Learning for life: ESD, ecopedagogy and the new spirit of capitalism

Abstract

More than a decade ago, critical ecopedagogue Richard Kahn expressed his fears and hopes regarding Education for sustainable development (ESD). He feared that ESD would be short lived and marginalized and would develop an instrumental pedagogy of one-sided transmission of knowledge, yet hoped for ESD to encompass three types of “ecoliteracies”: technical/functional, cultural and critical. After an assessment of current ESD, as reported by UNESCO, this paper concludes that his two first fears were unfounded, while his hopes regarding ESD’s pedagogical content were largely not met. To better understand the result, Luc Boltanski’s and Éve Chiapello’s analysis of “the new spirit of capitalism” is mobilized. According to it, current capitalism integrates “artistic critique” on e.g., lack of autonomy and creativity with greater ease than “social critique” with respect to e.g., poverty and inequality. This might explain what ecoliteracies that are integrated into ESD.

Keywords:

• Education for sustainable development
• environmental education
• critical pedagogy

Introduction

Along tortuous, sometimes parallel, sometimes distant paths, two environmental pedagogies have traveled through time: Education for Sustainable Development and ecopedagogy. The former started with the groundbreaking Brundtland-report in 1987 but trails lead further back, to the Environmental Education founded in the 1970s. The latter stems from the critical pedagogy of Paolo Freire and the more radical calls for systemic changes raised by the environmental movements of the 1970s. Both would claim that they are about learning for the preservation of life on Earth as we know it.

Their paths would cross at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 1992, but they soon parted again. Education for Sustainable Development went north and firmly established itself in the United Nation (UN) skyscraper on Manhattan, and ultimately became well integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals of the Agenda 2030. Ecopedagogy largely stayed in Latin America, in the semi-periphery of both the economic world system and the pedagogical debates, remaining critical and subversive. Yet, that the former became hegemonic does not, as we will see, necessarily mean that the latter was left marginalized and without influence—at least not all aspects of it.

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) matured during the so-called UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014). Early into it, one of the most significant contributors to the ecopedagogy movement, Kahn (2008, pp. 7–8), wrote:

The next decade will ultimately decide whether education for sustainable development is little more than the latest educational fad, or worse yet, that it turns out to be nothing other than a seductive pedagogical “greenwash” . . . On the other hand, if education for sustainable development is utilized strategically to advance a radical ecopedagogy, it could be the boost that education desperately needs in order to finally begin to adequately deal with the apocalyptic demands now being wrought upon society by planetary ecological crises.

Unfortunately, Kahn has never (at least not in a publicized form) returned to this question and evaluated the outcome of the decade. Did ESD end as a fad, a pedagogical greenwash, or has it become something adequate from the perspective of critical ecopedagogy? This will be the overarching question guiding this paper. In order to better understand the result—what ESD has become, and why—it is interpreted in the light of Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s (2005) classic study on the new spirit of capitalism, in which criticism of capitalism is divided into two categories: social and artistic critique.

This paper is not driven only by historical curiosity, however. UN’s Agenda 2030 is an important roadmap to a sustainable world and has been adopted by many institutions of higher education. As an example, the University of Gothenburg (GU), Sweden, has recently adopted Vision 2021–2030, according to which employees are obliged to “work for a long-term and sustainable development of society” (Göteborgs universitet (GU), 2020; my translation). Exactly how is not defined. As a GU teacher and coordinator of a master’s course in ESD, I am thus interested in how ESD can be used to contribute to the visions of my employer. The aim of the study is to try to evaluate whether ESD offers the critical perspectives that, according to Kahn (2008, p. 8), are necessary to “adequately deal with the . . . planetary ecological crises”—or whether we should consider to broaden our teaching beyond the confines of ESD to include also other perspectives, such as from ecopedagogy.

The paper is organized in the following way. In the next section, a brief historical background to ESD and ecopedagogy is given. Thereafter, in the third section, the key areas to which Kahn attributed his hopes and qualms for the development of ESD are identified. It is followed by an introduction of the theory on a new spirit of capitalism. In section five, a recent volume on current ESD—Issues and Trends in Education for Sustainable Development, by Leicht, Heiss and Byun (eds., 2018) published by UNESCO—is analyzed and through it, ESD is assessed in the key thematic areas that were identified in Kahn’s critique. The result is thereafter discussed in relation to the theoretical framework, and in a few concluding remarks, I will reflect on the relevance of current ESD for seriously addressing the planetary ecological crisis.

A brief history of ecopedagogy and ESD

The modern environmental movement took shape in the 1960s, alongside other new social movements, protesting and resisting different aspects of modern society. The growing environmental concern had wide effects in many areas and at all levels, and for instance led to the first global UN conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. There, the foundation was laid for Environmental Education (EE), which took firmer form through the Belgrade Charter in 1975 and the Tblisi Declaration in 1977 (McKeown & Hopkins, 2003). Despite aims and efforts to raise awareness around interdependencies between economic, social, political and ecological issues (Leicht et al., 2018, p. 27), an interdisciplinary perspective mostly did not materialize within EE. Partly because of a conservative backlash to EE in the 1980s, it tended to focus on science-based information about ecosystems and conservation (Monroe, 2012). In the eyes of Kahn (2010, p. 7) EE even advanced “outdated, essentialized, and dichotomous views of nature and wilderness.”

