Policy Futures in Education, Volume 3, Number 3, 2005
In the Name of Environmental Education:
words and things in the complex territory of
education–environment–development relations
JOSÉ ANTONIO CARIDE GÓMEZ
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
ABSTRACT The proclamation of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development by
the United Nations has placed education in general, and environmental education in
particular, at the front of a future full of important and uncertain meanings. On the one
hand, those inviting a conceptual, theoretical and praxiological revision of the education–
environment–development relationship appeal to the role of education in the construction
of ‘sustainability’ and lifestyles that will make it possible. On the other hand, there are those
that anticipate new and different readings of the environmental educative task. They range
from the questioning of its historic entity and identity (more than 30 years of initiatives,
plans and programmes across the world) to the firm demand for its proposals to provide an
‘education’ that is essential for the renewal of human action and thought. The article
subscribes to the latter position, arguing in favour of the necessity of an environmental
education that does not contradict itself, neither in its critical-reflexive discourses nor in its
emancipative practices, as a fundamental pillar of any development that aims at being
‘human’ and ‘sustainable’ from a pedagogical, ecological and social point of view.
But perhaps it is time to give a name at last to that image which appears in the depths of the
mirror and which the painter is contemplating in front of the picture. Perhaps it would be
better, once and for all, to determine the identities of all the figures presented or indicated
here, so as to avoid embroiling ourselves forever in those vague, rather abstract
designations, so constantly prone to misunderstanding and duplication. (Foucault, 1984,
p. 18)
Between Two Decades: from environmental
education to education for sustainable development
In The Order of Things, a book that was born from the reading of a text by Jorge Luis Borges (El
idioma analítico de John Wilkins, included in the volume Otras inquisiciones (Borges, 1952), Michel
Foucault ([1970] 1994, p. 9) makes an effort to bring into light the epistemological domain where
knowledge sinks its roots into the order of the world – knowledge that is sometimes subjected to
vicissitudes which do not always reflect its rational value, or its objective forms. It was clear for the
French ‘archaeologist’: knowledge, and the words used to name and transmit it, ends up by
building a story not of a growing perfection, but of conditions of possibility.
Choosing one kind of knowledge instead of another, or wondering about the reason why some
statements come out and are consolidated while others are excluded and weakened, are also
elements which constitute reality, describing and interpreting it, defining and embodying it,
registering and inventing it, with different methodological and theoretical arts. The huge
elaborating capacity of language can never be obviated because the fundamental codes of cultures –
the ones that manage their mental schemes, their values, their techniques, the hierarchy of their
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practices – and of the many concretions that those cultures adopt in speech and empiric orders
remit back to that language. Those cultures will be related to and will recognize themselves within
these orders. Not being the only ones, or even the best, these orders have a tendency to
confrontation and debate, to disagreement and rupture, to victories and defeats in the complex
scene of the ‘resemblances and signals’ that we make human, creating discomforts which are
difficult to overcome. This is due to the fact that they secretly weaken the language and its
representation of reality.
To Foucault, opposite the comfort provided by utopias (‘although they have no real locality
there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up
cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the
road to them is chimerical’), the heterotopias are disturbing ‘because they make it impossible to
name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax in
advance and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences ... words and things’. While
utopias permit fables and speeches, and even some journey towards what is thought to be desirable
and feasible, heterotopias ‘desiccate speech, stop words in their traces, contest the very possibility of
grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences’
(Foucault, 1984, p. 3).
In the complex territory of education–environment–development relations, the environmental
education begun by the utopia locating its principles and objectives within the frame of the
solutions to be adopted in order to face the crisis caused by the growing severity of environmental
problems, which, basically, have their origins in the way we live and develop, and, in addition,
mortgage the future of the planet and its ecosystem, has increased the existing inequalities among
people and countries by feeding the wealth and welfare of some in the face of the poverty and
discomfort of many others.
Not being a completely new issue, as Ulf Carlsson (1998), head of the UN Environmental
Education and Training Programme’s office, admitted, because the knowledge and skills that allow
for interaction with the environment had always been an essential support for survival,
environmental education centred most of the efforts destined to foster a change of course in the
human conscience and behaviour. This was not only with the aim of solving the existing problems,
but also with a strategic vision to prevent new problems from arising. This was a task that,
according to one of the first Heads of the UNESCO Environmental Education Programme,
Professor W.B. Stapp, could only be completed if we defined and established ‘some education
programmes centred on the causes of the environmental crisis, and not only on the symptoms’
(Stapp, 1978, p. 542). In addition, we should get the population interested in these questions by
activating the theoretic and practical skills that may provide an answer to those problems.
