New ethical challenges within environmental and sustainability education

The following mini-collection of papers derives from contributions to the very first symposium of the Environmental and Sustainability Research Network (ESER) at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in Porto, Portugal, September 2014. The symposium was an international and inter-disciplinary collaboration in the areas of environmental, sustainability, global and development education research with a special focus on current ethical and political issues within these areas. The symposium brought together researchers from four countries – Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden – who have a common interest in confronting political and ethical issues in the context of educational initiatives.

The Environmental and Sustainability Research Network (ESER) is the 30th network within European Educational Research Association (EERA) which annually organises ECER at different locations in Europe. The network was initiated in 2010 and developed through international collaborations during ECER in Berlin 2011, Cádiz 2012 and Istanbul 2013. Link convener of the network is Per Sund, Mälardalen University, Sweden.

The ESER network seems to fulfil a large need and has grown fast – today it organises over 170 researchers from 23 countries where all continents are represented. At the first conference as independent network in Porto 2014 about 80 researchers attended and to the second conference in Budapest 2015 this figure was raised to over 100.

The key objective of ESER is to facilitate a network of European researchers who will critically investigate and discuss the dynamic relations between education, learning, environment and sustainability issues. The network provides opportunities to share, discuss, disseminate and advance environmental and sustainability education research, and to promote the development and impact of such research. In this way the network aims to contribute to conceptual and methodological development in this field, as well as enhance empirical research in formal and informal educational settings from pre-school to higher education and other adult learning contexts. The research area is wide and includes curriculum, whole school approaches, teacher competencies, implementation and policy discussions on the one hand, and learning outcomes and learner participation on the other.

Education is accordingly a key focus of the network including the specific approaches to learning and teaching that are relevant when studying complex contemporary societal issues. Research activities and discussion in this network are closely related to long traditions in educational philosophy including the role and purposes of education, for example, the relation between education as a tool for societal change at large or for the development of the informed individual. What makes these educational discussions distinctive is the critical analysis of international and intergenerational aspects of the educational settings and activities.

New ethical and political challenges

It is in the nature of human development that new ethical and political problems constantly evolve. The starting point of the ESER symposium from which this mini-collection derives, was the transition environmental and sustainability education (ESE) has undergone where social and human development issues, alongside environmental issues, have gradually become more prominent. This transition can be understood in relation to social and economic changes in the global community as well as to discursive changes. A striking example is how the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg implied a shift in emphasis from the environment to poverty eradication and an interest in multicultural issues (Sund and Öhman 2014). Shortly after the 2002 World Summit, the UN’s Decade of ESD was adopted. According to some authors, this had the effect that the UNESCO, who had the task of promoting the Decade, uncoupled sustainable development from the focus of nature (Scott and Gough 2003; Jickling and Wals 2008).

The social and global aspects of sustainable development remains in the recently launched UNESCO Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development (2014) wherein it is stated that: ‘Sustainable development challenges have acquired even more urgency since the beginning of the Decade and new concerns have come to the fore, such as the need to promote global citizenship’ (33). The social aspects are seen as closely connected to environmental problems: ‘ESD … includes, among others, the interrelated issues of poverty reduction, climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, and sustainable consumption and production’ (33). The Roadmap also underlines the crucial role of education in promoting global citizenship and shaping a better (or more just) future: ‘To create a world that is more just, peaceful and sustainable, all individuals and societies must be equipped and empowered by knowledge, skills and values as well as be instilled with a heightened awareness to drive such change. This is where education has a critical role to play’ (8).

As a result of these changes new ethical and political challenges relating to globalisation, internationalisation, multiculturalism, and neo-liberalism have emerged within the ESE research field. This calls for new approaches to understanding interconnections and interdependence between and among social and ecological systems in current and future generations, and how education can and should contribute to the inclusion of these interrelated issues across the curriculum.

An ethical (and political) contextualisation: problems re-actualised

The content of the ethical and political problems evolving in ESE might be new but they re-actualises classic dilemmas and problems that have bothered/puzzled educational and philosophical scholars for centuries:

The grounding of values

First, these problems re-actualises what Richard Bernstein (1983) calls the ‘Cartesian anxiety’. By this expression he means that in the light of the new philosophical paradigm caused by the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century we seem to be stuck with two incommensurable options concerning our beliefs about the right and the good. Either it is possible to find an universal, rational and objective foundation for our moral beliefs or the only possible base for morality is our experience. But in the latter case morality is something subjective, external to rational argumentation, and hence we are doomed to an existence of moral heteronomy and relativism.

Pragmatists like Richard Rorty (1980, 1982/2003) have pointed to the difficulty of deciding whether certain moral beliefs correspond to any permanent foundation or not. From what sort of position could such a decision be possible? It seems that this would require access to an unclouded picture of both our own beliefs and the eternal referent, or, in other words, occupy a position outside our language, culture and life.

