Education for Sustainable Development in the Postcolonial World

Towards a Transformative Agenda for Africa

Leon Tikly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351812399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) lies at the heart of global, regional and national policy agendas, with the goal of achieving socially and environmentally just development through the provision of inclusive, equitable quality education for all. Realising this potential on the African continent, however, calls for radical transformation of policy and practice. Developing a transformative agenda requires taking account of the 'learning crisis' in schools, the inequitable access to a good quality education, the historical role of education and training in supporting unsustainable development, and the enormous challenges involved in complex system change.

In the African continent, sustainable development entails eradicating poverty and inequality, supporting economically sustainable livelihoods within planetary boundaries, and averting environmental catastrophe, as well as dealing with health pandemics and security threats. In addressing these challenges, the book:

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• explores the meaning of ESD for Africa in the context of the 'postcolonial condition'

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• critically discusses the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as regional development agendas

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• draws on a wealth of research evidence and examples from across the continent

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• engages with contemporary debates about the skills, competencies and capabilities required for sustainable development, including decolonising the curriculum and transforming teaching and learning relationships

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• sets out a transformative agenda for policy-makers, practitioners, NGOs, social movements and other stakeholders based on principles of social and environmental justice.

Education for Sustainable Development in the Postcolonial World is an essential read for anyone with an interest in education and socially and environmentally just development in Africa.

1 Setting the scene

Introduction

This book is about education for sustainable development (ESD) in Africa. It seems a timely juncture at which to write such a book. More than half a century after the euphoria following independence from colonial rule and despite the fact that the continent is blessed with immense natural and human resources as well as great cultural and ecological diversity, it continues to face enormous and apparently intractable challenges of unsustainable development that range from coping with the effects of deep-rooted poverty and inequality to climate change. The advent of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as of regional development agendas such as the African Union’s Agenda 2063 has provided new impetus to tackle Africa’s problems and to embark on new pathways of sustainable development. Education is centrally implicated in these agendas as demonstrated by the launch in 2015 of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa by the African Union. Yet many learners are still excluded from access to a good-quality education and training at all levels of the system. The upshot is that the continent faces a shortage of the skills and competencies required for realising sustainable development.

Africa is a particularly significant region from which to consider the opportunities and challenges for low-income, postcolonial countries in implementing ESD given the enduring colonial legacy, its position in relation to the global economy and politics, and the extent of the sustainability challenges it faces. Thus, whilst the focus of the book is on sub-Saharan Africa, it is hoped that the analysis developed will have a wider resonance for considering ESD in other low-income, postcolonial settings. The aim of this introductory chapter is to provide some background context for the remainder of the book. It will start by presenting an overview of global and regional agendas that impact on education whilst the second part of the chapter will outline the aims and main arguments developed in the remainder of the book. The chapter will commence, however, by introducing the reader to some of the key concepts that inform the book and will be developed in later chapters.

The ‘postcolonial condition’

It is worth summarising briefly what is meant by the term ‘postcolonialism’ and the ‘postcolonial condition’ in the context of this book (for a fuller account, see Tikly 1999, 2001, 2004; Crossley and Tikly 2004; Hickling-Hudson, Mathews, and Woods 2004; Rizvi 2007; Rizvi, Lingard, and Lavia 2006; Rizvi and Lingard 2006; Coloma 2009; Takayama, Sriprakash, and Connell 2017; Shizha and Makuvaza 2017). With its origins in the work of scholars such as Edward Said, Gyatouri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and others, postcolonialism is often understood as a ‘critical idiom’ through which to consider issues of development.

Postcolonial analysis has been applied in diverse ways in the field of international and comparative education, although it is possible to identify some central themes that run through the scholarship. These include a recognition of the importance of the colonial legacy in understanding global and regional education policy. In the context of the present book, it will be argued that much of what will be described as ‘unsustainable development’ on the continent, including the persistence of extractive economic practices, the patrimonial nature of the postcolonial state, the many forms of social inequality, and the marginalisation of African cultures and languages, have their origins in the colonial period, although they have been exacerbated under contemporary globalisation. Education systems, it will be suggested, have been instrumental in reproducing many of these dynamics and that key features of modern education systems, including their elitist nature, the Eurocentric and content-driven nature of the curriculum, the prevalence of teacher-centred pedagogy, the neglect and marginalisation of African languages, and indigenous knowledge, are complicit in this process. The identification of the postcolonial condition is not intended, therefore, to imply that colonialism is ‘over’ in a temporal sense. This is to acknowledge not only that some countries continue to experience ‘direct’ forms of colonisation but also that the dominance of the former colonising powers continues to manifest in new forms of what Nkrumah initially described as ‘neo-colonialism’ and that has elsewhere been understood as the ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey 2003; Tikly 2004).