Environmental education has become ‘a world referent in the formal educative systems,
associations, university and the environment management administrations’ (Calvo, 2004, p. 55)
with the contribution of several organisms and programmes of international importance, such as
UNESCO, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the
European Environmental Education Network (EEEN). As time goes by, environmental education
has not been able to avoid its own identity crisis, driving us into the heterotopia that brings with it
the so-called ‘education for sustainable development’. No doubt, it is a different vision of education
with which to walk into the first decades of the third millennium; but it is also, inevitably, a way of
closing some doors that environmental education tried to open before.
Being on the threshold of that passage, valuing – both with facts and words – the relevance of
this environmental education makes even more sense nowadays than it ever did. With a double
perspective:
• On the one hand, related to the past, it signifies a recognition of a trajectory where, in spite of
the plurality of its approaches and practices, environmental education has played an important
role in the search for ‘other’ developments of education, individuals and their socioenvironmental context; a task in which, as Daniel Vidart put it, the environmental-education
duty had ‘the virtue – or the imprudence – to summon a complete sequence of ancient, modern
and contemporary problems related to the “be” and the “must be” of the educative act in a
world society suffering from a deep and persistent crisis’ (Vidart, 1978, p. 513). It was a ‘new
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style of education’, integral and integrating both in its conceptions and methodologies, in which
the role of environmental knowledge and of pedagogical practice assumed the necessity of a
qualitative improvement in the ways of educating and being educated, of teaching and learning,
of cultivating oneself and socializing, looking forward to horizons which might be more
understanding and dialoguing with the realities where life is located (Caride & Meira, 2001).
• On the other hand, related to the future, environmental education should suppose a critical
reading of the ‘sustainability’ to which the new wave of development models adhere – in
particular, from the moment the expression ‘sustainable development’ installed itself in the
proposals that the United Nations (UN) started to put forward in the early 1980s. The World
Strategy for the Conservation of Nature that the IUCN presented in 1980 and the report Our Common
Future elaborated by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), also
called the Brundtland Report, will contribute in a decisive way to broadcasting the UN
proposals. All the events – on a local, regional, national and international scale – organized in
previous years to illustrate the paths to follow will also contribute to that aim. Examples of such
events are the world conferences held in Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002.
Within this context, in spite of the controversies that cause the images of ‘sustainable development’
and the politics of sustenance which protect it – what has been constantly referred to as empty
concepts, big boxes filled with nothing, no more than a simple desideratum where nobody is
allowed to disagree, even if it is an ‘epistemologically incorrect qualifier’ (Rivas, 1997, p. 47) –
everything suggests that we are obliged to live in times when these expressions will be the
backbone of a new planetary reality, beginning from a minimum consensus: try to satisfy the
necessities of today’s generation without endangering the capacity of future generations to satisfy
their own necessities.
Education, just like what has happened with other socio-political and economic practices, has
also joined the strategies of sustainable development, being identified as a collateral element in all
its processes and achievements. It has been pointed out as such in the declarations and
recommendations that have been formulated since the early 1990s: in Chapter 36 of Agenda 21,
which was passed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also
known as the Earth Summit (Rio, 1992), or later in the final document of the international
conference on ‘Environment and Society: education and public awareness for sustainability’, held
in Thessaloniki, Greece, from 8 to 12 December 1997, where it is literally stated that ‘understanding
education in favour of sustainability as a contribution to the politically alphabetized society is
essential to the re-elaboration of education’ (UNESCO, 1997, p. 28).
Once again, words, and with them the acts they anticipate, will play an important role in this
redefinition, firstly by giving this education a really explicit normative and practical sense as
‘education for ... sustainability, sustainable development, a supportable future or society’, and
secondly, by making its objectives and lines of action guide the priorities of a whole decade: the
period between 2005 and 2014 was proclaimed the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable
Development at the 57th UN General Assembly held in December 2002. In this resolution,
UNESCO was designated as the organism responsible for the promotion of the Decade, together
with the responsibilities it already assumed in two other important programmes: Education for All
and the UN Decade of Alphabetization. These three programmes will have to strengthen each
other in order to achieve the objectives of the development of the millennium, objectives in which
education and sustainability are two basic pillars.
