Sustainable development is central to the European project. The Presidency Report on the 2009 Review of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS) notes,inter alia:

"The SDS constitutes a long-term vision and an overarching policy framework providing guidance for all EU policies and strategies and including a global dimension, with a time frame of up to 2050. By tackling long-term trends it serves as an early warning instrument and a policy driver to bring about necessary reform and short-term policy action.

"The challenge lies in ensuring that the SDS has a real influence on EU policies, including other cross-cutting EU strategies, to ensure coherence between short and long-term objectives and between different sectors. In particular, the Commission is invited to continue to analyse and to propose appropriate measures to enhance the links and synergies between the SDS andthe EU 2020 strategy. Furthermore, the Commission is invited to integrate sustainability objectives in its 5-year work programmes and in future EU budgetary proposals."

This paper draws on ongoing philosophical and empirical studies to explore the particular educational significance of a focus on the long term and on European and global geographical scales.  Specifically, these studies include: (1) Research in the philosophy of education into the inter-relationship of education, nature and society, drawing on interdisciplinary evidence and considering the long term. (2) Research in English primary schools using an environmental education model developed in Denmark and Sweden, and having possible international applicability. (3) Research conducted in Palestine focusing on the educational significance of freshwater resources, and of sense-of-place. (4) Research in rural Nepal on the possible significance of European educational approaches for long term sustainable development that seeks to retain traditional environmental and spiritual values.

The significance for conceptualisations of sustainable development of temporal and geographical scale was first elaborated by the ecologist C.S.Holling (1995), pointing out that actions found beneficial at shorter or restricted scales may be damaging at a larger and longer scale, and vice versa.  However, the greatest single contribution to our understanding of the significance of scale - and of temporal scale in particular - predates the notion of sustainable development, and is found in the work of the great French historian Fernand Braudel. The significance of this oeuvre has been developed within the philosophy of education by Andrew Stables.

This paper represents the latest phase in work that has, over the last thirteen years, focused on understanding education (broadly defined) as a means of managing medium-to-long term change at the intersection of social, economic and environmental variables.  The approach taken combines a realist ontology with a relativist epistemology.  It is consistent with a tradition of pragmatist philosophy that has been influential both within the philosophy of education, and within the tradition of institutional economics.  It takes critical account of recent work in social policy (Room, 2011), philosophy (Scruton, 2012) and natural history (Wilson, 2012).  The paper is informed by data gathered through ongoing research in the international settings described above.

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