by Nicole Mwaura.

Perhaps, the issue lies in how we articulate our ideas.

Sustainable development (SD), often seen as the perpetual preservation of our world's resources, serves as an encompassing term. However, could the use of such overarching terms hinder progress? Let's consider a specific aspect of SD - Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).

So, what is ESD?

Introduced in 1992, ESD can be defined as the cultivation of skills, values, knowledge, and agency to address global challenges and inspire both individuals and collectives to proactively care for the planet.
While an admirable concept in theory and policy, ESD grapples with a significant challenge: the gap between awareness and practical application, which is its fundamental goal. Despite its intended purpose of guiding individuals or collectives toward solving the SDGs, studies indicate it has seen minimal success. How can a thirty-year concept have little to no success to show for it? The effectiveness of ESD encounters the same hurdle as sustainable development in general – the reliance on broad, umbrella terms. Words like 'skills,' 'values,' 'knowledge,' and 'challenges' may have objective definitions in the Oxford dictionary, but they remain subjective in reality. Resultantly, inertia in change being affected is occurring.

Looking ahead…

Could the key setback in bridging the awareness and application gap be traced back to the initial definition of concepts? How can this be rectified? As humans, consciously or not, aiming for universality in an inherently complex world might set us up for failure. And, while there is potential for the future success of ESD through new emphasis on considering contextual factors, nearly three decades have passed with little progress; primarily because people still grapple with understanding a supposedly 'defined' phenomenon.

We simply do not have another three decades lying around to understand our definitions.