Environmental/sustainability education in a global context: Stories of political and disciplinary resistances

For around 50 years – since the first United Nation Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, and before that in the 1970 IUCN definition of environmental education and the 1970 US Environmental Education Act – education has been seen as having a key role in achieving environmental targets. Indeed, for many years environmental education was seen by many as being more about nature conservation education than education for “the environment in its totality - natural and built, technological and social (economic, political, technological, cultural-historical, moral, aesthetic)”, as had been spelt out so clearly in the 1977 Tbilisi Declaration. More recent manifestations in agenda that bring together environment and development concerns with a social dimension, such as The Future We Want, the report of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, and the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have seen a diminishing of concerns about environmental protection and a rise in concerns about social issues (ending poverty is the first SDG goal). While not denying that environmental protection will not be achieved while people are going hungry and living in poverty, the changes in the arguments warrant interrogation. This chapter will critically examine the evolution of the fields known as environmental/sustainability education over the past 50 years in terms of their changing conceptualizations and prioritization in a variety of international contexts. It will also focus on the curriculum and disciplinary tensions and the political interventions that have changed the shape of the field during this period.