Yet later in the 1980s, the Brundtland report Our common future (WCED 1987), famously interlinked environmental, economic and social concerns in the concept sustainable development. Sustainable development stood at the center of The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The summit was a large conjuncture of movements, powerful people and ideas (Warlenius et al., 2015), and also gave impetus to the further developments of both ESD and ecopedagogy. The latter is rooted in the Brazilian educator and liberation theologist Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy, first developed during the 1950s and 1960s. Critical pedagogy focused on social and political emancipation without paying much regard to the environment. But starting in the 1990s, ecopedagogy developed out of this tradition and toward the end of his life, Freire himself worked on a book on ecopedagogy, but he passed away in 1997 before completing it (Kahn, 2010, p. 20).

In Rio 1992, a comprehensive charter—called the Earth Charter—was negotiated. It included writings about education that were “revolutionary,” according to Kahn (2010, p. 13), since they connected environmental, socioeconomic and political problems and demanded profound and integrated responses to the problems. But the Earth Charter and its educational framework was never adopted, not in Rio, and also not in the +10 follow up meeting on sustainable development in Johannesburg in 2002. The critical pedagogy movement developed aspirations around supporting environmental movements as well as initiatives to support the non-adopted Earth Charter. In 1999, a first international forum on ecopedagogy was arranged by the Instituto Paolo Freire, and an Ecopedagogy Charter was formed (Ibid., p. 18). While spread around the globe, the center of the ecopedagogy movement has remained in the global South, and especially in Latin America. Although considering it as a strength, one of the tasks that Kahn is taking on in his book is to develop an ecopedagogy also for the North (Ibid., pp. 20–22), and efforts for continuously developing ecopedagogy are ongoing (Misiaszek, 2020; Norat et al., 2016).

Yet, while ecopedagogy as a movement has remained in the margin, with institutional backing mainly from the Paolo Freire Institutes that exist in several countries (Kahn, 2010, p. 30n21), ESD has been given official status. Agenda 21, adopted in Rio in 1992, had a chapter on education which called for education and training related to all aspects of sustainability, transcending the confinements of EE, and in 1994 Education for Sustainable Development was launched by UNESCO and UNEP in an attempt to integrate environmental, population and development education (Leicht et al., 2018, p. 28). Soon after, a large debate, sometimes referred to as ESDebate (Hesselink et al., 2000), started over whether ESD was substituting EE, was a part of EE, or whether EE rather would become a nuance of ESD (see e.g., McKeown & Hopkins, 2003). Critics, such as Jickling and Wals (2008) did not oppose to ESD because of its broader focus on inequity and North-South relations, but questioned the use of the vague concept of sustainable development and the “homogenizing tendencies” of global policies that seemed to “reduce the conceptual space for self-determination, autonomy, and alternative ways of thinking.” Despite the “ESDebate,” ESD continued to develop alongside EE while “[t]oday EE and ESD have an overlapping and intertwined existence” (Monroe, 2012).

In 2002, the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) was announced, starting in 2005, and UNESCO was assigned its task manager (Jickling & Wals, 2008). During the decade, ESD evolved through several meetings and forums. An important step was taken during the Rio + 20 Sustainable development summit in 2012. It’s outcome document, The future we want, emphasized the importance of education for promoting “a green economy.” Three years later, the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development was adopted. Among its 17 goals—the so-called SDG’s—number 4 aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” One of the targets under the goal is 4.7, which by 2030 calls “all learners [to] acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through Education for Sustainable Development” (UN, 2015, p. 17). Aside from this target, ESD was “mainstreamed” throughout the Agenda 2030 since education of some sort is integrated in all the 17 SDGs (Leicht et al., 2018, p. 30).

After the decade of ESD ended in 2014, a Global Action Plan for ESD for the years 2015 to 2019 was adopted by the UN General Assembly, and in 2019, UNESCO decided on a framework for ESD for the coming ten years, called “Education for Sustainable Development: Toward achieving the SDGs (ESD for 2030)” (UNESCO, 2019). The decision was confirmed in the UN general assembly (UN, 2019). In 2020, UNESCO adopted a Roadmap for the ESD for 2030 framework, and in 2021, the Berlin Declaration on ESD was adopted during a UNESCO World conference on ESD. In a recent critical assessment of these documents (Bylund et al. 2022), ESD for 2030 is considered an “ambitious policy framework” for ESD implementation in the current decade, “in attunement with the United Nations broader agenda for sustainable development, and building on experiences from the Decade and the GAP.” Thus, the framework is regarded as representing a continuity of the already established ESD theories and practice.

Kahn’s qualms and hopes

In his 2008 article Richard Kahn discusses the UN decade of ESD and how crucial it will be in shaping ESD. He mentions a number of potential pitfalls, yet is not entirely despondent over the possibility of ESD becoming a much-needed injection. Kahn quotes González-Gaudiano (2005, p. 248) remark that ESD is a “floating signifier” or “interstitial tactic” and thus still under construction, and which final form will be dependent on the outcome of discursive struggles. Kahn’s (2008, p. 9) main hope lies in that ecopedagogy will be able to influence ESD through “strategic interventions on behalf of the oppressed” and by excluding “neoliberal planners” and their ambitions to “autocratically modernize the world despite the well-known consequential socio-cultural and ecological costs’ from ESD.”

From his article, I have deduced three key themes—influence, pedagogical method and pedagogical content—in which I will compare his qualms and hopes with the actual development of ESD during the decade after Kahn expressed them and up until today.

Influence

In the quote made in the introduction, Kahn expresses a fear that ESD will be “little more than the latest educational fad,” which I interpret as a short-lived phenomenon that will not have a substantial influence over educational praxis before it goes out of flavor. Another, similar, fear is that it will be marginalized, overshadowed by other pedagogical trends and movements. Kahn refers to González-Gaudiano (2005, p. 244) worry that educators that are not directly involved in environmental education “either appear to be uninformed or have shown no interest in the inception of a Decade that concerns their work.” But Kahn (2008, p. 8) also hopes that with injections from ecopedagogy, ESD “could at last move beyond its discursive marginality and a real hope for an ecological and planetary society could be sustained.” Thus, the qualm that ESD will not have a profound and mainstreamed influence over education, in spite of the declared UN decade, is contrasted with the hope that it will be able to transcend its marginalized position. The first theme evaluated will thus regard the future influence of ESD in the overall discourse on sustainable development as well as on hegemonic views on education.

Pedagogical methods

A second theme regards ESD’s development as a pedagogy (here focusing on the form of teaching rather than its content). Kahn refers to Bob Jickling (2005), who feared that ESD would become instrumentalist and deterministic, “merely a method for delivering and propagating expert’s ideas about sustainable development, rather than as a participatory and metacognitive engagement with students over what (if anything) sustainable development even means” (Kahn, 2008, p. 7). Beyond general statements, Kahn does not elaborate very much on the differences between “an instrumentalist” pedagogy and a liberating, ecopedagogical one. This omission can be explained by the fact that his article and book are treating ecopedagogy on a theoretical and abstract level.

Since ecopedagogy is an offspring of Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy, a legitimate way of operationalizing this tension would be to invoke Freire’s famous dichotomy between “the banking method of education” and “problem-posing education” (Freire, 2005 [1970]). The former represents traditional education where the learner is reduced to an empty and passive “banking account” to be filled by the teacher with a narrative that is distanced from the learner’s own experiences and knowledges (Ibid., ch. 2). What Kahn refers to as “instrumentalist and deterministic education” is thus understood as the “banking method.” Freire’s (and supposedly Kahn’s) alternative is called “problem-posing education” (Ibid., pp. 79–86), in which the hierarchical relation between teacher and students is democratized and substituted by dialogue and co-learning, based on the experience, curiosity and needs of the participants. Instead of a passive transmission of knowledge, learning takes place through problem-solving and practical processes of cognition. Thus, I will evaluate what types of pedagogical methods—oppressive or liberating, to use the language of critical pedagogy—that are promoted within ESD.

Pedagogical content

Richard Kahn’s main objective in his article and book is, arguably, to criticize contemporary neoliberal political-economic tendencies within sustainable development. He directs special attention to the “centrist” versions of neoliberalism represented by e. g. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton (which serves as a reminder of that they were written over a decade ago), according to which sustainable development is a “win-win-win for people, business, and the environment” (Kahn, 2008, p. 1) and which are unwilling or unable to see the sometimes conflicting interests of corporations and sustainability. It is time to admit that “our present historical moment is constituted by planetary ecological crisis,” Kahn argues, and the cause of the crisis is systemic, not atomistic: “the current globalization of neoliberal capitalism, which institutes classist, racist, sexist, and speciesist oppression, is a sort of biocidal . . . agent” (Ibid., p. 5).

Kahn’s qualm is that ESD will turn out to be “a pedagogical ‘greenwash’ developed by and for big business-as-usual in the name of combating social and ecological disasters” (Ibid., p. 7). The ecopedagogical alternative to that fear is the fostering of “three varieties of ecoliteracy . . . in the name of a more just, democratic and sustainable planetary civilization: the technical/functional, the cultural, and the critical” (my emphasis, Ibid., p. 9).

In short, technical/functional ecoliteracy encompasses an understanding of “basic scientific ecology, geology, biology and other scientific insights” and also “knowing how societies can affect ecological systems.” It is congruent with what is often called “environmental literacy” (Ibid., p. 9). Cultural ecoliteracy extends the understanding of nature and ecology beyond “Western science” and acknowledges “different epistemological relationships to nature,” such as traditional and indigenous ecological knowledge. Critical ecoliteracy adds a perspective of power and politics. By example, critical ecoliteracy could include an understanding of how colonialism, imperialism, militarism and industrial capitalism have influenced the construction of society and nature. It also incorporates positive dimensions and attempts to “mobilize diverse peoples to engage with culturally appropriate forms of ecological politics and to engage in movement building” (Ibid., p. 11).

Thus, Kahn’s qualms and worries about the development of ESD are many and diverse. In section 5, they will be compared to a recent assessment of ESD and we will get a better idea of how ESD has actually developed. Yet in order to better understand why ESD has evolved the way it has, we might be assisted by a more general theory on how current institutions are likely to react to different forms of critique and see whether that pattern is valid also for our case.

