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Education for Sustainable Development (ESD): A Critical Review of Concept, Potential and Risk

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Schooling for Sustainable Development in Europe

Part of the book series: Schooling for Sustainable Development ((SSDE,volume 6))

Abstract

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) can be thought of as the bringing together of a wide variety of educational strategies aimed at addressing the existential problems of human socio-economic development. But, as we near the end of the UN’s ESD Decade, what can we say about how ESD is conceptualised and interpreted; about its coherence and usefulness as an idea; about how well it fits within education systems and schools; about its potential as a strategy to change educational experiences across the globe; and about the uncertainties and ambiguities at its heart? This chapter examines these questions and puts forward a number of issues for both practitioners and policy makers to consider in the UN’s post-Decade global action programme.

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Correspondence to William Scott .

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Scott, W. (2015). Education for Sustainable Development (ESD): A Critical Review of Concept, Potential and Risk. In: Jucker, R., Mathar, R. (eds) Schooling for Sustainable Development in Europe. Schooling for Sustainable Development, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09549-3_4

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