social relations (they have powers of
language and technology that enable them to transform their own nature and that

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which surrounds them). In finding sustainable ways to live they have to balance
ecology and society centred values or an ecocentric perspective that finds intrinsic
values in the non-human world, with an anthropocentric or technocentric perspective
that suggests the only value of this world lies in its usefulness to people.

In seeking sustainability we should be guided by a weak anthropocentrism. This

maintains that while humans are the only source of value, they are not the only
bearers of value. In addition to valuing or caring for present and future generations of
people, we should value and care for the rest of nature by recognising its ecological,
scientific, aesthetic and spiritual value alongside its economic value, and
acknowledging its right to exist. In other words, we should balance our rights to self
determination and development, with responsibilities towards the rest of the human
and biotic community.

The ethics of weak anthropocentrism are reflected in the Earth Charter (ECI, 2007)
that sets out fundamental principles for sustainable development. Part of the
unfinished business of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the final version, approved in
2000, is essentially a people’s treaty shaped by a global dialogue that involved both
experts and representatives of civil society. Its preamble suggests that we must decide
to live with a sense of universal responsibility, identifying ourselves with the whole
Earth community as well as with our local communities. We are at once citizens of
different nations and of one world in which the local and global are linked. Everyone
shares responsibility for the present and future well-being of the human family and
the larger living world. The charter’s vision recognizes that environmental protection,
human rights, equitable human development and peace are interdependent and
indivisible, and its sixteen principles are grouped into four sections (respect and care
for the community of life; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; and
democracy, non-violence and peace). Principle 13 suggests that the world community
should strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and
accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision making and access
to justice. Principle 14 advocates ESD as part of formal education and life-long
learning.

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In 2003 UNESCO affirmed the intention of member states to use the Earth Charter as
an educational tool for implementing the DESD.

Social theory, politics and governance

Values reflect and shape ongoing social development and debates surrounding
sustainability should be guided by social theory. This now seeks to integrate nature
and the environment into its concerns (Barry, 2000, Sutton, 2004) and suggests that
the world is undergoing fundamental change that goes to the heart of the individual-
society relationship on which the concept of citizenship is founded. Following a crisis
of profitability at the end of the ‘post-war boom’ powerful economic and political
elites restructured political economies in ways that intensified globalisation,
environmental degradation, and social inequalities. This change is variously
interpreted as, for example, a shift from Fordist to Post-Fordist modes of regulation
(Lipietz, 1992); from modernity to post-modernity (Crook et al, 1992); or from
scarcity to risk society (Beck, 1992). Its significance lies firstly in the ways it has
further compromised the competence, form, autonomy and legitimacy of the nation
state as the prime container of political community and citizenship. The urgency of
global issues, together with the growth of global networks of power and international
political institutions and agencies, has prompted renewed attention to global models
of democracy and citizenship, while the rise of movements and nationalisms from
below, has prompted experiments with forms of direct or deliberative democracy
encouraged by governments adopting new consultation procedures to improve their
standing with citizens (Held et al, 2000).

Secondly, global change challenges the existential foundations of people’s lives and
brings new status and class divisions along with new interests and insecurities. In the
advanced industrial economies, the old politics of production and class has been
largely replaced by the new politics of consumption and identity. Consumer
capitalism offers a vast array of cultural products and encourages individuals to use
these to create meaning and organize and monitor their own multiple identities and
life narratives. Epistemological uncertainty may result in hedonism, or refuge in old
and new fundamentalisms, but it can also prompt a new sensitivity to difference and
subjectivity; scepticism towards grand narratives and universal truths; and a

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constructive post-modernism that seeks to acknowledge and correct the mistakes of
modern development. This involves a reassessment of industrialism, liberalism and
Marxism; a wider definition of politics; and the design and implementation of new
forms of democracy and citizenship that can foster sustainable development.

