The world is facing urgent challenges, including climate change, loss of biodiversity, environmental degradation, huge inequalities and endemic poverty. The United Nations 2030 Agenda constitutes a concerted effort by the global community to meet these challenges and in this context education for sustainable development (ESD) has become increasingly recognized as a political priority. In a series of consecutive global initiatives, UNESCO and partners have accordingly promoted the worldwide implementation of ESD, most recently in the ESD for 2030 framework. A recurrent message in the discourse that surrounds these initiatives is that ESD unites humanity in a common pursuit towards a more just and sustainable world. However, while this cosmopolitan message is noble, it also raises questions. How is the idea of human unity in ESD discourse reconciled with the fact that the world is terribly unequal? How is the global ESD enterprise pursued on a planet that is deeply divided socio-economically? These are pertinent and highly topical questions that have been largely overlooked in discussions about ESD and the present paper addresses this scarcity.

The presented paper is a draft article for a forthcoming review symposium issue in Environmental Education Research (EER) in which the findings of our recent book Education for Sustainable Development in an Unequal World: Biopolitics, Differentiation and Affirmative Alternatives (Knutsson et al, 2024), will be debated. The presented paper, which will be opening the review symposium issue, has two interrelated aims.

The first aim is to summarize the main findings and arguments of the book. The book explores how ESD is unpacked in different socio-economic contexts around the world and how inequality is managed in these processes.  Drawing on biopolitical theory and extensive data from different socio-economic contexts across the globe, the book offers a rich account of how the educational quest for sustainable development plays out in an unequal world and how wealthy and poor populations are separated on biopolitical grounds.    

The second aim of the paper is to propose future research directions amid the global biopolitical divide explored in the book. That is to map out a few areas of research that require further attention and which the book did not manage to fully explore or thoroughly develop. Hopefully, these suggested research directions can serve to inform future scholarly endeavours of relevance to global ESD practice.

As indicated above, the paper summarizes the main findings from our recent book which, in turn, builds on a four-year research project funded by the Swedish Research Council. The book develops a comparative biopolitical approach, informed by Foucauldian theory of biopolitics (Foucault, 1998, 2004, 2008) and comparative case study (CCS) methodology (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017; Vavrus & Bartlett, 2023). A biopolitical perspective places focus on how life, at the level of populations, is made governable, while the comparative approach enables the analysis of how different categories of populations are governed, and what responsibilities and lifestyles that are assigned to them, as ESD is enacted around the world. Our comparative biopolitical approach encompasses three analytical dimensions: biopolitical rationalities, biopolitical techniques and biopolitical ‘effects’. In accordance with the CCS methodology, ESD activities were explored between and across sites and scales, including global, national and local level. The material is extensive and comprises semi-structured interviews with individuals and groups, ethnographic observations, as well as policy documents, reports, newsletters, websites, blogposts, video clips, and learning material. Interviews were conducted with close to 200 informants, including teachers, students, principals, policymakers, government officials, IGOs, INGOs, NGOs, and expert consultants. Four countries, representing different socio-economic categories in accordance with World Bank (2024) definitions, were selected for original fieldwork: Sweden (high-income country), South Africa (upper middle-income country) and Rwanda and Uganda (low-income countries). To broaden the empirical terrain beyond these four selected countries, we further explored a range of ESD initiatives in different socio-economic settings in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, ‘at a distance’ through UNESCO documents, newsletters, blogposts, and websites. What emerges when comparing between and tracing across these different settings, and approaching the material through a biopolitical lens, is a significant global pattern in how rich and poor populations are educated for sustainable development.

Our findings reveal how ESD is adjusted to different socio-economic living conditions, and how different roles are assigned to rich and poor in the global ESD enterprise. In low-income settings, people are trained for a lifestyle marked by subsistence and petty entrepreneurialism, allowing them to address tangible sustainability problems in their immediate physical surroundings and make the most of the limited resources available. Populations in high-income settings, on the other hand, are educated within the parameters of a mass consumer lifestyle, addressing abstract sustainability problems and operating with a set of entitlements whereby preferences, choice, and even pleasure become mobilized as governing techniques. The implication of this depoliticized sensitivity to local ‘realities’, without consideration to their interrelations, is that inequality becomes accommodated, normalized and arguably even (re)produced. Furthermore, while ESD has been criticized for excluding the poor and for being insensitive to context, our findings rather point to the dubious ways that poor people are included, and to the problematic ways contextual difference is recognized, in the global ESD enterprise. Ultimately, a few areas of future research are suggested. One is the racialized dimensions of ESD. We propose that postcolonial and biopolitical theory are read together to deepen our understanding of current inequalities and the ubiquitous colonial imaginary that it is poor people that are uncapable of living sustainably. Another area concerns the reconciliation of democratic and biopolitical elements in ESD. While democratic practices are often foregrounded in ESD initiatives they simultaneously tend to become governmentalized and subsumed to ecological imperatives. More knowledge about this inherent tension is needed. A third area is didactic and concerns the possibility of developing ESD practices capable of transcending the pervasive categories that constitute the biopolitical divide. This is hardly a straightforward enterprise but a no less important one.

Bartlett, L. & Vavrus, F. (2017) Rethinking Case Study Research: A Comparative Approach. New York: Routledge Foucault, M. (1998) The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin Books Foucault, M. (2004) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1978-1979, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knutsson, B., Bylund, L., Hellberg, S. & Lindberg, J. (2024) Education for Sustainable Development in an Unequal World: Biopolitics, Differentiation and Affirmative Alternatives. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Vavrus, F. and Bartlett, L. (2023) Doing Comparative Case Studies: New Designs and Directions, New York: Routledge World Bank (2024) World Bank Country and Lending Groups. Retrieved from: https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups