{"id":39,"date":"2009-06-28T18:05:47","date_gmt":"2009-06-28T17:05:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=39"},"modified":"2009-06-28T18:05:47","modified_gmt":"2009-06-28T17:05:47","slug":"the-un-esd-decade-half-way-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2009\/06\/28\/the-un-esd-decade-half-way-there\/","title":{"rendered":"The UN ESD Decade \u2013 half way there"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">For three days at the end of March, 900+ people assembled in Bonn for the mid-Decade review.<span>\u00a0\u00a0This brief<\/span><\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">\u00a0<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">comment is<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">\u00a0<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">partial\u00a0<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">-\u00a0<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">in at least two senses.<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">1. EFA and ESD<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">If you log onto the UNESCO Education\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/portal.unesco.org\/education\/en\/ev.php-URL_ID=48712&amp;URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&amp;URL_SECTION=201.html\">homepage<\/a>\u00a0you will see that\u00a0<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">UNESCO's top priority is\u00a0<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">\u201c<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">Education for All (EFA) by 2015\u201d<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">, and that there\u2019s no mention of ESD.<span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>This mantra was repeated in Bonn, with EFA seen as a precondition for sustainable development.<span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>This is puzzling, assuming that climate scientists\u2019 data interpretation is correct, unless UNESCO doesn\u2019t really think that ESD can make a difference.<span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">With 75 million children not getting a primary education and with 800 million illiterate adults, EFA is crucial, but why can\u2019t ESD be an equal priority?<span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Stressing\u00a0both\u00a0EFA and ESD, and linking them as twin priorities, makes sense (to me at least), but I\u2019m not caught up in\u00a0<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">UNESCO<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">\u00a0education turf wars.<span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">2. The conference organizers went on about their need for feedback on reports and documents, but then provided very small amounts of discussion time.\u00a0<\/span><span><span>\u00a0<\/span>I was left with a sense of unfulfilled possibility, and a feeling that so little had been achieved by so many.<span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Given all the work\u00a0being done\u00a0across the world in the name of ESD, it is a great pity that\u00a0<\/span><span>delegates were not helped to come to more of a critical understanding of what was being achieved.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">3. Two issues were stressed that seem worth reiterating:<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">If it is to be useful, ESD has to be contextually sensitive and contingent, with any tendency to universalise it being resisted \u2013 and whilst ESD will have different drivers and emphases depending on socio-economic and environmental priorities, it seems inescapable that this must apply within countries as well as between them.<span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>For me, this also means that the question \u2018what has the ESD that we\u2019re doing,\u00a0here\u00a0and\u00a0now, contributing to sustainable development?\u2019 needs to be asked continually.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">Whilst movements and activities such as development education and environmental education can have a key and continuing part to play within that matrix of activity we call ESD, this is no good reason to invent new ones: climate change education springs to mind.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For three days at the end of March, 900+ people assembled in Bonn for the mid-Decade review.\u00a0\u00a0This brief\u00a0comment is\u00a0partial\u00a0-\u00a0in at least two senses. 1. EFA and ESD If you log onto the UNESCO Education\u00a0homepage\u00a0you will see that\u00a0UNESCO's top priority is\u00a0\u201cEducation...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}