Today's global society is characterized by overlapping and ongoing crises, including wars, pandemics, climate crisis, flight and migration; all these crises contribute to increasing social diversity Education plays a critical role in addressing these challenges—many of which are exacerbated by the "sustainable unsustainability" (Blühdorn 2020) of the Global North—by fostering new approaches for a "sustainable future" (UNESCO 2005: 6) and "societal transformation" (ibid.). A core objective of education, as articulated in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.7, is to ensure that “all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development” (UN 2015: 17). Achieving this goal requires educational opportunities and participatory structures that empower individuals from all backgrounds for the “Great Transformation” (WBGU 2011). This task has given rise to numerous educational concepts such as sustainable education, planetary well-being, global citizenship education and global learning. Although all of these concepts aim to promote fundamental change, they are based on different traditions of thought and are therefore critically examined from each other's perspectives. Building on these critical discourses, this paper explores whether - and under what conceptual and theoretical implications - social diversity and the widely contested concept of 'Education for Sustainable Development' (ESD) can be linked and leveraged to shape a sustainable global society. The paper is divided into four sections: After a brief introduction, it critically examines key concepts at the intersection of education and sustainability, highlighting their differences and commonalities (section 1). Section 2 focuses on pedagogical approaches in the context of flight and migration, highlighting the role of non-Western epistemologies (Garcia-Arias et al., 20-23) and the 'unlearning' of unsustainable knowledge systems (Boström et al., 2018). Drawing on Head et al. (2019, 2021), this paper asks how and under what theoretical assumptions migrant societies (Mecheril et al., 2010) can "learn from their newer members" (Head et al., 2019: 441). The main part of this paper brings together these strands of discourse, focusing on the often criticized concept of ESD and recent concepts of intercultural education (section 3). Hereby I will point to common pedagogical paradigms between ESD and newer intercultural approaches based on the concept of “competencylessness” (Mecheril 2013), and outline pedagogical starting points for overcoming the permacrisis based on empirical findings (Pusch 2023 and 2024). The paper concludes with a short summary and outlook (section 4).

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