The new spirit of capitalism

In the mid 1990s, the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiapello found themselves perplexed over the “coexistence of a deterioration in the economic and social position of a growing number of people” on the one hand, and “a booming, profoundly restructured capitalism” on the other, while at the same time the level of “social critique” was at an all times low (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005, p. xxxv). It was in many senses the opposite of the situation 20 or 30 years earlier, when capitalism was in crisis, real wages were booming and social critique was “at its zenith, as demonstrated by the events of May 1968” (Ibid.).

In the book Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999; in English as the The New Spirit of Capitalism, 2005) they set out to explain this reversed situation. In doing so, they differed between two sorts of critique; “artistic critique” and “social critique.” Both are critical toward capitalism, but in different ways. Artistic critique draws mainly on two sources of indignation; disenchantment over the inauthenticity of objects and relationships under capitalism, and its oppression or opposition to freedom, autonomy and creativity. Social critique draws on two other sources of criticism; that capitalism creates poverty and inequality, and that it fosters opportunism and egoism that tear down social bonds and solidarity (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005, pp. 37–38). There are certainly examples of when these two types of critique go hand in hand, but Boltanski and Chiapello emphasize the difference between them: “they might find themselves associated,” but are “not directly compatible” (Ibid., p. 39).

In brief, social critique dominated anti-capitalism in earlier stages and was mobilized through strong trade unions and labor parties. They were successful in reducing inequalities, but capitalism was also successful in incorporating and neutralizing this critique through reforms. The result was welfare capitalism.

In May 68 and in the following years the two types of criticisms coincided (at least in France, which is the empirical focus of their book). The first years after the May eruption, the social critique dominated, while from 1975, the artistic critique flourished in the form of “new social movements (feminist, homosexual, ecological and anti-nuclear)” (Ibid., p. 178). In this wave, capitalist exploitation at the level of the firm was reduced to one oppressive institution among others, such as the state, the army and the school. Instead, that capitalism foster alienation, loss of autonomy and oppressive institutions were emphasized (Ibid., p. 170, 178).

Initially, the employers interpreted the crisis in terms of social critique and negotiated higher wages and more social security. But this was unsuccessful in terms of halting the high levels of labor unrest, and also costly in economic terms. The “innovative fractions of the employer class” then started to elaborate on a second strategy, based on an understanding of the crisis as construed by artistic critique (Ibid., p. 177). This critique expressed demands for changes in the hierarchical structures, for which there were no institutionalized forms of negotiation to solve. It first seemed threatening to the order, but in the end, also artistic critique could be neutralized and integrated within capitalism through reforms and a shift in the “spirit” of capitalism. It was not only possible, but according to Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. 168) “it was by recuperating some of the oppositional themes articulated during the May events that capitalism was to disarm critique, regain the initiative, and discover a new dynamism.”

Thus, what signifies the new spirit of capitalism can be summarized as the effective marginalization of social critique and the co-optation of the artistic critique. That capitalism creates poverty and inequality and that it fosters opportunism and egoism was no longer seen as problematic, rather, proponents of such critique were soon regarded as outdated, something of the past. The demands of the artistic critique were instead reformulated in ways that were compatible with and even strengthened capital accumulation. Its demand for autonomy was integrated into new forms of workplace organization which made workers more directly involved in decision making and simultaneously reduced supervision costs; its demand for creativity was recognized (at least for more qualified staff), and it turned out that the “inventiveness, imagination and innovation” of these employees would become a great source of company revenues. Its demand for authenticity and critique of mass-produced, standardized commodities led to their replacement through diversification and customized production; and its demand for liberation from oppressions such as old bourgeois family values and sexual abstinence was soon made into new commodity markets, not the least in sex-related goods and services (Ibid., p. 326).

The theory of a new spirit of capitalism is not directly related neither to sustainable development nor pedagogy, but there are obvious parallels. Both the ecological movement, with its regard of the nature as authentic (Ibid., p. 447), and the critical pedagogy movement, aiming for liberation from oppressive institutions (Ibid., p. 125) are parts of the artistic critique of capitalism. Although Boltanski and Chiapello mainly focus on workplace cultures, their analysis is also applicable on wider, cultural phenomena. In the 6th section I will return to these categories and discuss them in relation to the development of ESD.

Analysis of current ESD

In this section, a fairly recently published and authoritative introduction to and evaluation of ESD published by UNESCO (Issues and trends in Education for Sustainable Development, by Leicht, Heiss and Byun (eds.), 2018) is used as the main source of knowledge on current practices of ESD. This edited volume consists of an introduction and ten chapters written by UNESCO officials, academic researchers and educators. The three editors are all employed by UNESCO. The first part of the book consists of three chapters that describes the background of ESD (Leicht et al., 2018) and its major components and themes (Rieckmann, 2018a, 2018b). The second part consists of seven chapter in which various implementations of ESD are described and discussed. By analyzing this volume rather than independent and/or critical examinations of ESD, I aim to capture the hegemonic discourse of ESD—how some of its main advocates choose to portray ESD—in order to be able to critically evaluate this discourse in the light of the ecopedagogical concerns raised by Kahn and discussed in the third section. It is thus assumed that the volume is a hegemonic expression of ESD; a wider range of sources could have resulted in firmer conclusions.

