Sustainable Society and Environmental Education: future perspectives and demands for the educational system

This paper provides an overview of the OECD (CERI) programme on ‘Environment and School Initatives’ (ENSI). It describes the emergence and development of an ecologically‐driven agenda for school change, and its rationale, within a shifting policy‐context in which the environmental concerns of the public are being increasingly acknowledged. The programme can be interpreted as a policy response to public concerns. However, ENSI's agenda, the author argues, radically differs from a school improvement agenda based on economistic assumptions. The idea of ‘sustainable development’ as an education policy goal is examined in the light of these two agendas and found to carry ambiguous meanings. ENSI's agenda is concerned with transforming existing structures and processes of schooling to enable students to play an active role in shaping an ecologically sustainable social and economic order. The school improvement agenda is dominated by concerns about the economic performativity of individuals in society. It only appears to imply a ‘fine‐tuning’ of the traditional structures and processes of schooling rather than any radical transformation. The paper identifies conflicting trends within contemporary education policy contexts that carry very different conceptions of envimomental education for ‘sustainable development’. The author argues that in this situation there is a danger that the ENSI network will lose sight of its radical agenda and fail to sustain its previous momentum.