During the last two decades, the role of “community” has gained increasing significance in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) discourse. For example, UNESCO’s current global ESE policy framework, ESD for 2030, states that “meaningful transformation and transformative actions for sustainable development are most likely to take place in the community” and that it is “at the community level, where learners and people make their choices for sustainable development and act upon them” (UNESCO, 2020, p. 34). The promise of community is also evident in numerous scholarly studies focused on ESE, with a steady increase in community-oriented research over the past two decades (Aguilar, 2018). These studies explore diverse topics, including community farming (Ruiz-Mallén et al., 2022), youth in underserved communities (Ellington & Prado, 2024), and community-level environmental literacy (Gibson et al., 2024). Although diverse, these studies, in one way or another, foreground community as a promising arena and generally view it as an essential component for achieving sustainability in ESE. But is the idea of community as the most promising arena for transformation warranted? Is it really the best bet for achieving sustainable development?

Taking a starting point in a four-year research project that explored and compared how ESE is enacted in high- and low-income contexts across the globe, this study offers a different perspective. Our research findings within the project confirm that the prominent role attributed to community in ESE policy and scholarship is also strongly reflected in the enactment of local ESE initiatives. Where we differ is in what we make of this. In contrast to previous studies, a key insight from our research, we suggest, is that a community focus in ESE divides as much as it unites and that there is every reason to approach the concept of community with caution. Drawing on biopolitical theory, this study thus aims to problematize the assumption that community represents the most promising level for transformation toward sustainability. This is done by framing community as a biopolitical governing device that allows for differentiation between communities, and by bringing our research findings into conversation with the arguments of two prominent contemporary philosophers of biopolitics.

In biopolitical theory (e.g., Foucault, 1998, 2008; Lemke, 2011; Miller & Rose, 2008), community assumes a particular meaning: as a "zone of government" and a mechanism through which governance is exercised (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 88f). In the context of the global enactment of ESE, this implies that "community" functions as a tool for governing schools and other ESE actors, encouraging their engagement in community-based sustainability initiatives. Furthermore, it enables differentiation between diverse communities based on their living conditions and lifestyles. Rather than fostering social cohesion, community becomes a means of enabling differentiation and plurality. This reflects what Miller and Rose (2008) describe as a reconfiguration of the political landscape, in which the notion of "society" and ideas of national social cohesion have increasingly given way to "community" as a more fragmented and localized framework for governing both individual and collective life.

We argue that it is through this differentiation that community ESE becomes problematic—at least if one agrees that populations in affluent and impoverished communities should not be assigned completely different roles and lifestyles in the quest for sustainability. For ESE to be enacted in a just and equitable way, the positive assumptions about the potential of community ESE need to be critically scrutinized, and the ways in which the concept of community is deployed in ESE must be further problematized.

The research project that the study takes its starting point in involved a range of methods including analysis of ESE policies and program texts, interviews with policy actors and NGO representatives, and in-depth fieldwork, including interviews with principals, teachers and students in 35 schools across different socio-economic contexts in countries with different income levels. The material—consisting of nearly 200 interview transcripts, websites, printed materials, and policies—was carefully analyzed using a comparative biopolitical approach developed within the project. This approached involved exploring the biopolitical rationalities and techniques used in global enactment of ESD, and the ‘effects’ in terms of sustainable subjectivities that theses intervention produced. The data was compared and analyzed using a vertical and horizontal comparative case study approach developed by Bartlett and Vavrus (2017). The research findings from the project have been published in six peer-reviewed articles, one PhD dissertation and a peer reviewed monograph. To problematize community ESE and to bring our research findings in conversation with contemporary biopolitical philosophy, we adopted a three-step approach. First, we returned to our previous research and materials, revisiting sections that dealt with community engagement in ESE. This reading allowed us to summarize and gain an overview of our findings while deepening our understanding of some of the key "problems" we had previously identified in relation to community ESE. Next, to gain further insights and develop new conceptions of the concept and meanings of community, we turned to philosophical works by scholars who have written extensively on biopolitics and community. We selected the works of two influential scholars: Roberto Esposito (2004, 2008, 2011, 2013), known for his work on communitas and immunitas, and Giorgio Agamben (1993, 1998), recognized for his concepts of bare life and the coming community. These works were chosen due to their significant influence on scholarly discussions about biopolitics and their engagement with the notion of community. This part of the process involved iterative reading, mutual reflection, and discussion. Finally, we brought our research findings into dialogue with the works of Esposito and Agamben through reflection and the drafting of texts. These drafts were reviewed by ourselves and colleagues, leading to revisions and further reviews. The process as a whole provided new insights into how community within ESE can be understood, as well as the challenges and future possibilities emerging from our reading of these philosophical works.

Our findings from the research project reveal stark contrasts in how ESE is enacted in low- and high-income communities. In low-income communities, ESE initiatives focuses on basic survival, promoting self-reliance, subsistence living, and small-scale entrepreneurship to address immediate community challenges. In contrast, high-income learners are taught within the framework of an affluent mass-consumption lifestyles, emphasizing responsible consumption, moderate lifestyle changes, and global awareness, often addressing abstract issues like carbon emissions and ecological footprints. While community plays a central role in all ESE initiatives, it presents an inherent tension between unity and division. On one hand, learners globally are invited to join a collective educational quest for sustainability. On the other, they are divided by socio-economic status, with different tasks and responsibilities assigned to populations based on their living conditions. How can we then understand this tension between unity and division in community-oriented ESE and the unequal ways it unfolds in practice? When placing our findings in dialogue with contemporary biopolitical scholarship, two key arguments emerge. The first suggests the paradoxical possibility that community, within sustainability education, has transmuted into what Esposito describes as its opposite: an autoimmunity dispositif that repels as much as it unites. The second, effectively inverting Agamben’s famous notion of the inclusive exclusion of bare life, posits that humanity is invited as members of a global community of sustainability education—but on terms so unequal that it becomes more accurate to speak of exclusionary inclusion. These two inversions, though distinct, underscore the need to think carefully and critically about community in the context of ESE.

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