The book’s chapters were coded. Sections which deal with the three concerns—influence of ESD, pedagogical methods, pedagogical content (divided into technical/functional, cultural, and critical ecoliteracies)—were marked and analyzed together in order to identify the commonalities and nuances that make up the hegemonic claims. Those were described and exemplified through quotes and, when relevant, compared with ecopedagogy. The results of the analysis are summarized in the following.

Influence

As discussed already in the background, ESD has been well integrated into the general sustainable development discourse, through the decade of ESD, its inclusion in Agenda 2030, and the current UNESCO plan “ESD for 2030.” Since ESD is thus likely to continue living for at least the rest of the decade, the fear that ESD would become a short lived “fad” is overruled.

The question remains, however, whether it has had any major influence on mainstream education, generally. There are some evaluations of how ESD is implemented in countries around the world. It turns out that the picture is mixed. In 2013, 68 countries responded to a UNESCO survey on their achievements during the ESD decade. Of those, 21 had integrated ESD into policy and/or curriculums, while 19 had adopted a national ESD strategy (Didham & Ofei-Manu, 2018, p. 88). Also, regional frameworks for promotion of ESD had been set up for Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean (Ibid., p. 93). While, on the one hand, a majority of countries have not done enough to implement ESD, including secured necessary financial resources, the UNESCO report notes that it can take years to implement policy and curricular revisions and that further improvements might be on their way (Ibid., p. 93).

In addition, several interesting cases of how ESD has been implemented are given in the report, including in large countries such as China, Egypt, Japan, and Indonesia. In EU, most member states have reported efforts to include ESD in teacher training, and to use ESD pedagogy in early childhood, primary and secondary education (Ibid., p. 100).

Without going further into details, it is clear that although more efforts certainly remain to be made, Kahn’s qualm that ESD would stay on the margin of education has not materialized. On the other hand, ESD has perhaps not become the vital and decisive injection to environmental education that he was hoping for. At least not yet: the principal aim of the Global Action Program on ESD (2015–2019) was to keep scaling up ESD, both by encouraging the education sector to enable everyone “to contribute to sustainable development,” and by addressing all sectors involved in sustainable development and requesting them to “strengthen education and learning” (Leicht et al., 2018, p. 37). In the subsequent agenda, ESD for 2030, it is concluded that the scaling up has been successful and that it will continue (UNESCO, 2019). If the success is repeated, ESD could be on the route to become an influential driver for a sustainable world.

Pedagogical methods

In recent policy documents from UNESCO and other texts where ESD’s pedagogical methods are discussed and formed, there is a clear and consistent focus on concepts that are associated with critical pedagogy and problem-posing education. ESD’s pedagogy is referred to as “interactive, learner-centered . . . an action-oriented transformative pedagogy, characterized by elements such as self-directed learning, participation and collaboration, problem-orientation” (Rieckmann, 2018a, p. 40). This tendency is framed as a movement from a more instrumental approach promoting certain behaviors (“ESD 1”), to an emancipatory approach focusing on “building capacity to think critical about (and beyond) what experts say” and to test and explore sustainability independently (“ESD 2”) (Ibid., p. 41). This evolvement is also confirmed directly by UNESCO, which Global action program states that ESD ‘promotes skills like critical thinking, understanding complex systems, imagining future scenarios, and making decisions in a participatory and collaborative way” (UNESCO, 2014, p. 33).

Rieckmann (2018a, pp. 44–45) outlines a number of “key competencies” of particular importance for thinking and acting on sustainable development, around which there is “a general agreement within the international ESD discourse.” These include, among others, systems thinking competency and critical thinking competency. When he lists the three “key pedagogical approaches in ESD” (Ibid., p. 49) those comprise of A learner centered approach, Action-oriented learning, and Transformative learning—which all echo the ideas laid out by Freire.

Critical pedagogy is not the only source of inspiration for ESD, however. Rather, it combines more traditional methods for transferring given sets of knowledges with methods for developing the learner’s capacities to engage autonomously with sustainability issues where Freire’s influence is also directly mentioned (Didham & Ofei-Manu, 2018, p. 92). Nonetheless, Kahn’s fear that ESD would turn out as “instrumentalist and deterministic” seems unfounded.

Pedagogical content

Finally, what about Kahn’s qualm that the pedagogical content of ESD would be weak and contribute to “greenwashing” of big business rather than leading the way to true sustainability? The rhetoric of the ESD discourse is clearly different from that of critical pedagogy and critical theory, but anything else would have been surprising; the former is an established part of the UN system and has adopted its lingo, which is quite far from the terminology of Kahn and ecopedagogy, influenced by Marxist humanism and radical ecology. But beyond the rhetoric, what are the main themes addressed in ESD and how do they correspond to the three types of “ecoliteracies” that Kahn was hoping for ESD to include?

