Decoloniality and Education for Sustainable Development: The Case of South Africa

• In Event: Learning and outcomes in an Afrikan digital age

Proposal

Decolonial thinking (e.g. Lugones, 2010; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mbembe, 2021; Mignolo, 2011, 2018) is a lens that is being increasingly applied to educational endeavors. At the same time, there is an increasing call for quality education to promote sustainable development (e.g. UNESCO, 2014, 2023, 2024) and associated thematic areas such as climate change and climate justice. The main aim of this paper was to understand both the conceptual links between decoloniality and education for sustainable development (ESD) and to then develop and apply an analytical framework for exploring these links, using South Africa as a case study. Our hypothesis was that combining these two concepts would potentially illuminate ways that ESD might deeply embrace and reflect the lens of decoloniality.

South Africa has a very particular history of colonization, which resulted in a nearly 50-year regime of racial segregation known as apartheid. Nowadays, the country is in a post-colonial period. South Africa is also a country characterized by communities highly vulnerable to climate change, due to increased risks associated with flooding, storms and draughts, water scarcity, forestry, endangered biodiversity, and human and ecosystem health issues (MECCE, 2022). Both conditions make South Africa an ideal case study for exploring the links between decoloniality and ESD.

The aim of the paper was thus threefold: (1) to develop an analytical framework for understanding the conceptual links between decoloniality and ESD; (2) to apply this framework in the case study of South Africa to understand to what degree and how these links exist in national education policy and curriculum documents; (3) to reflect on how such analytical frameworks and conceptions of both ESD and decoloniality need to be understood in the context of specific educational, political and historical environments such as South Africa, and (4) propose how incorporating decolonial perspectives within ESD could offer substantial theoretical, curricular and pedagogical benefits.

This paper begins with an exploration of how the framework of decoloniality is being applied in ESD in academic (English-speaking) literature. The literature review took place through online EBSCO searches for the years 2000 to the present, providing access to articles, books and dissertations. The online search used the keywords “education for sustainable development” or “environmental education” combined with “decolonization” or “decoloniality.” In general, there were few articles that address both ESD and decoloniality. However, we did find literature that helped us in understanding critiques and imaginations related to ESD and decoloniality that would be pertinent for developing an integrated analytical framework.

The literature review resulted in the development of keywords that were used in a content analysis of key education and curriculum documents in the South African context. The content analysis included a quantification of the frequency and location of occurrence of the keywords in individual documents. In addition, qualitative data were documented for each occurrence, with an excerpt of the text in which the keyword was found.

We analyzed two sets of South African policy documents. The first were education policy documents and white papers relevant for curriculum, beginning in the post-apartheid period. The second set of documents were the most recent curriculum frameworks (CAPS) identified by the 2022 MECCE study as being most relevant for ESD: including Life Skills/Life Orientation; the Social Sciences, including Geography and History; and the Natural Sciences, collectively addressing pre-K through 12th grade education.

The results for South African policy and curriculum documents show that there is significant attention to environmental themes. However, there is much less attention to themes associated with decoloniality (e.g., indigenous ways of knowing, gender, power relations), and these decolonial themes are rarely linked with the environment. In summary, we find an alignment, or co-existence, of these topics without their being brought to bear holistically as a decolonial perspective on ESD.

In reflecting on the use of these keywords, we realized ways in which keywords in the analytical framework needed to be adjusted and results sensitively interpreted for the South African context. First, although decoloniality is a theoretical concept that is being widely discussed in academic circles in the country, within the K-12 curriculum it is concrete references to apartheid and the post-apartheid period that are commonly referred to. This raises an interesting question about how to connect the wider frame of ‘decoloniality’ with specific post-colonial contexts. Also, within the South African context, there are references to vulnerable groups, minorities and Indigenous peoples, with these categories both overlapping and distinct. These methodological questions will be relevant for future research.

The paper ultimately demonstrates the gap in both the global literature and the South African case study of a decolonial perspective on ESD and the potential value in bringing these together in policy and practice. We argue that bringing a decolonial perspective to ESD could help create more inclusive, context-sensitive, and transformative educational frameworks that address global sustainability challenges while acknowledging local colonial histories.

We want to highlight two crucial insights. First, it is important to acknowledge the coloniality of climate change, that is, how the uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change are linked with the processes of colonialism, neoliberalism and modernity. Second, a decolonial perspective on ESD–that is, a perspective on ESD that addresses the complexities of colonialism, capitalism, and international development - requires also addressing how decolonizing ESD can contribute to challenging the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing ‘universal’ approaches and structures, imagined solutions, and educational interventions.

Authors

• Felisa Tibbitts, Utrecht University

• Catarina Coelho da Silva

• MICHALINOS ZEMBYLAS, Open University of Cyprus