VET as it is known today emerged primarily as a mechanism in support of fossil capital (Malm, 2016), and consequently still by-and-large reflects the modernization and industrialization political ideologies and development paradigms of the fossil capital era. More recently, VET is being shaped by neo-liberalism and its particular political ideology and development paradigm, which aligns with the ‘big data’ economy or fourth industrial revolution.
The recently proclaimed 2015 sustainable development agenda, points to the need for a massive transformation in the political ideologies and development paradigms that have shaped VET to date. The UNEP 2011 Foresight Report focusing on critical issues for the 21stcentury, identifies the relevance of skills and skills development paradigms as the second most critical issue in orienting towards a more sustainable world, arguing for “updating educational institutions” to better meet educational needs for global change and sustainable development, noting that this will “requirea variety of new capabilities, in particular new job skills, modes of learning, management approaches and research efforts”. However current sustainability initiatives within VET remains more at the level greening institutions or to add discrete new modules or programmes such as photovoltaic installation. There is hence a need for a VET model that takes equity and environmental sustainability objectives into account, and which questions normative ideas of production that are central to VET framing. Such a model involves a wider framing of economy, beyond the dominant productivist, growth and market-based model, it introduces sustainable production and consumption, and far-reaching feminist de-growth and other ecological economics concepts (Bauhardt, 2014) for shaping work and learning, and VET systems. There is an urgency associated with the development of such an orientation (Fien et al. 2013; Pavlova, 2014), given the current risk of earth system tipping points (Steffen et al. 2018).
In this paper we further the work of Anderson, 2008, McGrath, 2012, Lotz-Sisitka and Ramsarup, 2020), who argue that that VET discourses focus on the productive elements of work and neglects the reproductive aspects of work. A sustainability lens on VET will introduce a regenerative dimension of work (drawing from Raworth 2017). This re-purposing of the work focus within the VET system will need a focus on the ontological dimensions of work but also on the ontological dimensions of jobs, occupations, qualifications, curriculum, institutions and subjects (Lotz-Sisitka and Ramsarup, 2020). This analysis will allow the research to elevate the regenerative dimensions of work in society and within VET systems.

The continuities of Cartesian dualistic thinking that drives the split between nature and culture, and the macro-micro divide in educational policy and practice produces dualism in the system and fails to produce a more integrative framing for just transitions within VET. Our research hence addresses the question of VET system transformation via laminated system analysis.

The research is conceptual and works towards the development of a methodology that can allows political economy to meet political ecology (Lotz-Sisitka and Ramsarup, 2020) to deepen analysis to transformative VET systems. This can well be used for empirical investigations at different levels of the VET system. In this paper, we synthesise the research insights from the VET4 project and from the broader work of the Greenskills project in South Africa through a laminated analysis. The laminated system that we draw on is based on the work of critical realist philosopher Bhaskar (2016) who argued for a “relational conception of the subject matter of social science” grounded in a non-reductionist account of generative tendencies, structures and mechanisms, and the conditions under which structures can be transformed via agency involving the ontologically constituted dialectic of absence and emergence. Bhaskar (2016) argues that such mechanisms operate at different levels of scale, and an adequate analysis should therefore take the different levels of scale into account for generative dialectical change. These are: 1) the sub-individual and 2) biographical level(s) where motives, and reasons for action operate (e.g. the motives and knowledge of VET lecturers); 3) the micro level (e.g. interactions at VET college level with students, communities, partners etc.); the 4) meso level (e.g. relations between functional roles such as capitalist and worker, or college and curriculum and standards development institutions); the 5) macro-level (e.g. the functioning of the national economy); the 6) mega-level (e.g. trajectories of whole traditions or formations e.g. modernist production paradigms); and 7) the planetary level (e.g. the impacts of climate change). The laminated system model helps to overcome the macro-micro dualism of niche level innovations vs policy level innovations, and addresses the need for including considerations of the geo-history of humanity in VET thinking and praxis. We point to a need for emergence practices at other levels of the system for internal coherence in building a new orientation to VET that will take sustainability principles and concerns into account, pointing to future potential transformative praxis pathways.

The paper hence contributes an immanent critique of the work focus within the VET systems from a sustainability perspective. Its identifies significant absences at different levels of the laminated VET system (e.g. absence of lecturer training and support for introducing sustainability at biographical level, absence of sustainability curriculum innovation practices and forums at institutional levels, absence of integration of sustainability at policy levels at meso level, and absence of greening of work principles at meso and mega level (amongst others). The paper therefore presents an ontologically grounded laminated system that models how a sustainability-oriented paradigm for VET can be operationalized to align with the national and international commitments to the sustainable development goals aimed at addressing the planetary challenges associated with global changes.

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