‘We must urgently learn to live differently’: the biopolitics of ESD for 2030

Abstract

Recently, the new global policy framework for implementing education for sustainable development (ESD) – ESD for 2030 – was launched officially. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, this paper explores biopolitical elements in ESD for 2030. The paper contributes to previous research on ESD policy by employing a biopolitical perspective, and by highlighting problematic aspects of the framework’s will to include and to adapt to different contexts. The analysis brings attention to the framework’s notions of life and to how different human populations are separated. Furthermore, the analysis of the framework demonstrates how notions of transformative pedagogy, community, and the individual, assume the functions of biopolitical techniques. The findings point to a biopolitical differentiation where rich and poor populations are assumed to need different educational interventions, adapted to their socio-economic contexts, in the global educational policy quest for sustainable development. Ultimately, we consider the potential of Foucauldian ethics as an affirmative alternative to the current mode of biopolitical differentiation in global ESD policy

Keywords:

• Biopolitics
• education for sustainable development
• education policy
• inequality
• differentiation
• ESD for 2030

Acknowledgements

This work is part of the research project Education for sustainable development in an unequal world: Populations, skills and lifestyles, funded by the Swedish Research Council. We wish to thank our project colleague Jonas Lindberg and the Critical Education Research group (KRUF) at the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For an excellent overview of different theoretical approaches to biopolitics see Lemke (2011).

2 Biopolitics and educational inclusion more generally has been discussed recently by Echeverri-Alvarez (2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council under Grant 2018-04029.