‘They are eating the dogs’: on ‘bonded rationality’ and Education for Sustainable Development

This article responds to Knutsson, Bylund, Hellberg, and Lindberg’s (2024) Education for Sustainable Development in an Unequal World and their accompanying article. While endorsing their biopolitical analysis of how Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) accommodates rather than challenges global inequality, I extend their argument through the lens of New Institutional Economics (NIE), specifically the concept of bounded rationality. I argue that in the contemporary ‘post-truth’ political landscape, particularly in the United States, rationality is not merely bounded but bonded: chained to ideological ecosystems that produce willful distortion of information and opportunistic behavior at the national scale. Drawing on NIE and critical autoethnographic reflections, I contend that ESD’s project of rational persuasion may paradoxically penalize the populations most committed to sustainability, while the most powerful polluters exploit information asymmetries to evade responsibility. The article further critiques the United States’ withdrawal from UNESCO and its implications for the global ESD enterprise. Finally, I situate the analysis within the breakdown of the post-World War II liberal international order, asking whether the present conjuncture is best understood as an interregnum in the Gramscian sense, in which morbid symptoms proliferate while the new order cannot yet be born, or whether a new hegemonic order has already taken the old one’s place.