Conflicts of interest: an indispensable element of education for sustainable development

A central concept introduced in the Nordic debate on sustainable development is ‘action competence’. The concept has been defined as a competence of learners, i.e. the ability to take into consideration the social factors and human conflicts of interest that lies behind environmental questions and sustainable development. The concern of this article is the role of such conflicts for making meaning in relation to sustainable development. With this aim, we analyze a series of interviews with seven high school students. Our analysis takes its point of departure in the works of Dewey and Wittgenstein. It shows that the dialogue partners in this study continuously put one another in the position of having to make communicative choices in the dialogue. Moreover, the choices facing these dialogue partners can be translated into human conflicts of interest of a broader kind. A conclusion we draw from our work is that value judgments dealing with human conflicts of interest are a foundation upon which the dialogue on sustainable development is constructed, and that they seem to be a prerequisite if the dialogue is not to come to a standstill. We discuss the consequences of this finding for education for sustainable development.