Constructive postmodernism recognizes that government, in the form of the

constitution, law and state policies, can act as protector and trustee of collective
reason, but that self-managing citizens must increasingly act themselves in
responsible and enlightened ways that express solidarity with others. Sustainability
requires the extension of both legal and practical notions of citizenship: a
restructuring of the state and international political institutions to facilitate new legal
rights and responsibilities (environmental citizenship), and the strengthening and
democratisation of civil society to foster moral responsibility and more sustainable
ways of living (ecological citizenship). The Real World coalition of UK environment
and development NGOs is one advocate of such improved governance (Christie &
Warburton, 2001).

Green political theory and the politics of sustainable development

The green movement and green politics reflect the theory and practice of these new
kinds of citizenship (Barry, 1998). Greens work ‘in and against’ the state urging it to
meet new demands based in ethics, and ‘beyond and around’ the state by using
international forums, treaties and conventions to establish new environmental rights
and responsibilities across borders. International NGOs shadow international
governmental agencies, organize social forums offering alternative agendas alongside
international summits (Hubbard & Miller, 2005), and use the new communication
technologies to sustain virtual communities of active global citizens. As regards
practical citizenship, greens seek to rescue society from the instrumental reason that
dominates markets and states by fostering civil society and a public sphere in which
ecological and social issues can be debated and self-managing sustainable
communities can take root. Appropriate technologies, economic localisation, and
deliberative democracy, are key elements of green alternatives (Woodin & Lucas,
2004) with localisation or decentralisation encouraging both greater self-sufficiency
and more deliberative decision-making (Baber & Bartlett, 2005). Encouraging

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dialogue and discussion, as part of community decision making, has moralising and
pedagogical effects, and is a key element of social learning for sustainability.

Having suggested that greens are in the vanguard of new forms of governance,
citizenship, and community development, it should be acknowledged that both
liberals and Marxists now advocate variants of sustainable development. Liberals are
reformist, strongly anthropocentric, and believe that such development does not
require a radical restructuring of capitalist social relations. Economic growth can be
balanced with environmental protection and social justice using existing and new
forms of technology and global governance (Turner, 2001). Sometimes termed
ecological modernisation or the greening of capitalism, this liberal view is dominant
within the international community and is reflected in Agenda 21, the agenda for
sustainable development produced by the 1992 Earth Summit.

Marxists reject capitalism with a green face suggesting that market-based

environmental policies do little to counter the anti-ecological characteristics of
capital. While sceptical of the utopianism in much early green political theory, they
now acknowledge the environmental crisis (the second contradiction of capitalism
(Merchant, 1994)) but remind greens of the continuing significance of class struggle
(Burkett, 2003); imperialism (Harvey, 2003); and state regulation and planning
(Dickenson, 2003). Dresner (2006) argues that the language of sustainability returns
us to many of the unfashionable ideas about fairness, solidarity, and the conscious
regulation of social development, that were associated with socialism in the past.
Post-industrial socialists have updated these ideas with new concepts of welfare and
citizenship.

UNESCO suggests that ESD should develop knowledge and understanding of the
social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.
Addressing the social dimension clearly involves citizenship education as it seeks an
understanding of social institutions and their role in change and development, as well
as the democratic and participatory systems which give opportunity for the expression
of opinion, the selection of governments, the forging of consensus and the resolution
of differences (Pigozzi, 2005, p. 2)

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Liberal environmental citizenship

Environmental citizenship (refers to) the way in which the environment-citizenship

relationship can be regarded from a liberal point of view. . . . . this is a citizenship
that deals in the currency of environmental rights, that is conducted exclusively in the
public sphere, whose principal virtues are the liberal ones of reasonableness and a
willingness to accept the force of better argument and procedural legitimacy, and
whose remit is bounded political configurations modelled on the nation-state. For the
most rough-and-ready purposes, it can be taken that environmental citizenship here
refers to attempts to extend the discourse and practice of rights-claiming into the
environmental context. Dobson, 2003, p. 89

While liberal democracy is not the dominant form of government in the world, it is
dominant in those advanced industrial states that cause most of the environmental
degradation. Sustainable development may be pursued using existing and additional
human rights contained in state constitutions and international instruments (Alder &
Wilkinson, 1999; Elliott, 2004). These should include substantive rights to life, to
those basic needs that support it, and to a liveable and sustainable environment,
together with procedural rights, such as the right of access to environmental
information. Rights and associated laws that govern environmental management and
land use planning are particularly significant, with activists in the environmental
justice movement seeking to use and extend these in ways that protect the health,
livelihoods and amenities of disadvantaged communities.

