Reviewing strategies in/for ESD policy engagement: Agency reclaimed

ABSTRACT

In this response article, I draw on critical realist perspectives to engage with the argument put forward in Bengtsson's study, which sees agency as an ontological necessity for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) policy engagement. Bengtsson supports a notion of the logic of contingent action over the logic of power as dominance, suggesting possibilities for agency and resistance. Although I do not in principle disagree with the agentive possibilities embedded in this aspect of the Bengtsson argument, it is the scope of the conceptualization thereof that I consider in this response. I start with considering the limitations of a Westphalian analysis of policy appropriations and agency for ESD, and argue that the Westphalian frame for policy analysis may be inadequate for capturing the significance of non-state actors and wider generative mechanisms such as informal normative structures, and private, economic power in the global political economy. Drawing on Fraser's (2008) concept of the transnational public sphere, I explore other potential possibilities for agency-centered appropriations or negations of, and/or resistance to ESD policy discourses, potentially expanding the agency-centered perspective referred to in Bengtsson's analysis and critique of policy making for ESD, or, at the very least, by offering a wider view of possibility for what he refers to as the ‘ineradicable moment of conflict, or antagonism.’ In particular, I broaden the notion of the transnational public sphere to be inclusive of Dussel's (1998) three concerns of transformation, namely; poverty and wealth inequality, environmental degradation, and narrow rationalities involving ongoing colonization of people, territories and resources. In doing this, I concur with Fraser, who suggests that the concept of the public sphere may well be “so thoroughly Westphalian in its deep conceptual structure as to be unsalvageable as a critical tool for theorizing the present” and suggest that public sphere thinking and associated conceptions of agency require expansion, which I offer from postcolonial and decolonization literature, critical realism, ontological experiences, and reflection on Environmental Education (EE) /ESD policy in the southern African region. Ultimately, I propose need for a more radical framework for EE/ ESD policy research that reaches beyond analyses of appropriations of policy within the Wesphalian state framework, and that moves beyond critiquing or seeking out resistance moments associated with the assumptions of trickle down effects from UN level policy, or analysis that is centered on the EE versus ESD debate. Such a framework requires a revitalized notion of agency involving commitment to collective, relational (including the socio-materially relational) and transgressive forms of agency for deep societal transformations all round. Overall, it seems that environmental education policy and praxis research conceptualized within a decolonizing transnational sphere frame appears to still be an open and as yet under-explored terrain.

KEYWORDS:

• agency
• decolonization
• education for sustainable development policy
• environmental education policy
• realist relational agency
• transgression
• transnational

Notes

1. “Westphalian sovereignty is the term used to describe the modern state system's basis for state sovereignty. Westphalian sovereignty is simply defined as the ability of a state to have sovereignty (or absolute control) over its own territory. Westphalian sovereignty signifies both a style of sovereignty as tied to the relationship between a state and its territory and also, the time period or era of the current manifestation of state sovereignty. The development of Westphalian sovereignty is considered the result of the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648, which marked the official end of the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War in Europe. Westphalian sovereignty also refers to a system of sovereign nation-states, which suggests that all states, despite their size or relative power, have control of their own territory. A state's sovereign control over their own territory requires clear boundaries and a distinction between domestic and foreign”. (http://historyofthought.as.uky.edu/index.php/Westphalian_Sovereignty, accessed June 2015)

2. An interesting contemporary exception is the UN's incapacity to mediate consensus on carbon mitigation targets to address global climate change.

3. Note, this does not reflect on country-based funding that supported in-country or bi or multi-lateral ESD activities. It rather reflects only the more obvious core funding to UNESCO for ESD activities.

4. see for example Operation Phakisa's Oceans Economy Lab at http://www.operationphakisa.gov.za/operations/oel/pages/default.aspx

5. Note this is not a full analysis of this form of scholarship – some examples only are referenced here.