The Silver Bullet? Assessing the Role of Education for Sustainability

• In Event: 3540 - Development and Global Environmental Change: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Raising rates of educational attainment is a ubiquitous national and international governance goal. According to a central environmental sociology framework, ecological modernization, it is possible that rising educational attainment may undergird less carbon intensive economies and more ecologically oriented societies. Similarly, the capabilities approach, a popular framework within international development scholarship, holds that education may be generative for a more sustainable development trajectory if it is “instrumental” in fostering a positive feedback loop between well-being, social equality, civic participation, and environmental protection. Using two-way fixed effects longitudinal modeling techniques, this study empirically assesses the relationship between national educational attainment and the ecological costs of producing human well-being for 76 nations between 1960 and 2010, using the Carbon Intensity of Well-Being (CIWB) ratio. CIWB is a well-established metric for sustainability within environmental sociology. The results show that gains in educational attainment have played an important historical role in reducing the carbon intensity with which nation-states have produced well-being for its citizens. Less encouraging, from a global sustainability perspective, is the uneven distribution of these desirable effects across nations in most regions, and their diminishment over time in all regions.
 

Author

• Orla Kelly, Boston College