Education for Sustainable Development: towards UNECE Strategy and UN Decade

Presentation at the UK COUNCIL FOR ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION NATIONAL CONFERENCE 2004

“Education, regeneration and the nature of learning” Thursday 1 and Friday 2 April

The Academy Conference and Training Suite
Holiday Inn, London - Kensington Forum

By Victoria Elias, ECO-Accord, Russia elias@leadnet.ru

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First of all I would like to thank you for this opportunity and for the invitation to participate in this conference, and to explain to you how we see, from an international perspective, the problems and the challenges on developing international agreements in education for sustainable development.

I’m speaking in my capacity of the chairperson for the European Eco-Forum that involves environmental citizen organisations, from the entire United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) region, which has 55 member states, including western Europe, central and eastern Europe, former Soviet Union, North America, Canada and US, so it’s quite a diverse region, which in fact makes a difference in the world of education, I’m not afraid to say so.

In listening to presentations during yesterday and today, I was thinking what should I tell you, what else can I tell you? You are such experienced people. You know so much and you do so much and I hear so many interesting initiatives and I try to think what to say, then I came back to the initial ideas, but I would like to stress, before I come to some international processes and structures and what is going on, I would like to stress that it is extremely important for us all working back at home, working at national levels, to see what are the government commitments, to try and influence policies that are developed, not only at national level where exactly they are implemented, but also commitments at international levels where our governments in fact commit to do something and to take action back home. I would like to start with a provocative thing, whether a definition of ESD is possible or not. I’ve made some search on the internet and international documents and I’ve also made some studies together with colleagues, I will come to that later, and I have found that it is interesting that it is defined now by UNESCO as a developing concept. This particularly highlights it’s from education to learning, including formal and non-formal continuing education, awareness raising, lifelong learning, it is an inter-disciplinary approach with interaction and preparation between teacher and learner, and also learning by experience.

What are the milestones on the way to international commitments on ESD? We should probably start with 1972 with the Stockholm Conference, which was speaking about our future and then come to Tbilisi (1977) which was already mentioned several times during this conference, which was first environmental education event, that further was repeated in ten years in Moscow, but that was a starting point for environmental education. The next milestone on this way was UNCED in Rio de Janeiro (1992), where the most important international document on sustainable development – Agenda 21 - was adopted. I think that we can be sure that Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 is very important for education in general, and in particular for education for sustainable development.

In 1996 the UN Commission on Sustainable Development adopted an international programme of work on education, public awareness and professional training (this was amended in 1998). I think that the Aarhus Convention, adopted in Aarhus, Denmark (1998) in the framework on the Environment for Europe process, is a tremendous step forward that leads us to the freedom of information, broad public participation and access to justice in Europe, Central Asia and the Northern America. The Aarhus Convention is the UNECE Convention on public participation, access to information and access to justice on environmental matters, which I think the UK has signed, but I think has not ratified yet.

The next milestone on the road to ESD is a commitment on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Now we are coming to the Decade while already developing the UN ECE strategy on ESD.

It’s a pity that there are no UNESCO people at this conference that would maybe give us more information about the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. It was proposed that the fourth preparatory committee to the World Summit of Sustainable Development in June 2002, by the government of Japan, and then at the World Summit the decision was taken and further proposed to the UN General Assembly, which adopted its resolution 57/254 on 20 December 2002 and it says that from 1st January 2005 until the year 2014, the international Decade on Education for Sustainable Development will be organised. The preparatory process is not that intensive. The draft International Implementation Scheme was disseminated last summer in the middle of August and there was a call for contributions from all major groups. The comments were collected. I know that many people have sent their ideas. I know that many people have not received feedback, but UNESCO have assured us that they are working now on the draft Implementation Scheme, that they are in the process of consultations now and by Summer 2004 their scheme will be available. It will give recommendations to national governments on incorporation of education for sustainable development, international plans and policies.

How UNESCO sees it: You can say that it’s learning which is much better from our point of view. Professional education and retraining, developing skills, defining values which we discussed very much yesterday, public awareness, and this all should lead to understanding sustainability and improving quality of life and we from ECO-Forum also add minimising risk in our society.

Those are goals of this education as they are defined by UNESCO.

It is interesting to mention, we must demonstrate that we all have much to do and still much to contribute to the development of the programme. Priorities, as they are identified by UNESCO, according to their programme for two years and mid-term programme for six years are education for all, with a special focus on schools, literacy, and water resources. I’m sure that there can be other priorities that also may be stressed here.

Now I would like to say more about the process which we have now in the region, in the UNECE region where we all belong. ECO-Forum in particular tried to bring the education issue on the ministerial agenda, on the agenda of the Environment for Europe process, the process of co-operation on the environment in the region. We tried to do it for a long time, but in 1999 the Ukraine government, when defining their proposals for the agenda of the next Environment for Europe Ministerial conference, proposed to prepare a European charter on environmental education. Using this opportunity ECO-Forum came further with the proposal to focus on their UN ECE strategy on education for sustainable development because environmental education has already a long history in the region and we need to move further.