In the Draft International Implementation Scheme for the Decade of Education for Sustainable
Development (Arima et al, 2004), the environmental perspectives and the protection of the
environment present a worrying indifference towards environmental education, which they try to
move away from in their concepts and practices, even when it is stated that the efforts to
understand the interdependence and the fragility of the systems which support life on earth and the
capital of natural resources which are indispensable to humankind must be located in the centre of
education for sustainable development. Thus, the reconciliation of Man with nature, giving an
important role to education in its achievement, will return to the close-up of the socio-political
impulses of modernity, in its ‘post’ version, with the aim of clarifying and understanding the
multiple and troublesome impacts that the ecological crisis has on the natural and social
ecosystems.
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The same organisms that promoted and consolidated environmental education in previous
years now participate in their demolition and abandonment in favour of ‘education for sustainable
development’. These organisms fostered environmental education by showing it as one of the most
coherent and suggestive processes to face the challenges of the future, even to the point of valuing
it as the most important tool to create conscience and change lifestyles to help save an
environment in constant deterioration.
Unlike ‘education for sustainable development’, constantly legitimized by its supposed
prospective vision that is in harmony with values and worries that concern us in a direct way (the
fostering of health, intercultural understanding, peace, gender equality, the reduction of poverty,
rural transformation, human rights, production and consumption, information and communication
technologies, etc.), environmental education is unfairly presented as a field of failed tests: an
attempt from the past which has not been able to overcome the confusion around the problems
and the directions to follow, with a heavy academic load, reductionist in its conception of the
environment and the educative practices it fostered, etc. All of this, implicitly or explicitly, is
destined to question its competence and effectiveness to conquer the objectives initially proclaimed
in the International Programme on Environmental Education (1975) – awareness, knowledge and
skills acquisition, change in attitudes, valuation capacity and social participation – whose aims and
characteristics were adopted and reinforced at the Tbilisi Conference (1977) and the Moscow
Congress (1987). The recommendations of these conferences will be incorporated in the
environmental and education policies of many countries, with the support of most of the
international agencies that promote initiatives related to education and the environment.
Suffice to say that the decade 1990-2000 was declared the World Decade of Environmental
Education at the International Congress on Environmental Education and Training held in
Moscow from 17 to 21 August 1987, with the aim – among others – of approving an international
strategy related to environmental education and training for the 1990s. This event had its
continuity, or even better its counterpoint, in December 2002 with the proclamation, as has already
been mentioned, of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.
Nevertheless, the fact that we consider as unfair and unjustified some of the valuations made
about the achievements and failures of environmental education – valuations magnified by the
impulses supporting its reconversion, integration and/or substitution by an ‘education for sustainable
development’ – does not prevent us from admitting that it is, and it has been, environmental
education whose fulfilments are far from being on a level with the expectations and results it
announces. This is also the case with many ‘other’ educations (intercultural, civic, health, peace,
gender equality) with which we try to provide an answer to the complex and changing social
realities. Thus, in the eighth point of the IV Iberoamerican Congress on Environmental Education,
held in Havana, Cuba, from 13 May to 6 June 2003, this circumstance was admitted, pointing out
how:
in recent years intense doubts about the orientations and future development of
environmental education programmes have emerged, which has set into motion important
processes of change both in their basic orientations and in the ways to implement them.
Opposite to those doubts, another approach has been that of assimilating Environmental
Education inside the emergent field of Education for Sustainable Development. (IV
Congreso Iberoamericano de Educación Ambiental, 2003)
It can be said that, due to its own limitations or the resistance that many of its practices generate,
environmental education has not always been able to avoid the problems – and from them, the
challenges – which caused its birth and progressive consolidation as a way to face the imbalances
(ecological, social, moral, etc.) that are inherent to development, with the consequences that this
has in the the adoption of given lifestyles, of some guides of production and consumption, of
mobilization of politics and processes destined to satisfy everybody’s needs with justice and equity,
helping to achieve a minimum level in welfare and quality of life.