After Agenda 2030 was adopted in 2015, ESD has thematically become more closely bound up with its 17 SDG’s. Thus, when Rieckmann (2018b) appoints key themes for ESD, they are all closely related to the SDG’s: climate change, biodiversity, sustainable production and consumption, global justice, disaster risk reduction, and poverty reduction. For each theme, Rieckmann lists a number of learning objectives (LO’s), divided into three categories—Cognitive, Socio-emotional, and Behavioral learning objectives. The cognitive learning objectives largely correspond with the technical/functional ecoliteracy. Within the theme of Climate action, for instance, the cognitive LO’s include an understanding of the greenhouse effect, how human activities change the climate, and “the main ecological, social, cultural and economic consequences of climate change” (Ibid., p. 65). Within biodiversity, the LO’s demand of the learner to understand basic marine ecology and ecosystems along with the threats to the ecosystems (Ibid., p. 71). And so on.

What Kahn refers to as cultural ecoliteracy is less represented within ESD. In this, traditional and indigenous ecological knowledge is emphasized in order to widen the scope beyond a Eurocentric narrative of science. In his 2010 book, Kahn devotes an entire chapter to the postcolonial and feminist critique of western science, juxtaposing it to TEK (traditional ecological knowledge), defined by Berkes (1993, p. 1) as ways of being, wisdom and cultural continuity “acquired over thousands of years of direct human contact with the environment.”

ESD, as represented in the UNESCO report (Leicht et al., 2018), contain very few, if any, traces of such an epistemological or ontological critique of natural science. One example of how indigenous knowledge can inform sustainability practices is described in the report’s chapter 5 (O’Donoghue et al., 2018), which looks at a selection of innovative ESD learning environments. One case describes an ESD project in Mexico aiming at intergenerational transfer of traditional and indigenous knowledges of fishing practices (Ibid., pp. 123–124). It shows that indigenous and traditional ecological practices might be used within ESD in order to foster sustainable behaviors, but it is hardly an example of the kind of ontological dethroning of “Western” science that Kahn intends with cultural ecoliteracy.

This difference between how TEK is used in ESD and ecopedagogy respectively also mirrors how critical perspectives are treated. In ESD praxis, critical thinking is emphasized, but it means something else then what Kahn intends with critical ecoliteracy. Critical thinking in ESD refers to an important part of the scientific method—to question truth claims and “think critically about (and beyond) what experts say,” described as a part of the “ESD 2” pedagogy (Rieckmann, 2018a, p. 41). In the list of key competencies of ESD, critical thinking competency is defined as “the ability to question norms, practices and opinions, reflect on own one’s (sic!) values, perceptions and actions, and take a position in the sustainability discourse” (Ibid., p. 44). While I assume that Kahn would find this kind of critical thinking highly commendable, ESD nonetheless lacks the critical perspectives that is at the center of ecopedagogy. The latter belongs to a tradition of structuralist and materialist critical theory that focuses on power structures and also name these structures. For Kahn (2008, p. 10), this seems to be crucial. In his description of what a critical ecoliteracy should contain, he points to the roles of “colonialism and imperialism,” “industrial capitalism,” “militarism.” When he describes the causes of the current systemic crises, he blames another set of named structures: “neoliberal capitalism, which institutes classist, racist, sexist, and speciesist oppression” (Ibid., p. 5).

That is a striking difference between ecopedagogy and ESD. In the UNESCO report, none of these “isms” are mentioned. The conclusion is that ecopedagogy’s focus on power structures is lacking in ESD, where criticality is a more limited phenomena reserved for singular aspects of modern society rather than modern society as such. When Rieckmann’s (2018a, p. 44) mention “system thinking,” defined as “the ability to . . . analyze complex systems” as a key competency of ESD, this is also far from the system referred to when “system change” is discussed within critical theory.

Critical ecoliteracy should, according to Kahn (2008, p. 11), however not only focus on the negative in criticizing the current, but also on the positive in visualizing and mobilizing for alternatives. ESD is also not alien to political protests. Yet, that there is a tension between ESD and the radical protests envisioned by Kahn becomes obvious in chapter 7 of the UNESCO report (Vallabh, 2018). Here, what the author calls “ESD movements developed by youth” (Ibid., p. 157) are discussed in highly contradictory terms. Vallabh refers to youth-led movements based on “radical system criticism” as being in “discordant harmony” with “the mainstreaming of sustainable development” (Ibid., p 164). She brings up several points of criticism toward such movements, including that they are idealistic, shallow and biased (Ibid, pp. 164–165), unable to upscale their influence and, most remarkable, that they are exclusive toward “others” such as immigrant groups (Ibid., p. 166). To find a cure, Vallabh tries to find a balance between “educating” youths and enable them to shape movements of their own. Her suggestions remind of traditional methods for co-option such as creating “intergenerational dialogues” (Ibid., pp. 168–170).

Thus, within pedagogical content there are large tensions between ESD and ecopedagogy around the meaning of criticality, including also the importance of cultural pluralism. Nonetheless, ESD contains at least some elements of all three ecoliteracies forwarded by Kahn.