It was quite challenging, a lot of lobbying, we have had much support but no real commitment to support the idea and take it further and finally in July 2002 Sweden and Russia agreed to take the lead in this process and Sweden proposed the Baltic Agenda 21 for Education as a basis for the further development of this strategy. A small drafting group was created at that time and it was working on a strategy that was disseminated and maybe some of you have seen those five drafts that were prepared during 2002 and early in 2003. However, senior officials reviewed the text and commented on that saying that it’s not ready yet for the international strategy. They have proposed to prepare a ministerial statement on ESD for the Kiev conference and to see whether ministers will take this responsibility to further develop a region-wide strategy on ESD.

In May 2003 a Ministerial Statement on ESD was adopted in Kiev by UNECE Ministers of Environment. The document that was developed up to that time is now known as Basic Elements for the UNECE Strategy on ESD. It’s available on the UNECE website. Education Ministers were invited to join the process of ESD Strategy development in a full manner.

The strategy development process was continued after Kiev Conference. The very important task was to involve in the development of the document both environmental and education ministers. That was quite a difficult one for decision-making when the initiative came from the environmental sector. There were many comments from many countries that environmental ministers are not responsible for education and therefore they cannot facilitate the process. It was a special request sent to UNESCO to join the UNECE in coordinating the process, but they agreed that UNECE should provide the secretariat for the strategy development at the UNECE regional level.

A number of international organisations are also involved in this process, as well as NGOs. ECO-Forum has a special discussion group and I’m very happy to say that both UK governments and UK NGOs are involved in the process.

We still are missing the private sector here and this is one of the important things that has to somehow be solved.

The timetable for strategy development is quite tight now. In October last year the UNECE Committee on Environmental Policy has taken the decision on establishing a Task Force on ESD. Preparations were made by January this year and in February the Task Force had its first meeting. It was the First UNECE Regional Meeting on ESD. The Task Force appointed a drafting group which has the first meeting in February, the second one - last week here in London and the third one will be in mid-April in the Hague and then in July there will be the Second Regional Meeting on ESD that will discuss the strategy text. I would like to call upon you all to read the text when it will be available at the end of April on the website and to provide your comments to this document because the drafting group cannot make magic things and the Task Force will also be limited in some understanding and experience, and all comments from all organisations, especially those working on education on the ground, are extremely important.

In October this year the strategy will be presented to the Committee on Environmental Policy and if the Committee approves this then it will be finalised by the Secretariat and the Task Force Chairs. The follow-up of the process will be submission of this strategy as a contribution from the UNECE region to the UN Decade on ESD.

It is planned that in February 2005 probably in Geneva or in one of the host countries there will be a regional ministerial meeting on launching the strategy, involving both environmental and education ministers.

In March 2005 some regional workshops will take place and further what is important implementation of the strategy is planned to be reviewed every two years.

What is in the strategy now? I’m not talking very much about the content because it is still developing. It has its usual preamble in describing vision and understanding education for sustainable development. It also tries to prioritise national action plans on ESD - each country which would adopt the strategy will have to develop this. Evaluation and assessment is also very important and I would like to highlight that. It is now proposed that EPRs (environmental performance reviews) will be components on the strategy implementation.

The composition of the drafting group as you can see on the slide, the UK is, as I said, involved also in the drafting process and I would like to also ask you to contact your Department for Education and Skills with maybe some comments and contributions to the strategy text because they are responsible for the process.

I think it’s very important that the involvement of UK started with Defra and now both Defra and DfES are involved. You can also contribute your comments through ECO-Forum, and please do that.

We have conducted the study recently with the support of Defra taking examples of visions, comments and proposals on ESD in three countries: Russia, Bulgaria and the UK, understanding that the systems are really different and experience is different. The work was done by the NGOs from those countries – ECO-Accord Centre, Borrowed Nature Association and Living Earth Foundation – under the umbrella of the European ECO-Forum. The main goal of the study was to contribute views of educators of those who work in this area to the task force, to the understanding and further development of the strategy and you have now the interim report of the result of this study disseminated.

I hope you will enjoy reading this, and I’m thankful to some people in this room who provided this through the interviews.

What I would like to highlight is that almost all people say that definition is impossible, however, there were some that said we must define ESD before developing the strategy.

Where is the place for ESD in formal education? This has also been discussed in different details. It is seen as a mistake to see ESD as simple reorientation of environmental education, which happens very often and which was said in the strategy. It’s interesting that social and economic issues are very much stressed in Russia and Bulgaria as possible further carriers of the ESD.

It’s also very important and almost all respondents said that economics can be the main carrier of ESD.

It’s really challenging to say all these things. I would like to hope to focus on this interview, but I had to tell you more about the international process.

What I would like to say is that there was an interesting response from Russian government received when we asked about funding, because it’s often about funding. It’s quite a mistake now on the international level, you can see this, that sometimes western countries think, OK, we develop international strategy, that will be about aid to the East, but what I was really happy to hear from Russian government was that they say if the project is run only with foreign support without real contribution to the budget from our side, it will exist in a parallel universe. We really need commitment from all governments and all levels, from all authorities at all levels. We need support from private sector for implementation for ESD and for a better world. The next phase of this study would be the study for good practice in ESD, to illustrate how the strategy can be implemented and how it is already implemented in some countries and how it should be going further.

Thank you very much for your attention.