ESD: Power, politics, and policy: “Tragic optimism” from Latin America

ABSTRACT

In light of the challenging developmental issues confronting the countries of Latin America, this response article analyzes the power and resistance of education for sustainable development from both theoretical and policy perspectives. Of particular concern are the neo-productivist strategies driving the latest stage of capitalist development. This needed discussion about education and development fluctuates between necessity and contingency. Derrida's concept of the “constitutive outside” accounts for how existing tensions within education for sustainable development inform the need for new identification models that are open, unsteady, incomplete, and relational. The constitutive outside also recovers the notion of “tragic optimism” (Santos, 2009) for clarifying the complexity of the struggle for emancipation and the confidence of the human capacity to create horizons of possibility. This confidence and capacity cannot be objectified from the impossible discourse (and palimpsest) of the texts/policies of education for sustainable development.

KEYWORDS:

• articulation
• contingency
• displacement
• dominance
• identity
• palimpsest
• power
• resistance

Acknowledgments

I greatly appreciate the fundamental suggestions from Rosa-Nidia Buenfil and Phillip Payne to build this answer.

Notes

1. See the resulting declaration calling for urgent action to mainstream ESD and include ESD in the post-2015 development agenda at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/single-view/news/world_conference_on_education_for_sustainable_development_calls_for_renewed_commitment_by_all_countries/back/9597/#.VYBgNlJGTeN

2. See for example Wals (2009).

3. For further discussion, see the Environmental Education Research (EER) special issue: Environmental Education in a Neoliberal Climate (2015) 21(3). Particularly see Huckle and Wals' article (pages 491–505) and Stahelin, Accioly, & Sanchez (pages 433–446).

4. Palimpsest comes from the Greek word that means erased again and designates the manuscript that still retains traces of an inscription previous to that which was dropped deliberately from the text to overwrite a new text. It was a custom in the Middle Ages as a way of recycling to deal with the scarcity of parchment. Many classical Greek texts hidden by Christian writings that were considered lost have been recovered because the erasure was fortunately imperfect.

5. In a sense, the resistance of EE to being subsumed entirely by ESD has been a contingent element that has prevented the attempt to fix its meaning, giving rise to a relationship of antagonism. This resistance was an unexpected reaction to the intense onslaught of UNESCO, especially the Thessaloniki Conference in 1997, to declare exhausted environmental education. The fact that environmental educators affiliated to the NAAEE (but also elsewhere) did not accept, or endorse, that deterministic and teleological speech act was a substantive part of this ongoing resistance.

6. Antiphrasis is a rhetorical figure filled with irony that designates people or things with voices that mean the opposite of what it should say.

7. There is also substantive difference between sustainable development and sustainability (Martínez-Alier et al. 2010; 2014); Martínez-Alier, 2008). The latter has a strong political, critical thinking and participatory substrate (agency). For its part, sustainable development aims to set economic growth as the hub through which gravitate other components (social, ecological, etc.) to preserve an order, a certain system of social identities. It has the aim of seizing hegemony in various social phenomena through an approach to rationality conceptually capable of exhausting the whole phenomenon, an impossible claim.

8. See also Mouffe (1993).