Discussion

In this section, I will return to the theory of a new spirit of capitalism and discuss it in relation to the results in the previous section. To reconvene, the new spirit of capitalism is characterized on the one hand by the marginalization of the social critique, with its emphasis on the poverty, inequality, opportunism and egoism that capitalism generates, and on the other hand, by the co-optation of the artistic critique, morphing its critical demands for autonomy, creativity, authenticity and liberation into integral parts of capitalist accumulation. Since ESD has developed within established institutions—UN and national school systems—it should be regarded as part of the wider capitalist culture and thereby, if Boltanski and Chiapello are right, it should exhibit the same characteristics as the new spirit of capitalism at large.

In the previous section, current ESD praxis has been evaluated from the critical perspective of ecopedagogy. Early in the decade of ESD, Richard Kahn (2008) expressed his hopes and qualms regarding the future development of ESD, and here, a follow up report has been attempted in order to see to what extent he was proven right, wrong, or both. Three main themes were identified. Regarding the first—the influence of ESD—I conclude that Kahn’s fear that ESD will be short lived and/or marginalized has been disproved. Integrated into Agenda 2030, institutionally based in UNESCO and with ongoing activities around the world for at least another decade, ESD’s influence is substantial and growing.

According to Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s theory, environmentalism is part of the “artistic critique” that is integrated into the new spirit of capitalism, mainly through green consumerism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005, pp. 447–449). Thus, that ESD is thriving within capitalist institutions does not contradict the theory. It doesn’t, however, offer explanations for the general surge of environmentalism during the last decade, which is related to dynamics that was not entirely visible when the theory was developed in the late 1990s (especially the development of the climate issue that burst in 2006–2007). But the theory can still offer an understanding for how environmentalism, in a surge explained by factors external to the theory, is integrated into current capitalism. The same dynamics as in the green consumerism example have now expanded way beyond the original demands for “organic food” to entire industrial sectors (renewable energy, electronic vehicles, etc.) and to that, we can add new institutions such as carbon trading and climate compensation mechanisms, as well as discourses around “ecological modernization” and “green growth” which all aim to integrate environmental concern into the market mechanism. In that way, the green critique is internalized, and it is not surprising that a phenomenon such as ESD can thrive in the institutions.

The second theme regarded the pedagogical methods, where Kahn’s qualm was that ESD would develop an instrumental pedagogy of one-sided transmission of knowledge and worldviews. Through a framework inspired by Freire’s concepts of “the banking model” versus “problem-posing” education, it was concluded that current ESD has incorporated much of the problem-posing pedagogical methods, even referring directly to Freire’s pedagogy. Again, Kahn’s qualm was disproven. And again, this result is in alignment with the predictions of the theory. Liberating forms of educational praxis is part of the artistic critique’s demand for liberation, that has been integrated and exploited in modern capitalism. Although Boltanski and Chiapello focus on workplaces rather than schools, one of the main tasks of the educational system is to prepare young people for the demands of the labor market. It is therefore only a matter of time before new requirements by employers will spill over to changes in school curriculums. In this sense, the free pedagogies of ESD are only one part of a much broader educational movement away from rigidity, hierarchy and orderliness—a response to the demands from Fordist production models—to curriculums emphasizing creativity and autonomy, which is in alignment with the requirements of the new spirit of capitalism.

Thirdly, the pedagogical content of ESD was evaluated against the three types of ecoliteracies seen as crucial by Kahn: technical/functional, cultural and critical. I conclude that while ESD contains some elements of all these ecoliteracies, there are substantial differences between ESD’s and Kahn’s views on the latter two. That ESD has integrated the technical/functional ecoliteracy is not surprising since it is a mere consequence of the integration of the environmentalist critique discussed above. Indigenous and traditional practices are sometimes taught within ESD, but at least in the evaluation used for this study, such education does not evolve into critical discussions on the hegemonic, scientific pretensions as potentially biased. Further, while “critical thinking” and “systemic thinking” are crucial parts of ESD, problems and shortcomings tend to be regarded as isolated rather than expressions of problematical power structures, such as capitalism, sexism or racism.

This is where the analysis points to the largest divergence between ESD and ecopedagogy, and theory might help explain why. While, as we have seen, representations of the artistic critique are rather easily disarmed and integrated into modern capitalism, critical ecoliteracy contains elements also of social critique, criticizing the poverty, inequality and egoism created by capitalism. According to Kahn (2008, p. 10), ecopedagogy goes beyond ecological concerns in a narrow sense and analyses them in relation to power and politics, to colonialism and imperialism, industrial capitalism and class-divides—areas of economic divisions that belong in the category of social critique rather than artistic critique. This also reveals the vintage of critical (eco)pedagogy: while it is largely an expression of the artistic critique, focusing on oppression and alienation, it was founded in a context of immense social critique and in a sense bridges the two types of critique. While Freire’s pedagogical methods for liberating the oppressed from their oppressors were domesticated and put to use for accumulation, this required a decontextualization of them from the social critique in which they were developed. This context of social critique is also still highly present in texts on critical pedagogy and ecopedagogy, including in those by Kahn. But, as predicted by theory, these aspects have not been transferred to ESD, whose concepts of criticality are much weaker. Demands for (economic and social) justice, redistribution and decommodification are simply hard pills to swallow for the institutions that form ESD—just as predicted by theory.