Secondly, analysis of the postcolonial condition involves appreciation of Africa’s position in relation to processes of contemporary globalisation and this is the focus of Chapters 3–6. Thirdly, like much Marxist, feminist, queer, and other kinds of critical scholarship, postcolonial analysis is also intended to give voice to those groups who have been historically marginalised in economic, political and cultural terms. As will be suggested in Chapter 2, this involves understanding the co-evolution of intersecting ‘regimes of inequality’. In particular, this will involve consideration of inequalities based on class, gender, race, ethnicity, and urban/rural location. In this regard, postcolonial scholarship builds on and takes forward the ideas of many generations of anti-colonial activists on the continent both in the context of anti-colonial struggles and subsequently. Many of these such as Nelson Mandela, Stephen Biko, Julius Nyerere, Walter Rodney, and others wrote a lot about colonial education, as will be discussed in Chapter 5.

This is significant because these critical scholars were not simply content with providing an abstract analysis of injustices involved in colonial education but were also deeply committed to identifying solutions in the context of struggles for national liberation. It is in this spirit that the present book seeks to not only analyse the nature of education for unsustainable development but also to propose how education systems in Africa can be transformed to support a vision of sustainable development linked to the idea of social and environmental justice. This vision will be set out in Chapter 7. In developing the analysis of the postcolonial condition, however, the book parts company with some of the more overtly poststructuralist emphasis within much recent postcolonial scholarship linked to the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences during the 1970s and 1980s. Rather, it adopts what has been described in Chapter 2 as a ‘complex realist’ approach that seeks to bring together materialist and discursive forms of analysis to understand complex reality (Bhaskar 2011). It is argued in this respect that the postcolonial condition itself needs to be understood both discursively, i.e. in terms of the constitutive effects of different discourses of development on the way that social reality and postcolonial identities are constructed, and materially, as an aspect of the impact of wider changes in relation to processes of economic and political globalisation.

An overview of global and regional policy agendas

Later chapters will seek to develop a more sustained analysis and critique of global and regional agendas that have as their focus achieving SD and ESD on the continent. For now, however, and by way of background to the book, it is important to provide an overview. In particular, attention will focus at a global level on the SDGs, including SDG 4 (the education SDG), and at a regional level on Agenda 2063 and the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA), which it has been suggested represent a regional response to the SDGs. For some, the focus on global and regional agendas might appear puzzling given that education policy remains primarily a national concern. As will be argued in later chapters, however, it is an aspect of the dynamics of contemporary globalisation that global and regional policy agendas have become increasingly influential in shaping national policy. Linked to this, and as discussed in Chapter 4, it is important to understand how policy-making processes at different scales of the global, regional, and national interact to ‘produce’ policy that is enacted at a local level. It is also important to recognise from the outset, however, the tremendous diversity in economic, political, cultural, and environmental terms on the continent. Through focusing on the impact of global and regional policy agendas, it is hoped to tease out some of the commonalities as well as differences with respect to understanding the challenges and possibilities for implementing ESD. In this respect, as Hoogvelt (1997) has argued, at a regional level, Africa can be perceived to exemplify a distinctive ‘postcolonial formation’ in its attempts to engage with the effects of globalisation, i.e. a distinctive mixture of economic, political, and cultural dynamics linked to Africa’s position in the world and to the nature of regional responses to globalisation.

The SDGs

A key point of reference for contemporary debates about sustainable development are the recently adopted SDGs. A brief history of the origins of the SDGs is given in Chapter 3. Originally proposed by the Colombian government, they were given impetus at the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in 2012 which mandated the creation of an Open Working Group (OWG) to come up with a draft agenda.¹ Alongside the OWG discussions, the United Nations (UN) conducted a series of ‘global conversations’, the results of which were fed into the working group’s discussions. Although the SDGs provide continuity on the preceding Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they also signal a decisive break in recognising the inextricable links between economic and human development on the one hand and environmental protection on the other. The SDGs are also more expansive in scope than the more minimalist MDGs, setting out a total of 169 targets compared to the 18 targets in the MDGs. For the first time, the SDGs are aimed at countries of the global North as well as the Global South which on the one hand recognises the global reach of issues such as poverty, inequality, and climate change and on the other hand the role of rich industrialised countries, both in perpetuating and in potentially overcoming these challenges.

From the perspective of this book, a key feature of the SDGs is that they set out what is described as a ‘transformative’ development agenda (although it will be argued in subsequent chapters that they do not go far enough in this respect). Specifically, the Transforming our World Report (UN 2015c) identifies five ‘Ps’ that lie at the heart of a transformative agenda:

People

We are determined to end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions, and to ensure that all human beings can fulfil their potential in dignity and equality and in a healthy environment.

Planet

We are determined to protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change, so that it can support the needs of the present and future generations.

Prosperity

We are determined to ensure that all human beings can enjoy prosperous and fulfilling lives and that economic, social, and technological progress occurs in harmony with nature.

Peace

We are determined to foster peaceful, just, and inclusive societies which are free from fear and violence. There can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development.

Partnership

We are determined to mobilise the means required to implement this Agenda through a revitalised Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, based on a spirit of strengthened global solidarity, focused in particular on the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable and with the participation of all countries, all stakeholders, and all people. (UN 2015c, 2)

The 17 SDGs can be seen to correspond to these principles. They are set out in Box 1.1.

Box 1.1 The Sustainable Development Goals

• Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
• Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture
• Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
• Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
• Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
• Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all
• Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all
• Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation
• Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
• Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable
• Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
• Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
• Goal 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development
• Goal 15. Protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
• Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels
• Goal 17. Str...