On this matter, the consensus achieved by countries and entities with completely different
interests with regard to education for sustainable development cannot and must not ignore the
contributions of environmental education to human development, either by itself or together with
any other alternatives trying to widen the educative potential of society and the different options
derived from it in order to make a better everyday life and socio-environmental circumstances
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where this life takes place. There are two reasons, at least, which guarantee that this might and
must be so.
The first reason is the fact that education for sustainable or supportable development neither
recreates nor replaces environmental education, hard as the new discursive configuration may try,
as is shown by the solid lines of argumentation made by Drs González-Gaudiano and Meira Cartea
(in this issue). Anyway, apart from any other interpretations, the desirable point is that each of
them should keep their own identity details. On doing this, their potential options for convergence
and interaction must not cause subordination or dependence of the one on the other. They answer
to different motivations conceptually, epistemologically and strategically, even if they agree in the
diagnosis and prognosis of the critical starting circumstances – the degradation of life on earth – and
the educative approaches needed to face them. The report managed by Jacques Delors (1996)
specified these approaches, mentioning the important role education must play in order for
humankind to progress towards ideals of peace, freedom, democracy and social justice, to the
service of a more harmonious human development, from which we can fight against poverty,
exclusion, oppressions, wars or discriminations, whatever their appearances might be.
The second reason is because environmental education is and needs to be an education whose
pedagogical and social practices aspire to go beyond any imaginable development, as ‘sustainable’
or ‘supportable’ as it might be, because its determination must be much deeper and much more
involved: educating to change society, trying to get more and better conditions of perdurability,
fairness and social justice (Caride & Meira, 2001). The ambition of this purpose was endorsed by
documents emanating from the International Forum of Non-Governmental Organizations and
Social Movements, also known as the Global Forum. Its celebration at the same time as the
governmental Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 allowed the Forum to declare, without
beating about the bush, that environmental education must be understood as a political act based
on values which promote social transformation, in agreement with the ecological ethics that needs
the construction of a human development which might be, among other things and in spite of its
ambiguities, sustainable. Its treaty on Environmental Education for Sustainable Societies and
Global Responsibility is recognized as one of the first attempts to provide a social, political and
ethical framework for environmental education around the proposals of sustainable development,
just as it is expounded in the Delegates’ Resolution of the IV Iberoamerican Congress on
Environmental Education, held in Havana.
An Environmental Education with a Historic Entity and Identity,
Critical and Reflexive, with its Own Conceptions and Practices
In contrast to the models of development that we know and that have been experienced by
humankind throughout history, which are based on short-term economic exploitation and the
selfish message of unlimited growth, environmental education will admit, in this sense, that the
options of sustainable or supportable development will be included in its strategic horizons as far as
its itineraries, in the current socio-historic circumstances, allow us to understand this
environmental education as an educative practice with an intense political and civic content, in a
completely different ethic, moral, cultural and structural context. This acceptance presupposes a
change of paradigm in the set of values and predominant lifestyles, and in our society (Ortega &
Mínguez, 2003).
In the ‘documental elements’ entitled ‘Educating for a Better Environment’ compiled by the
quarterly educational magazine Perspectivas, Professor Peter J. Fensham assured that from 1972,
‘the activities known as environmental education in the international frame had made a
considerable progress’. He contrasted their starting points – ‘in 1974, just in a few countries this
concept had been sufficiently accepted, or there was coordination enough of the programmes so as
to present national reports about the situation on the subject’ – with the achievements in late 1977,
when, due to the celebration of the Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education in
Tbilisi, Georgia, ‘more than thirty countries had compiled official national reports on their
dispositives and programmes on Environmental Education’. In his opinion, this was a count that,
by then, was ‘a minimum indication of what the UNESCO and UNEP Programme had promoted
and conquered in the international frame’ (Fensham, 1978, p. 492).
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Twenty years later, Ulf Carlsson admitted that ‘the development of the reflections on
environmental education has not been as fast as the progress of other issues on environment’ (1998,
p. 20). Carlsson evaluated the initiatives carried out, reflecting that at the moment when the
International Programme for Environmental Education (IPEE) – which has now disappeared, but
was a programme that was thought to be ‘the biggest and most important programme on
environmental education of the world’ – was launched and established ‘the nature and philosophy
of environmental education, this type of education headed an educative reform put into practice
through a holistic and integrating scheme’ (1998, p. 20). With its contributions and those promoted
by other environmental sciences, Carlsson – from his privileged position at the UN Environmental
Education and Training Programme’s office – recognized that there had been a considerable
advance in the understanding of the environmental problem within a wider point of view, together
with an extension in the limits of its resolution, because at that time ‘environment’ had a broader
perspective. In his opinion, even though it was ‘difficult to measure the impact on conscience in
general ... it is inferred it has been significant, raising conscience on all levels in most of the
countries around the world’ (1998, p. 20).