Owing to this difficulty, pragmatists claim that it is not possible to make a distinction between the nature of the right and the good and the practices of justification. In the pragmatic perspective, the referent when the moral values are to be decided is the socially agreed conventions for determining them within a certain community. But even if we accept that values only can be established within human practice (e.g. education) difficulties remain: what kind of criteria must such an undistorted conversation meet, and how are those criteria to be justified? (see e.g. a discussion between Rorty and Habermas on this issue in Brandom 2000).

The legitimate moral object

The contributions of the mini-collection also highlight the crucial question of to whom/what we owe moral obligations; what rights does the moral object have and what are our responsibilities to fulfil those rights? (see Kronlid and Öhman 2013).

In relation to sustainable development this concerns whom we ought to take into account in our strivings for a sustainable future and to what extent. Influential moral philosophers such Kant claimed that only those capable of making rational moral decisions, that is human beings, have intrinsic value and are included in the moral community. This is also the general idea of anthropocentric environmental ethics which also involves the idea that non-human nature, including non-human animals, is only valuable if it has instrumental value for human well-being. Anthropocentrism does not however necessarily exclude a long-term and serious environmental commitment as it may recognise the dependence on nature for a human prosperity (see e.g. Page 2007).

The human moral community has gradually expanded to involve responsibility for other human beings of the present generation (intragenerational justice) and concerns for the well-being of future generations (intergenerational justice). Important questions to take into considerations are historical legacies and complicities, the unequal distribution of wealth and resources, people’s development possibilities in which different ethical principles clash and conflicts arise (Bonnett 2012; Le Grange 2012). This strand of an anthropocentric environmental ethics relates to Global Ethics, another field of theoretical inquiry that address ethical questions and problems arising out of the global interconnection and interdependence of the world’s population (see e.g. Hutchings 2011; Widdows 2011).

Other environmental ethicists, like Callicott (1989) and Rolston (1998), have argued that rationality should not be the key to the moral community and have suggested that all organisms have intrinsic value by virtue of having a good of their own related to their flourishing (Biocentrism) or that ecosystems and species have intrinsic value because they have a capacity to sustain life and well-being in terms of their integrity, stability and beauty (Ecocentrism). This value-oriented discussion of whom/what possess intrinsic value have been criticised for being too rationalistic, abstract and decontextualized (Light and Katz 1996). If we find good arguments for ecocentrism for example, would it be possible to consequently live according to such an ethical principle? In contrast, relation-oriented environmental ethics takes the vantage point that moral agents are situated in morally relevant relationships with both humans and non-humans, and that the justification of actions and principles should take these particular relationships into consideration (Kronlid 2003; Kronlid and Öhman 2013).

In an attempt to balance the anthropocentric and the ecocentric Gough, Scott, and Stables (2000) argue that only a partially ecocentric view is possible since all human worldviews are in some sense anthropocentric. They also stress the need to acknowledge cultural pluralism and the ways in which this is apparent through differing dominant value systems. This would imply that questions of value, the way we relate to nature and if the value something holds is an instrumental or an intrinsic value is not neutral but stained by cultural norms. Within the last decade, a number of researchers have discussed the relation between environmental ethics and human ethics which has led to challenging philosophical debates about the individual’s interaction with and moral obligations toward the environment (González‐Gaudiano 2006; Kopnina 2012). Bonnett (2006) discusses whether a sense of sustainability can be developed which is neither anthropocentric nor ecocentric and raises the fundamental issue of how any ethical dimension is to be grounded and he proposes a position which ‘locates the essence of sustainability in the nature of human consciousness itself’ (274).

Regardless of environmental ethical position one important ESE-question remains: How to expand democracy and involve the voices of those unheard (non-human animals, people in other parts of the world, future generations) in classroom conversations about a sustainable future?

The democratic paradox of education

Finally, the papers presented here renew the intricate relationship between democracy and education (see Sund and Öhman 2014). A classical problem that has concerned philosophers and educationalists ever since the idea of democracy saw the light of day in ancient Greece is the paradox between the double educational assignment to foster free, autonomous subjects and at the same time transfer foundational values and norms of a particular culture to future generations (for a more general elaboration on the democratic paradox and the tension between the liberal and the democratic tradition, see Mouffe [2000]). This paradox is indeed accentuated when implementing urgent political and ethical issues in ESE: how to create a commitment to a specific idea about a just and sustainable future but still leave room for free opinion making? Or as Anders Schinkel (2009, 509) puts it: ‘if the state is to abstain from endorsing or favouring particular conceptions of the good life, can it legitimately make compulsory for all schools a type of education that explicitly tries to form rather than just inform pupils?’.

How strong and what normativity is acceptable in compulsory education? Many national curricula explicitly promote values connected to human rights and democracy: Is there similar common agreement on certain environmental and sustainable values in our societies today? Are there in fact universal values that are transparently applicable to local contexts as the UNESCO report, Universalism and ethical values for the environment (2010), seems to suggest? Is the global environmental and social crisis so serious and urgent that we are obliged to encourage the formation of radical environmentalists in order to avoid that education continue to ‘equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the Earth’ as David Orr once put it (1994, 5)?

