Globalisation and education for sustainable development: exploring the global in motion

Abstract

The article explores education for sustainable development (ESD) as a policy concept in different spaces and how it is re-articulated as part of a process of globalisation. The objective is to explore empirically an alternative set of logics in order to conceive of this process of globalisation. With this objective in mind, the article investigates articulations of ESD and sustainable development in Vietnamese and Thai policy-making, and reflects upon how these articulations can be seen to relate to globalisation. In so doing, it addresses concerns about the globalising potential of ESD within the field of environmental education research, and aims to open up for an alternative understanding of the processes associated with the rearticulation of ESD in different national education policy settings. The alternative conception that is put forward promotes an understanding of these re-articulations of ESD as contingent, opening up a space for contestation and counter-hegemonic articulations.

Keywords:

• globalization
• globalisation
• policy
• logic
• ESD
• Vietnam
• Thailand

Notes

1. Logics are not used to refer to the logical foundation of a language, but rather to the types of relationships between entities of a particular language, as a form of life, where these types render possible the operation of a language as a system. Logics thereby deal with the properties of entities within language games as part of a language as a system of rules (Laclau 2000, 284).

2. Being is here understood as discursively constituted, that is to say the temporary result of discursive practice. Its being is, by extension, interpreted to be relative to specific formations in the discursive, that is to say in relation to context.

3. Representation in the form of articulation requires that certain relational differences be articulated to give meaning to a signifier. In the case that a signifier is articulated without any differentiation it loses all meaning. Even empty signifiers bear the mark of such a need for differentiation. Sustainable development, for example, needs to distance itself from something, e.g. unsustainable development.