Much of this coincides with the reflections expressed by the Delegates’ Resolution of the IV
Iberoamerican Congress on Environmental Education, held in Havana in 2003, when it was
recognized that:
Environmental Education has had a continuous evolutive and strengthening process, being
the most widely non-disciplinary field spread by now in all the countries of the world, and
one of the first ones to be considered as a general educative need for all of the inhabitants of
the world. The orientations and basic approaches of Environmental Education were
consolidated in a sequence of international events that from the mid 1970s provided that
Environmental Education with a solid conceptual and methodological base. (IV Congreso
Iberoamericano de Educación Ambiental, 2003)
This has not prevented, in recent years, the appearance of internal ‘strong questionings about the
orientations and future development of environmental education programmes, a fact that has set
into motion important processes of change both in its basic orientations and the ways to
implement it’ (IV Congreso Iberoamericano de Educación Ambiental, 2003).
As is known, in this evolution, environmental education takes different circumstances as a
frame of reference, circumstances that explain its beginning as a dimension of integral and global
education of people and social collectives see Figure 1), by means of which we learn to think and
act according to new principles and values. Environmental education has also been able to involve
an extensive list of institutional and social agents, with three main aims:
1. To make, from a holistic and interdisciplinary point of view, the comprehension of the complex
interaction existing between societies and the environment easier, favouring a better and bigger
knowledge of the ecological, economic, social and cultural processes where they are settled. In
order to achieve this, it refers back to a critical analysis of the socio-environmental problems
and its relations to lifestyles, models of management and everyday life, both in its local
community dimension and other territorial and social scopes.
2. To foster a compromise between citizenship and the processes of social, cultural and economic
change which are necessary for the achievement of a human sustainable development, with
values, attitudes and aptitudes which may allow every person to have his/her own criteria, both
in his/her relations to other people and to the environment.
3. To promote competences and skills for action, in the individual and collective frames, with a
special emphasis on citizens’ participation in decision making and all the initiatives which may
lead to an economically feasible, ecologically appropriate, socially fair, culturally equitable
alternative development (Gutiérrez, 1994).
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Figure 1. Frames of reference in the origin and evolution of environmental education.
In an attempt to fulfil these aims, environmental education has meaningfully enriched its semantic
and conceptual profiles (Breiting, 1994; Novo, 1995; González-Gaudiano, 1997): the epistemological
and theoretical reflection to which its schools of thought are assigned cartographically (Sauvé,
2005); the lines of investigation opened in recent years by methodologies (Sauvé, 1999, 2000;
Benayas et al, 2003; Barroso et al, 2004); and environmental education policies and strategies with
international, national, regional or local scope in several social realities and contexts. It must be
added that there has been a substantial increase in documental sources and resources (Meira, 1998),
in environmental education equipment, in training programmes in universities and other levels of
the education system, just as there has been an increase in meetings, assemblies, conferences, etc.,
summoned in the name of environmental education all over the world, which are quite often
highly sensitive to the inherited or emergent problems (globalization, poverty, biodiversity,
peaceful coexistence, sustainable tourism, fragile landscapes, etc.) that require ‘new proposals for
action’ (Xunta de Galicia & UNESCO, 2001).
All of these things, in some way, constitute the most visible exponents of an environmental
education whose realities and perspectives (see Figure 2), beyond words, have grown in their
practical and discursive entity and identity within the complex territory of education–
environment–development relations. And, broadly speaking, they have been backed by a relative
consensus on their most relevant principles and acts. Environmental education is considered to be,
among other things:
• An alternative line in the way of educating and being educated in the postmodern society of
knowledge and information. The idea needs to be deepened of an integral and permanent
education whose practices can be carried out in several social spaces and times and not
exclusively in school institutions. The multiple potentials derived from the association between
the process of learning and the life cycle are highlighted because they provide each individual –
from his/her childhood to his/her old age – with the capacity to direct his/her own destiny, and
they also offer the means to achieve a better balance between his/her needs and the
opportunities to learn (to know, learn, live together and be).