In outlining a conception of environmental citizenship that is developed from an

immanent critique of contemporary liberalism, Bell (2005) suggests that liberalism
should abandon its conception of the environment as property and adopt a conception
of the environment as provider of basic human needs and a subject about which there
is reasonable disagreement. Within mainstream liberalism, civic citizenship regards
the environment as property to be owned; political citizenship ensures that the
environment will become a political issue; and social citizenship is theorized with no
reference to the bio-physical environment. Since liberals accept that citizens have a
social right to the fulfilment of their basic needs and this requires exploitation of the
environment, consistency requires that the basic needs concept should take priority

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over the property concept, and that liberals concerned about the welfare of current and
future generations should be committed to forms of sustainable development
grounded in this concept. Such a revision of liberal theory reflects ethical principles of
inter and intra-generational justice and imposes a constraint on capitalism rather than
requiring its rejection.

Liberals believe that there is a multiplicity of reasonable moral doctrines held by

reasonable people in democratic societies (the fact of reasonable pluralism) and that it
is unreasonable to defend principles of political justice, that govern the basic
institutions of society, by appealing to controversial moral claims (for example the
strongly ecocentric views of deep ecologists). The fact of moral pluralism rules out
the conception of the environment as property (only one of many reasonable
conceptions) but allows that of the environment as a supplier of basic needs since no
reasonable doctrine could deny its factual or normative foundations (survival as a
precondition for all other goods). The fact of reasonable pluralism allows an
additional conception of environment in that all citizens should accept (for the
purposes of political justice) that the nature and value of the environment is a subject
about which there is reasonable disagreement. This conception suggests that
decisions, relating to environmental matters, should reflect democratic procedural
principles and that the policies of the liberal state will reflect conceptions that win in
politically just debates.

Liberal environmental citizenship requires citizens to have substantive rights to such

basic needs as clean air and water. Such rights are likely to be subject to considerable
dispute and possible judicial or legislative interpretation. It also requires citizens to
have procedural rights to defend and extend substantive rights, by for example
seeking redress if rights are denied or campaigning for new rights. A conception of
the environment as a subject about which there is reasonable agreement, requires
citizens to have procedural rights to participate in environmental decisions and
debates (to promote their own conception of the ‘good environment’), and personal
rights that allow them to make choices in their everyday life about how they affect the
environment. In return environmental citizens have duties to obey and promote just
environmental laws that secure these rights and to promote, through political
institutions, environmental justice across the world. They do not have a duty to

8
protect nature, wilderness or ‘green spaces’ (a particular conception of environment),
nor do they have a duty to make lifestyle choices that promote global environmental
justice (a negation of personal rights).

An apparent rejection of private environmental duties (for example the duty to recycle
or reduce car use) puts liberals at odds with other accounts of environmental
citizenship. But Bell argues that liberals can endorse such duties for two reasons: that
they are an effective way of promoting changes in policy and law; and may be
considered as citizens’ duties rather than legal duties.

Post-cosmopolitan ecological citizenship

Ecological citizenship deals in the currency of non-contractual responsibility. It

inhabits the private as well as the public sphere, it refers to the source rather than the
nature of responsibility to determine what count as citizenship virtues, it works with
the language of virtue, and it is explicitly non-territorial. Dobson, 2003, p. 89

Dobson starts his discussion of citizenship and the environment by noting that
asymmetrical nature of globalisation. Local acts with global consequences produce
communities of obligation that are primarily communities of injustice. Cheap food in
European supermarkets, for example, is often the result of exploited labour and land
in Africa, and British consumers therefore have non-reciprocal duties to African
farmers that should be discharged through redistributive acts.

