Unsustainability and Decolonial Thinking: Considerations Beyond ESD

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has gained immense importance due to the global political call for sustainable development. At the same time, the devastating effects of anthropogenic climate change are increasing every year. Humanity is confronted with a situation of sustainable unsustainability. This contribution argues that current competence-oriented approaches to ESD maintain and reinforce unsustainability. Methodological individualism is identified as a main problem in ESD. Furthermore, the human-nature dualism and the idea of an undifferentiated humanity are discussed as problematic epistemic preconditions in the modern Western mindset. Another problem of ESD approaches is the denial and perpetuation of colonial and imperial orders. With regard to these findings, we discuss ways to overcome epistemic preconditions of ESD. We point to collective consciousness and global solidarity as different modes of living and being that offer decolonial alternatives to a good life. Such a reconceptualization implies a repoliticization of education in times of anthropogenic climate change that focuses on the entanglements in epistemic assumptions and conditions of unsustainability as central reference points.