Whither sustainable development (and its education)? A view from one Caribbean person

• In Event: Has ‘sustainable development’ had its day? Interrogating and reframing the global education agenda

Proposal

In this paper I take the position that the concept, “sustainable development,” and practices associated with it are deeply problematic and reactionary to the interests of planetary health and the justice-oriented aspirations of the world’s majority. Therefore, I argue that it is time to move on from the concept, “sustainable development” and the education that supports it. Drawing on the context of the Caribbean, a region that faces some of the worst effects of climate change and socio-economic problems, which are connected to a long history of colonialism and exploitative modernist development, I justify my argument in two ways. One, the term is not fit-for-purpose and it is also tainted, both in its conceptual grounding and supporting practices. Sustainable development does not reflect the true and urgent plight of the world’s majority and the depth of the ecological crisis, as well as the connection between the two.

In the Caribbean, for example, indigenous societies were decimated and largely replaced by Africans who were enslaved as Europeans exploited various peoples in their efforts to break nature and monetize the environment under the guise of civilizing these peoples, the precursor to modern development (Brissett & Jules, 202; Sheller, 2008). In turn, contemporary ideas and applications of development are defined by capitalist visions of the “good life” embodied in highly industrialized Western societies which serve as models to which the majority world, the Global South, are expected to aspire (Bernstein, 2000). This version of development is both hostile to the environment and unachievable for the world’s majority. Second, many of the educational ideas and practices that serve “sustainable development” have simply universalized one civilization’s ideas about how to inhabit the Earth and relate to everything within. Thus, the dominant model of modern education, too, has been complicit in the world that has been created, including the versions of development described above. This has resulted in epistemic prejudice that has robbed us all of multiple ways of knowing and living, reducing our capacity to even envision possibilities beyond a modernist capitalist life that continues to hasten the threats to our existence.

The notion of sustainable development or its more progressive alternative matters for education because education is where discourses about what a future life should look like are constructed, disseminated, sustained, made into practice and institutionalized. Education is about teaching and learning how we should live, what are desirable and sustainable lifestyles, what is morally acceptable, and what we agree to be truthful versions of history, which shape how we act in the present and the future. Ultimately, instead of sustainable development, I argue for approaches that deliberately, in both rhetoric and practice, promote social transformation and just futures that do more than merely sustain a deeply flawed and inequitable system. Rather than “sustainable development” and “education for sustainable development,” I propose “social transformation and just futures,” and “education for social transformation and just futures” that deliberately and unequivocally pursue human and ecological justice and harmony, rhetorically and practically.

Author

• Nigel Brissett, Clark University