Advocates of cosmopolitan citizenship (see Chapter 00), such as Held (1995), focus
on the human community and suggest that uncoerced dialogue and greater democracy
will allow the realisation of universal values, such as those expressed in the Earth
Charter. Dobson maintains that they focus on the wrong kind of community (the
human community rather than communities of obligation); the wrong mode of
operation (impartiality rather than partiality); and the wrong political objective (more
dialogue and democracy rather than more justice and democracy). Rather than a thin
and non-material account of the ties that bind members of the cosmopolitan
community (common humanity and a commitment to dialogue), Dobson offers a
thickly material account linked to the production and reproduction of daily life in an

9
unequal and globalising world. This prompts him to canvass the emergence of post-
cosmopolitan citizenship, alongside liberal and civic-republican forms.

Figure 1 Three types of citizenship (Dobson, 2003, p.39)

1 Liberal 2 Civic republican 3 Post-cosmopolitan

Rights/entitlements Duties/responsibilities Duties/responsibilities
(contractual) (contractual) (non-contractual)
Public sphere Public sphere Public and private spheres
Virtue-free ‘Masculine’ virtue ‘Feminine’ virtue
Territorial Territorial Non-territorial
(discriminatory) (discriminatory) (non-discriminatory)

In comparing citizenship in its liberal, civic republican, and post-cosmopolitan forms,

Dobson focuses on four dimensions (rights/responsibilities; public/private; virtue/non-
virtue; and territorial/non-territorial), see Figure 1. It is the fact that citizens of
globalising nations are ‘always already’ acting on others that requires post-
cosmopolitan citizenship to acknowledge non-reciprocal, non-contractual and
unilateral duties. Since acts in the private sphere impact upon people and
environments at a distance (have public implications), this sphere is properly a site for
politics and the exercise of post-cosmopolitan citizenship. Such citizenship focuses on
horizontal citizen-citizen relations rather than vertical citizen-state relations, and is
committed to such ‘feminine’ virtues as care and compassion. It is non-territorial in
that it spans borders and is associated with a global civil society as exemplified by the
anti-globalisation movement.

Ecological citizenship is a specifically ecological form of post-cosmopolitan

citizenship. It recognizes that as members of global society we are ‘always already’
obligated to others at a distance, a concept best expressed in the notion of ecological
footprints. Such a footprint is a measure of the total amount of ecologically productive
land and water supporting one’s lifestyle, and for the more affluent members of global
society, much of this land and water is located far from their place of residence
(Wackernagel & Rees, 1996). As we consume more, our ecological footprints grow,

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and we are obligated to more strangers across space and time (to those at a distance
and to those not yet born). The community of ecological citizenship is created by our
material activities and obligates us to protect a healthy, complex and autonomously
functioning ecological system for the benefit of present and future generations. Such
obligation is encouraged by adopting a weak anthropocentrism as outlined above.

Ecological citizenship has international and intergenerational dimensions and its

responsibilities are asymmetrical, falling on globalising rather than globalised
individuals. Ecological citizens will want to ensure that their ecological footprints do
not compromise or foreclose options for present and future generations and will be
prepared to reduce them without expecting others to follow their example. Obligation
ends when ecological space (resources and services) is fairly distributed but such
fairness may require the righting of historical wrongs. Virtues normally associated
with the private sphere, such as care and compassion, help ecological citizens meet
their responsibilities, and this sphere will increasingly become a site of citizenship as
they realise that by reducing household consumption they can reduce their ecological
footprints. Such politicisation of the private sphere is a challenge for liberals since it
questions personal choice and subjects the idea of the ‘good life’ to political scrutiny.

Hayward (2006) offers an alternative understanding of ecological citizenship while

Valencia Saiz (2005) suggests that a blind spot in Dobson’s work is his apparent
insistence on the efficacy of individual political agency. He fails to address the
conditions under which environmental or ecological citizenship can be engendered or
the political economy of such citizenships. This is the theme of post-industrial
socialism.

Post-industrial socialist citizenship

A theory of post-industrial socialist citizenship (PISC) builds on the ideas of Gorz and
Habermas (Goldblatt, 1996). Gorz focuses on the potential of new technologies to free
citizens from work so that they can devote the time saved to self and community
development. Habermas writes of the colonisation of the lifeworld, or the way in
which the instrumental rationality of the economy and state invades everyday life, and
argues that if citizens are to extend their autonomy, there needs to be a vibrant civil

11
society or public sphere governed by communicative rationality or deliberative
democracy.

