Sustainability and participation: an educational challenge

Abstract

Education on sustainability and “sustainable” participation needs a culture that underlies it. This is true for the various contexts of sustainable development: environmental, economic and social. In 1987 the Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as “development capable of meeting the needs
of the present generation without compromising those of the future generations”. The fundamental basis of this culture of sustainability is a non-individualist and non-privatistic conception of knowledge, of social actions and of planning. Culture – necessary for sustainability to produce it – has to be based
on an idea of “care” of the common social assets. This is why sustainability can really be asserted only through “participation”. However, at times, there has been a façade of participation while under the surface something completely different was going on. It is therefore a question of sustaining the necessity
for a real and practicable “sustainable participation”. It is the participation itself, that has to be rethought in a sustainable way, precisely because it is the basis, according to a virtuous circle, of the possibility that sustainability in its various economic, environmental, social contexts can, in time, be implemented.
Participation appears to be fundamental for education on sustainability. There is therefore the need for education on ‘sustainable participation’.