Afrocentric perspectives on UNESCO’s education for sustainable development framework: implications for university leadership

Purpose The primary challenge confronting the higher education system today revolves around strengthening the institutional capacity in dealing with ever-mounting sustainability challenges. Some policy-oriented frameworks that have emanated in recent years from multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, UNDP and UNESCO indicate that higher education is in crisis globally and the existing system is unsustainable in the medium and long term. UNESCO has played a prominent role in defining the future of higher education through its current policy effort “the education for sustainable development (ESD) framework”. However, a growing body of research indicates that UNESCO’s ESD framework, in its current form, fails to appropriately address African nations’ postcolonial issues. Against this context, this systematic review of literature explored the strategies required to adapt UNESCO’s ESD framework to successfully mitigate African higher education challenges. Design/methodology/approach This systematic review of literature explored the strategies required to adapt UNESCO’s ESD framework to successfully mitigate African higher education challenges. A total of 299 articles were initially retrieved from the Scopus platform, after which 52 articles were adopted after a meticulous application of exclusion criteria. Findings Research findings spotlight several strategies that can promote the contextualization of the UNESCO ESD framework within the African higher education system; these perspectives include the glocalization of educational processes, integration of indigenous knowledge into the learning space, adoption of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning and cultivation of sustainability-conscious leadership, among others. Research limitations/implications Limited to literature sources only, this review recommends future studies contextualizing the ESD framework of UNESCO to incorporate region-specific contexts. Various identified methodological approaches, whether quantitative, qualitative, or mixed designs, could be used to do this. Such an approach could lead to the collection of primary data from larger samples, thereby conferring more generalizability onto the findings. Practical implications The findings of this systematic review are indicative that scholars in the realm of ESD are yet to explore all dimensions of this field, particularly in the context of African higher education. This is suggestive that the education sustainability discourse continues to be an intriguing research domain. Social implications This study uncovered certain weak links in the effort to integrate sustainability into the core values of African higher education institutions and proposed knowledge pillars that would possibly facilitate a succinct understanding of the topic. Using new epistemologies to theorize sustainability education in an African context, the author challenges current models by highlighting the imperatives of a glocalized education system. Originality/value This study’s findings provide much needed new knowledge for policymakers in the university sector who are still in the process of localizing sustainable development practices within their institutions.