Hegemony and the politics of policy making for education for sustainable development: A case study of Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Assumptions are readily made about the global nature and discourse of education for sustainable development. This study challenges assumptions made about structural power as expressed through Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) policy and politics of education. Focusing on the concept of sustainable development (SD) and ESD, the research examined the culturally contextualized question: How should we understand the relationship between these policy concepts, structural power, hegemony and the hegemonic discourses that articulate them? A case analysis of the political and educational history of Vietnam is used to highlight how assumptions on the hegemonic potential of SD and ESD may or may not be appropriate, or adequate, for understanding that relationship at the depth required for critical purposes. The findings of a discourse analysis of relevant policy documents suggests the meanings of these concepts are not fully determined and cannot be seen as expressions of a determinable overall state of power relations or hegemony. Instead, they are suggestive of the limits of hegemonic power and allow for the emergence of a space of contestation. This space is at play in the political contestation of the meaning of SD and ESD in Vietnamese policy.

KEYWORDS:

• discourse
• education for sustainable development
• environmental education
• hegemony
• power
• sustainable development
• Vietnam

Note

Notes

1. The concept of socialist-oriented economy has its historical roots in the economic reforms introduced in the 1980s (Đổi Mới) (cf. Beresford & Fforde, 1997; Fforde, 2009). The initial experimentation with markets under a planned economy, and subsequent expansion of markets under state influence, have since created two factions within the Vietnamese Communist Party, where the emergent fraction of globally oriented economists has attained a more influential and predominant voice in state policy-making (cf. Le, 2009; Vuving, 2006). It is the historical and contextually bound struggle between these two fractions that the concept of socialist-oriented market economy attempts to handle by suggesting the possibility of accommodating these demands as part of the politics put forward by the VCP. With regards to the above highlighted incommensurabilities in the conception of sustainability, the case of Vietnamese policy-making with its particular antagonism between socialists and economists demands can be seen highlight this impossibility to dominate even in the form of politics of a one-party state (cf. Vuving, 2010).