Overview of the papers

In various ways the papers in this mini-collection all connect to the ethical (and political) dilemmas and problems sketched above and relate them to forces that are at work in society today, such as globalisation, internationalisation, multiculturalism, and neo-liberalism.

In the first paper Karen Pashby and Vanessa Andreotti focus on the intragenerational ethical aspects of the intersection of two trends in higher education today: internationalisation and promotion of sustainability. Using a post/decolonial perspective they map different possibilities for ethical internationalism and suggest a heuristic tool for locating intersections of neoliberal, liberal humanist and critical discourses within the dominating modern/colonial imaginary. The generative potential of the heuristic is illustrated by an analysis of the ethical implications and theoretical conundrums evident in policy documents relating to internationalisation from universities in Canada, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden and the UK.

Also Louise Sund’s paper engages with intragenerational ethics and benefit from a postcolonial framework but shifts the focus from policy to educational practice. More specifically she explores how teachers with experience of international professional development reflect on and incorporate global sustainability issues in their teaching. Drawing on Vanessa Andreotti’s work she presents an analytical tool that makes it possible to clarify how the teachers deal with historical legacies and complicities, global power inequalities, binary ways of thinking, moral responsibility and universal vs. particular values. The paper illustrates how these teachers articulated different ways of utilising the curriculum and enacting pedagogies relating to colonialism and complex global issues.

Katrien Van Poeck, Gert Goeminne and Joke Vandenabeele elaborate on the democratic paradox of education. In their paper they question the traditional boundaries between (objective) science and (normative/subjective) politics and they argue that existing science-policy constellation is incapable to democratically contain the hybrid ontology of controversial sustainability issues. Furthermore they claim that this objective-subjective dichotomy also imprint the debate between advocates for instrumental/normative and pluralistic approaches to ESE. In order to handle the democratic paradox in ESE they draw on Bruno Latour’s conceptual distinction between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘matters of concern’. Through three case studies they focus on how educational practices deal with sustainability issues as matters of fact, matters of value and/or matters of concern. This brings them to argue for a ‘concern-oriented ESE’ that does not depart from an artificial separation of facts and values, but instead confronts the multiplicity of concerns at stake and makes facts and values emerge in their interconnectedness.

The democratic paradox of education is also a concern in Helen Kopnina and Brett Cherniak’s contribution, but above all they address the question of the legitimate moral object in relation to pluralistic approaches to ESE. They argue that an anthropocentric perspective focusing on intragenerational and intergenerational equity defined in economic terms generally informs sustainable development and that this ties sustainable development to a neoliberal market discourse. In this way, they claim, all parts of the natural world become regarded as exploitable for human benefit while the prosperity and safety of ‘more-than-human elements of nature’ (individual animals or entire habitats) is neglected, even if it leads to their extinction. To contradict this moral subordination of nature they argue for what they call an inclusive pluralistic approach to ESE involving human eco-advocates who ‘speak for nature’ and represent the voices of ‘more-than-human citizens’ in order to take both human and ‘more-than-human’ interests into consideration simultaneously.

Finally, we are fortunate to include the comments from two prominent scholars, Sharon Todd and Stephen Gough, which both appeared as discussants in the ESER-symposium in Porto 2014.

From their specific positions within the field of educational philosophy each was invited to make reflections – descriptive, critical and prospective – in order to review the strengths and weaknesses of the ethical and political perspectives put forward in this mini-collection.

In her criticism of the papers Sharon Todd specifically explores their relationship to education and the kinds of moves the papers make in the name of education. She notes that all the papers in different ways want to improve education on order to enhance environmental and sustainability goals. Her worry is that education in this way is reduced to a vehicle for instilling the ‘right’ values, and the ‘right’ kind of knowledge. What she call for is more of a view of education as an art form involving ambivalence and ambiguity which makes room for the unplanned and unpredictable moments where education actually exceeds the dominant discourses.

Stephen Gough relates the papers to Rorty’s concept of ‘abnormal discourse’ and sees them as fruitful challenges to the ideas and perspectives that normally are taken for granted. Giving benefit to the papers in this way he also questions some of the claims made in the papers. He points to the philosophical difficulties of the ecocentric position, especially the fact that concepts like ‘justice’ and ‘rights’ only exist in the human discourse. He also advise us to be cautious about the assumption that we now stand above the modernism that has cause the world’s problems, and can therefore offer solutions to everyone else. Finally he questions the obligate connection between neoliberalism and ‘free market’ and emphasises that under neoliberalism regulation actually has increase (not least of education), and challenges us by stating that ‘the market’ is an effective device for interconnecting facts and values and an equal distribution of resources.

Notes on contributor

Johan Öhman is Professor of education at Örebro University’s School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences and is one of the founders of the research group SMED (Studies of Meaning-making in Educational Discourses). His work is based on John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy and view of the democratic potential of education. His area of research is ethical and democratic issues within the sphere of sustainability and environmental education, especially learning outcomes of student discussions, students argumentation, and teacher–student interactions.

Johan Öhman
School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences,
Örebro University, Sweden