Editorial: A Search for Conjunctions at a Time of Direction-setting Review and Synthesis

Abstract

This journal reflects a diversity of environment and sustainability education research and viewpoints alongside two synthesis papers. Read as a whole and within a widely held ideal that diversity reflects resilience, the environment and education for sustainable development landscape in Africa might be said to be healthy and proliferating. But read against the pressure to produce tangible evidence of change on an African landscape of persistent climate variation and poverty, along with a widening gap between rich and poor, the picture remains challenging. These contrasting readings are notable at a time when we are looking towards the Association
for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) Triennial in February, 2012, the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012 and our own EEASA +30 conference in September 2012. The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development is characterised by a proliferation of education imperatives. These emerged as modern education in response to the issues of the day and now a modernity in deepening crisis. The scope of the change is notable in a UNESCO teacher education module that is today called Global Climate Change Learning for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2012). Here, education to address global risk is re-inscribed as learning
to mitigate the impact of climate change alongside adaptive learning to change. In the lead-up to Rio+20 there is also an emphasis on learning as transition to a ‘green economy’ or for a ‘green society’. The subtle differences in terms here are provoking as much intense debate as did the advent of education for sustainable development (ESD) over a decade ago. The diversity in this journal challenges us to have a closer look at the ideals that shape and steer a globalising modernity. Here education, as emergent systems of reason, is orientated to shape citizens so as to mitigate risk that is being produced by the growth-orientated engine
room of the modernist project, an issue that still remains relatively untouched by educative practice