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• The creator and promoter of new approaches and strategies in the education–environment–
development dialogue (Caride & Meira, 2001), which reveals the social and ecological
contradictions that make the current development model unbearable, perpetuating conditions of
social inequality and injustice; reorientates the satisfaction of basic needs and the social,
economic and cultural indicators that define the quality of life; re-elaborates the objectives, the
contents and the social organization of work and the productive processes with social and
environmental criteria; articulates an alternative value frame, centred on redistributive equity
and solidarity so as to share the environmental loads and benefits; favours processes of
communitarian development that may exemplify sustainable social models, which are used as
experience to make the global connections between ecology and the subjacent model of society
more comprehensible.
• An inspiration for new pedagogic methods and content, a fact which will allow the development
of knowledges and aptitudes that might be meaningful for a transdisciplinary, complex and
globalized understanding of the environment and of the different factors and processes (physicalnatural, socio-economic and cultural) that define it – not only with the aim of a diagnosis, but
also with the objective of fulfilling acts that may allow us to foresee or resolve socioenvironmental problems in local, regional, national and international arenas.
• The generator of solidary initiatives and shared responsibilities, both from a diachronic and
synchronic perspective, in the present and the past. Every individual from each generation has to
participate in these initiatives. The expression ‘sustainability’ has, in this context, a special and
symbolic value as it means an opening towards new interpretations of the compromises of
humankind and the obligations of humankind to itself and to the environment, guaranteeing
civic and ecological rights. In this sense, the particpation and the social dialogue in a context of
peace, democracy and its liberties are inexcusable supports to advance in the cohesion and social
integration, fighting poverty and the inequalities that limit or prevent the achievement of
generalized human welfare.
• A type of education that enables new ethics, with a biocentric character, through which it might
be plausible, as Ortega & Mínguez (2003, p. 278) put it, to ‘restor[e] the ecological damage
caused and preserve, in the future, the conditions of life of all the ecosystems, thinking not only
of the survival of humankind but also of the moral duty of looking at and treating in a different
way the rest of living creatures’. It deals with working in favour of integral ethics, demanding,
with principles, values and attitudes on which the construction of a planetary moral conscience
might be settled, with emphasis on the prominence of people as moral subjects whose individual
autonomy and self-realization must be appropriate to the achievement of more and better
human development for everyone.
Figure 2. Environmental education: realities and perspectives.
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Nevertheless, it Can and Must Be an Environmental
Education for Sustainable Human Development
Within these coordinates of the future and the past, environmental education must meet
‘sustainable development’, claiming its own space in what has been and must be an educative
practice with a critical and strategic vocation, coherent with alternatives that may renew human
action and thought, constructing where it is feasible and deconstructing where it is necessary the
controversial and ambiguous, but still incredibly powerful, semantic constellation with its epicentre
on the word ‘development’ (Esteva, 2000). This is a concept which Edgar Morin would say is:
master, evident, empiric (measurable according to the growth rates of industrial production,
of the elevation of the level of life, usually used in order to describe the situation of the
world and each country), suggestive and rich in meanings at the same time, which allow a
reflection on the evolution of societies and the progress of human virtues. But also ... a dark,
uncertain, mythological and poor concept which at the same time as it consummates a
cultural model of bourgeois civilization, it undermines and disintegrates it ... it acts for and
thanks to the expansion of a masculine, adult, bourgeois and white model of humanity, it
provokes a multiple reaction that not only questions the control of that model but also the
value of the aforementioned model. (Morin, 1995, p. 396)
In these and other discourses on development, we notice that we are faced with a problem with a
long historic background, although it has several shades (Caride, 2001) from which it is possible to
analyze or promote a variety of events, such as the metamorphosis of capitalism, the fight of the
countries in the Third World to achieve decolonization, the search for new balances in North–
South relations or the spreading of human rights to everyone regardless of an individual’s social
condition and origin. All these aspects permit us to accommodate the use of the word
‘development’ to conflicting interests, such as those defended by the International Monetary Fund
or the World Bank, non-governmental organizations, churches and multinationals, the UN and
autocratic states, the Right and the Left, the elites and the grass-roots movements.
