Educating for/learning with country: towards a more equal world

This article responds to two challenges posed by Beniamin Knutsson et al. (Citation2024). The first is to ‘explore what is said and done when ESD is enacted in different contexts around the globe’ (39), particularly focussing on the policy dimensions of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), by discussing how ESD is being enacted in Australia. The second is to explore ‘what affirmative alternatives there might be to current modes of neoliberal biopolitical differentiation in global ESD implementation’ (162), particularly the racialized dimensions of the implementation. Australia is a former British colony, established on the unceded lands of its First Nations people, so it provides an appropriate context for discussion of ‘how Western knowledge and values are imposed on students in these settings without sensitivity to local culture and life-worlds’ (174) with little adaptation to local lifestyles and living conditions which Knutsson et al. see as characteristic of ESD implementation generally. (Post)colonial critiques of its education system and implementation of ESD in Australia are relevant and therefore discussed here together with how we need to be educating for/learning with Country, and opposing the neoliberal capitalism that is working strongly against an equal world.