PISC (Little, 1998) involves reduced working hours for those in paid employment to
provide a more equitable distribution of work. At the same time all have an obligation
to make some contribution to the wealth and well-being of society in return for a
guaranteed social wage (a new economic right). This new right would increase the
prospects of realising equal citizenship, but PISC also requires the redefinition of civil
rights to promote autonomy, and of political rights to ensure participation. Rights to
self-determination would emphasise positive freedoms, rather than the negative
freedoms of liberal democracy; encourage a civil rather than national definition of
citizenship; and counter alienation from politics. Political rights would provide
citizens with an equal chance to influence the decisions affecting their lives and shift
the balance from representative to more deliberative or direct forms of democracy. A
universal requirement to contribute to social wealth would value much of the current
unpaid work (such as that of carers) that is involved in the maintenance and
reproduction of everyday life.

The relevance of PISC for sustainable development lies in its potential to free citizens
from the treadmill of capitalist production and consumption and foster diverse green
political economies. People would have the time and encouragement to act as
environmental and ecological citizens by developing local economic trading schemes
(LETSystems, 2007); participating in deliberative environmental management and
planning; and building social capital (Smith, 2005), In these and other ways they
would learn their way to sustainability.

Citizenship education for Sustainable Development

The DESD website suggests that education is the primary agent of transformation
towards sustainable development since it can foster the required values, behaviour and
lifestyles. It recognizes however that there can be no universal model of ESD. Each
country has to define its own priorities and actions, with goals, emphases and
processes that are locally defined to meet local conditions. As quality education ESD
supports a rights-based approach; develops the learner’s competence as a community

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member and global citizen (as well as an individual and family member); upholds and
conveys the principles of a sustainable world as outlined in the Earth Charter; is
locally relevant and culturally appropriate; and conserves indigenous and traditional
knowledge.

UNESCO publishes a booklet on the international implementation of the Decade

(UNESCO, 2006) and reports on progress to date (for example UNESCO, 2007),
while the DESD website provides access to developments around the world. SDELG
(2005) provides a survey of ESD in eleven countries that suggests that there is a great
deal of good practice but also a need to appreciate and signpost the embryonic and
fragile nature of much ESD. It is most securely established within the curricula of
formal education in those countries where it has government support and regional
strategies, such as that of UNECE (2005), are significant in prompting action by
member states.

ESD has emerged since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit as a synthesis of environmental
and development education. UNESCO has acknowledges the central roles of
citizenship education and political literacy in ESD and the consequences that follow
from this.

. . . a curriculum reoriented towards sustainability would place the notion of

citizenship among its primary objectives. This would require a revision of many
existing curricula and the development of objectives and content themes, and
teaching, learning and assessment processes that emphasize moral virtues, ethical
motivation and ability to work with others to help build a sustainable future. Viewing
education for sustainability as a contribution to a politically literate society is central
to the reformulation of education and calls for a "new generation" of theorizing and
practice in education and a rethinking of many familiar approaches, including within
environmental education. (Unesco, 1997, paras. 67 & 68)

Something of what this new theorizing and practice may mean for citizenship
education will now be outlined by reference to some of the key features of ESD as
quality education listed on the DESD site.

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ESD is interdisciplinary and holistic (learning for sustainable development
should be embedded in the whole curriculum, not taught as a separate subject)

Mention has already been made of a socio-ecological theory of reality and the need to
see the world as a complex of inter-related ecological, environmental and social
relations and processes. Modern academic divisions of labour separate the natural and
social sciences and humanities; divorce academic knowledge from people’s everyday
knowledge; and so prevent learners from developing a comprehensive understanding
of their place in the world (Dickens, 1996). The primacy of ecology and nature study
in much environmental education should be challenged and more attention given to
the economic, political and cultural structures and processes that cause social injustice
and foster unsustainable practices. The curriculum What We Consume that I
developed for WWF-UK in the mid to late 1980s (Huckle, 1988) was an early attempt
to redesign environmental education as ESD using the Programme for Political
Education’s framework for political literacy (Crick & Porter, 1978), and a concept of
citizenship education that embraces governance within the ecological, economic,
political, social and cultural domains, at all scales from the local to the global (Lynch,
1992). Experiential classroom activities focussed on the political economy of goods
students consumed, set out sustainable alternatives, and allowed critical consideration
of environmental, ecological and post-industrial socialist citizenship.