Any development is capable of these interpretations. The fact that when it is typified as
‘sustainable’ it has ‘implicit[ly] the semantic contradiction that a development cannot be, by
definition, sustainable’ (Morey, 1997, p. 33), is added to these interpretations. It is not easy to
overcome its contradictions, either in its words or in its facts, in a political, institutional, academic,
scientific and cultural context that uses and abuses the expression without many objections.
Consequently, set against other possibilities, we will be able to admit the humanity of the concept,
as far as it is shown in its essentially plural (as a development of everything and everyone) and
mainly human (of the subjects and not the objects, even if it integrates both) dimensions. It is a
form of development, we will say, that takes place if we:
understand that most of the issues proposed in its speeches will only be made definite in the
horizon of a society that may admit the possibility of a radical transformation. And this, with
the broad conviction that the human and the social are unquestionable dimensions and they
are transverse to any concept or model that might defend it. To put it with some emphasis:
the development will be human (both in the personal and the social) or won’t be. (Caride,
2001, p. 22)
Furthermore, we cannot avoid the idea that any education is for something; no doubt for
development, too (of people, of communities, of societies, of cultures, of the economy, of
institutions, etc.). In any case, it will always be preferable that an education be for that which is
identified as sustainable.
Consequently, in spite of the lack of a universal model of education for sustainable
development, it will always be preferable that this education includes sustainability as one of its
guiding principles than if it does not, taking on the responsibility of creating a future that might be
feasible and long lasting. It must be done, nevertheless, by all types of education that diversify and
expand the opportunities to educate and be educated in our societies. Among them, and together
with others (which vindicate themselves in the name of peace, international understanding,
interculturality, gender equality, democracy, etc., inside and outside the education system), we can
find environmental education.
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Education–Environment–Development Relations
I think that given the extent of what is being said and done (even further, of what will be said
and done during the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development), it is the best destiny
for environmental education: the one that makes compatible the will that education – all types of
education – may play a part in the supportable development of socio-environmental backgrounds,
without invalidating or diminishing the capacity its several conceptions and practices have – I
mention this particularly with regard to environmental education – in order to make considerable
contributions to that achievement. The complexity and global reach of the ecological problems,
together with the globalization of the economic space and the homogenization of cultural
guidelines, requires this procedure. We have to return to Foucault, although only to avoid
ambiguities and confusions that complicate us to the infinite in abstract and floating disquisitions,
as will be the case if we only look into the generalities, ambiguities and lack of precision of an
‘education for sustainable development’. the organisms promoting this education, among them
UNESCO, literally admit that ‘there is no universal model’; that ‘every country must define its own
priorities and ways of participation’; that ‘it is related to other programmes and concerns of education’; or
that ‘it is not a new programme but an invitation to have a second thought about our educative politics, our
programmes and our pedagogic practices’ (UNESCO. Available at: http://unesco.org/education/desd
[emphasis added]).
In the presence of the uncertainty hovering over its future, critically establishing the identities
we have already constructed, apart from being an act of historic justice – in this case for
environmental education, with its programmes and strategies, with the people and institutions that
have made it possible – represents one of the most solid, sensible and consequent means of moving
forward in its fulfilment, in favour of an education for development with broad intentions: a fair,
equitable, solidary, integral, communitarian sustainable development. This education must not
contradict itself, either in its critical-reflexive purposes or in its emancipatory practices (Caride,
2005). The fact that this could be done in the name of environmental education and that we can
and must contribute to sustainable development from its conceptions and practices is a requisite –
especially if this demand is inscribed within the complex and complicated relations that education,
development and environmental realities establish with each other.
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JOSÉ ANTONIO CARIDE GÓMEZ, Ph.D., is holder of the Extraordinary Award in Sciences of
Education at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he is senior lecturer in social
pedagogy in the Department of Theory and History of Education in the Faculty of Sciences of
Education. He has been a visiting professor in several European and Latin American universities.
His teaching and research work is well known through a number of books and articles related to
environmental education and sustainable development, social education, cultural policies, and
community development, education and society in Galicia. He has been president of the
Iberoamerican Society of Social Pedagogy since 2002. Correspondence: José Antonio Caride Gómez,
Professor of Social Pedagogy, Department of Theory of Education, History of Education and Social
Pedagogy, Faculty of Sciences of Education, University of Santiago of Compostela, campus sur.
15782 – Santiago of Compostela (A Coruña), Spain ([email protected]).
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