I have so far not discussed the perhaps more surprising absence of cultural ecoliteracy in current ESD. The new spirit of capitalism is normally capable of integrating cultural diversities into commodity circulation, and is undisturbed by the plurality of epistemologies and ontologies it can imply. Yet although indigenous struggles are partly cultural, and thus expressions of the artistic critique, they are almost always also social. Former colonial states, now liberal and characterized by this new spirit, have no large difficulties in recognizing indigenous people’s cultural rights and even admit historical abuses, but that does not stop indigenous lands from being exploited in the name of (sustainable) development, nor the continued social marginalization and economic deprivation of their inhabitants. Thus, also cultural ecoliteracy carries a profound social critique that might explain its absence in mainstream ESD.

This also serves as an important reminder of that movements and issues can carry both artistic and social critique, and sometimes shift emphasis between them. Thus while generally cultural recognition (artistic critique) has been an easier win than economic redistribution (social critique) under neoliberal capitalism and therefore, movements have been enticed to focus on the former, it seems to me that environmental movements, mainly because of the immense threat of climate change, have started to (re)turn to the opposite pole of social critique: from dissatisfaction over inauthenticity and alienation, resolved largely by individual action in the sphere of consumption, to a questioning of the economic system itself, with its compulsion to grow and pollute and its reinforcing of inequalities, demanding political and institutional solutions rather than marked-based. This is visible in the strong and emerging discourses of both degrowth (e. g. Kallis, 2018, Hickel, 2020) and green new deal (e. g. Klein, 2019, Aronoff et al., 2019) which both, although in different ways, emphasize that grand political and economic shifts, way beyond individual life-style changes, are necessary to deal with climate change.

In parallel, there are some discussions on whether ESD, in its current institutional setting, can cater a social-ecological critique of capitalism. For instance, Bylund et al. (2022) complains that the ESD for 2030 framework is “detached from broader economic structures and realities on the ground,” and they miss in it the tools with which the transformation designated as necessary can be crafted. Meanwhile Huckle and Wals (2015) call for a transformative, global education for sustainability citizenship explicitly inspired by ecopedagogy. They are not optimistic about the prospects of UNESCO promoting it since it is ruled by “the most powerful states” whose interests “are closely aligned with those of global capital.” Yet, after a re-reading of the policy documents of EE adopted in the 1970s, they conclude that these were much more “explicit . . . when referring to the global economic and political order and the need for change” (Ibid.), indicating that also the policy regime of ESD could become more transformational and “social” in another political climate, given other balances of power, than in the current neo-neoliberal.

If this observation is correct, Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s categorization of ecology as an artistic critique will need to be reevaluated since ecology has become the center of radical, transformative discourses, and I suggest that what might be called a social-ecological critique of capitalism is integrated in their framework. Further, unless ESD is able to incorporate more of the cultural and critical ecopedagogies recommended by Kahn, ecopedagogy will become even more of a crucial complement for educators of sustainable development.

Summary and conclusions

In this paper, the institutional and practical development of ESD has been sketched and compared to what ecopedagogue Richard Kahn feared and hoped more than a decade ago. In brief, I concluded that Kahn’s first fear, that ESD would be short lived and/or marginalized, has been disproved. His second fear, that ESD would develop an instrumental pedagogy of one-sided transmission of knowledge, comparable to Freire’s “banking model” of education, was also disproven. The development of the pedagogical content of ESD—divided into technical/functional, cultural and critical ecoliteracies—has not met Kahn’s hopes, however. Much of ESD seems to be limited to general environmental literacy (technical/functional) while cultural and critical perspectives, necessary for comprehending the ecological crisis in its entirety, according to Kahn, are underdeveloped or absent.

To better understand why some ecoliteracies are prevalent while others have languished in current ESD, Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s theory of a new spirit of capitalism was applied on the result. According to the theory, contemporary capitalism tends to disarm, integrate, and prosper from “artistic critique” of capitalism, which draws on disenchantment over the inauthenticity of objects and relationships, and oppression to freedom, autonomy and creativity, while simultaneously marginalizing the “social critique” of capitalism that draws on the poverty and inequality, opportunism and egoism generated by capitalism. Since ESD is shaped mainly within major institutions of current capitalism (the UN and nation educational systems) it was assumed that ESD would exhibit similar patterns of integrating artistic critique and marginalizing social critique. In the theoretical discussion I argued that such a pattern was manifest and that the absence in ESD of cultural and critical perspectives can be related to the social critique inherent in them.

What would, then, Kahn’s final judgment over ESD’s development be, more than a decade after he wrote his article in 2008? Perhaps as slightly better than expected, but not good enough to “actually deal with the . . . planetary ecological crises.” ESD educators have thus good reasons to continue to use inspiration and material from mainstream ESD in their teaching, but in order to evoke an understanding of the systemic foundations and the cultural and social roots of problems such as climate change, it could be complemented with the critical perspectives of e.g., ecopedagogy.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the insightful comments on the manuscript provided by the colleagues Anders Burman (School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, GU), Helena Pedersen (Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies, GU), Arwid Lund (Library and Information Science, Södertörn University) and teachers and students at the Pedagogical Development and Interactive Learning at GU. I also want to thank two anonymous reviewers for valuable input. For remaining flaws, I take full responsibility. The research was done entirely within the author’s employment at GU.