Clearly environmental citizenship education should develop propositional and

procedural knowledge of environmental rights and the roles played by laws,
regulations, tax and fiscal policies, and other instruments in shaping sustainable
development. Students might for example study local planning issues; ecological tax
reform via national budgets; and the introduction of a carbon trading scheme within
the European Union. They might focus on the performance of corporations and NGOs
as environmental citizens, examining for example the corporate social responsibility
claims of a supermarket chain, and an NGO campaign to protect local farmers from
land seizures linked to increased demand for bio-fuels. Such lessons require teachers
to integrate citizenship education with other subjects (geography, science, technology,
media studies etc) and by revealing the ecological footprints of the rich, lead to
considerations of ecological citizenship. Encouraged to think and act, both globally

14
and locally, students may revise their identities as they adopt more sustainable ways
of living.

ESD is values-driven: sharing the values and principles underpinning

sustainable development;

The Earth Charter guidebook for teachers (ECIIS, 2005) provides advice on
introducing Earth Charter principles across the curriculum and is supported by a book
of essays examining the principles (Corcoran et al, 2005). Moral and social
responsibility, partly developed through moral and values education, is a key outcome
of ESD, but there is political debate on whether or not the state should promote such
principles through education.

Political liberalism maintains that the state should not intentionally promote any
comprehensive religious, philosophical or ethical doctrines. It deliberately avoids
taking a stand on the purposes of human life or what constitutes our well being.
Instead it aims to find principles of justice for a society that can be accepted by people
with radically different metaphysical and ethical commitments. Bell (2004) draws on
Rawl’s concept of justice to suggest that sustainability is an anthropocentric concept
arrived at through informed democratic deliberation of what is necessary for all
(current and future) members of society to have a decent standard of life through
social co-operation. Citizenship education should therefore promote political virtues
(reasonableness; a sense of fairness, a spirit of compromise and a readiness to meet
others halfway) designed to ensure intra-generational justice, and sustainability
virtues (essentially the duty of the current generation to maintain the ‘circumstances
of justice’ for future generations) designed to ensure inter-generational justice. The
curriculum should aim to promote a positive attitude toward ‘sustainability’ and a
basic understanding of the environmental and social science frameworks that citizens
need to participate in ‘sustainability’ decisions (Bell, 2004, p. 47). It should not
however promote particular green ideals or forms of sustainable development that are
properly matters of personal and collective choice. These might be aspects of the
permissible curriculum (as they are in some national curricula) if the demos so
decides, but schools that then promote green ideals should pay proper respect to the
political liberal’s concern for freedom. The school’s environmental ethic is not the

15
only environmental ethic that can be held in society, and education about some
competing green ideals (and non-green or anti-green ideas) should also be part of the
curriculum.

Dobson (2003) also considers whether a liberal education system can cope with the
value-laden nature of sustainability questions, and concludes that liberalism’s
normative neutrality commits it to providing the ‘mental and material wherewithal’
for choosing from a wide range of options concerning the good life. Realism requires
the teaching of some determinate habits, practices and values and the appropriate
liberal commitment is not to offer some determinate account of it (sustainability), but
to ensure the conditions within which the widest range of opportunities for thinking
and living sustainability are authentically available (p. 198).Liberal ESD is more
likely to fail by omission rather than indoctrination, and liberal education systems can
teach citizenship ESD provided that they embrace the full implications of the
indeterminate and contested nature of sustainable development, and develop students’
reasoning ability through exposure to real examples of partiality and commitment.

