Unsustainable Development as the Constitutive Other in Vietnamese Policy on Sustainable Development and Higher Education

• In Event: International Research on Sustainability in Higher Education: Policy, Research, and Activism for Sustainable Campuses

Abstract

Objective. The presentation focuses on the mutually constitutive relationship between sustainable development and unsustainable development in Vietnamese overarching education and socio-economic policy-making, including in relation to higher education. It thereby ties into the session's purpose to examine the relationship between research, policy, and activism and conceiving of how these practices can contribute to change. The presentation explores how a lack of articulation of unsustainable development in education, including higher education, and socio-economic policy defining sustainability in Vietnam becomes a premise for hiding potential antagonisms among competing narratives that constitute sustainability in institutional frameworks.
Theoretical framework. The analysis draws on post-foundational and post-Marxist theory (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Laclau, 1990, 1996) in order to conceive of how the constitution of sustainable development through Vietnamese policy making can be understood as a political struggle among a diversity of social groups that engage in policy making in order to influence social change. The framework provides a rationale for how presences and absences in discursive practices such as policy-making can be conceived as mutually dependent and constitutive for meaning and social structuration. It draws on the conception of a notion of constitutive other (cf. Laclau 1990; Derrida 1978, 1998) in order to portray the subversive effect of substitutions, silences and absences for the constitution of social imaginaries, such as sustainable development or higher education for sustainable development.
Modes of inquiry. The underlying analysis is a discourse analysis (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) of central policy-documents that define socio-economic development, education and sustainable development in Vietnam. The analysis consists of a an attempt to map central patterns or discourses that emerge in the various policy documents and that can be seen to be predominant for the constitution of meaning of sustainable and unsustainable development.
Data. The underlying data for the discourse analysis consists of Vietnamese national policy-documents that are central to socio-economic, education, environmental and education for sustainable development policy. Vietnamese policy is arranged around 10 year socio-economic development plans and the selection of documents included in the analysis covers the central policy documents that set the overall agenda for the areas of socio-economic, sustainable development, education, environmental protection education and education for sustainable development.
Substantiated conclusions. Initial results show that the articulation of unsustainable development is consequently omitted within Vietnamese policy-making. While the term is rarely used it is not given concrete meaning to. This is interpreted to suggest that the articulation of unsustainable development is riddled with political tensions as the concrete meaning given to the concept might highlight conflicts in conceptions of its other, i.e. sustainable development, thereby undermining the empty consensus both concepts are to represent.
Scholarly significance. The presentation will feed into the ongoing debate on the hegemonic position of sustainable development (Jickling & Wals 2008, Sauvé et al. 2005) as well as higher education for sustainable development (Blewitt, 2013) and problematize the consensus that is commonly assumed by highlighting the disruptive effects of “unsustainable development” as a constitutive other.

Author

• Stefan Bengtsson, Uppsala University