Marxists question the neutrality of liberal states and consider their education systems
to be principally concerned with the reproduction of unsustainable social and
environmental relations. Education as praxis involves ideology critique and seeks,
through reflection and action on lived realities, to bring students to a critical
awareness of the limited nature of current forms of democracy and citizenship and the
potential of radical alternatives such as those offered by post-industrial socialism.
Building on the ideas of Freire, Capra and others, Gadotti (1996, 2005) associates
ESD with eco-pedagogy, a utopian project to change current social and environmental
relations that emerged from the Rio Global Forum in 1992.

ESD involves critical thinking and problem solving: leading to confidence in

addressing the dilemmas and challenges of sustainable development;

Habermas’ theory of knowledge constitutive interests suggests that ESD can be

theorized and practiced as environmental science and management; values and
behaviour change; or socially critical education (Huckle, 2006). Radicals
acknowledge the conservative and idealist nature of the first two forms and draw on

16
critical social theory of the environment and education to theorize the third. What We
Consume is one example of such ESD. Another is UNESCO’s multi-media teacher
education program Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Future (UNESCO,
2007) which contains a unit on citizenship education.

ESD that uses critical or eco-pedagogy claims to develop critical thinking and
problem solving in democratic ways, but Gough and Scott (2006) suggest that it is
prescriptive and manipulative. It is too ready to prescribe educational outcomes from
a flawed understanding of the relations between the environment, citizenship and
learning, and shape learners to behaviours designed to support the policy choices of
others. It roots thinking about the future in what we know (or think we know) in the
present, whereas a desirable ESD would acknowledge the uncertainty of many
knowledge claims regarding sustainable development; the unpredictable ways in
which society and nature co-evolve; and the need for learning characterised by open-
endedness, negotiation, and the juxtapositioning of competing perspectives. These are
characteristics that socially critical ESD already claims to possess.

Multi-method: word, art, drama, debate, etc.

Bonnett (2003) argues that sustainability should be taught as a frame of mind or

sensitivity to the multiple meanings of nature and the numerous ways in which it is
valuable to human civilisation. Art, literature, music and film can all help teachers to
develop sustainability as a frame of mind and prompt debate about the kinds of
political economy and citizenship that would allow it to find expression in the real
world.

Gilbert (1995) suggests that the political economy of culture and the environment
should be incorporated into citizenship education. The power of cultural expression is
increasingly available to youth, through such media as video and the internet, and
plays an important role in their understanding of self and others. Along with the
identity and lifestyle politics of environmentalism, it is a means whereby young
people experiment with identity and life narratives, develop a sense of agency and
come to act out social alternatives. The sales of texts like No Logo (Klein, 2000)
suggest that students can be motivated towards politics and citizenship education, but

17
the starting points should be identity and lifestyle, rather than formal notions of the
ideal citizen. Kenway & Bullen (2001) and Quart (2003) raise related issues in the
context of consumerism.

Locally relevant: addressing local as well as global issues, and using the
language(s) which learners most commonly use

Clearly citizenship ESD should be practised in and beyond educational institutions

that are seeking to be more sustainable. There are growing international movements
of sustainable schools (Henderson & Tilbury, 2004) and universities (Corcoran &
Wals, 2004) and as these green the curriculum, campus and community, there are
opportunities for pupils and students to participate in decisions; learn through active
citizenship or community involvement (Hart, 1996, Adams & Ingham, 1998); and
thereby develop action competence (Carlsson & Jensen, 2006)..

Environmental management, participatory planning, corporate social responsibility,

urban greening, rural development, and ethical consumerism, are examples of
contexts in which individuals can learn their way to sustainability alongside
businesses, governments and civil society organisations. There is an emerging
literature on social learning for sustainability: the learning that takes place when
divergent interests, norms, values and constructions of reality meet in an environment
that is conducive to learning (Wals, 2007, p. 18). Wals’ text outlines principles,
perspectives and praxis from across the world while Keen et al (2005) draw on
Australian experience.

There is much in these volumes to support this chapter’s argument that ‘new
generation’ theorizing and practice in citizenship ESD is well established and that it is
possible to teach activist and duty-based forms of citizenship linked to visions of
more just, sustainable and democratic futures.

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