as part of education for sustainable development.
Not excluding questions of health, citizenship, environment and territories, all types of education (Barthes et al. 2017) are generally designed as a means of conceiving the future insofar as it forms a continuum with the present and the past rather than being disconnected from them (Vergnolle-Mainar 2011; Julien 2018). They are a means of thinking about duration not as a linear dynamic but as a time limit, which implies a retroactive conception of the future with a consideration for the occurrence of possible but unquantifiable disasters and the avoidance of naive catastrophism that inhibits commitment (Lange and Martinand 2014). They enable us to think about the question of the local and the global as a whole in terms of the contextualizations that facilitate the appropriation of the issues at stake. Moreover, they are a way of rethinking enabling environments (Janner-Raimondi 2017); considering the values of solidarity, fraternity, sharing and cooperation as support tools rather than obstacles to change and commitment in tomorrow’s world; conceiving scales of organization in terms of complexity (Morin 2015), which implies thresholds, disruptions and beginnings; and thinking about systems in terms of societal responsibilities, among other things (Lange and Martinand 2014).
The changes implied by taking the educational project seriously in the Anthropocene era are therefore considerable. To this end, there is a need to lay the groundwork for intentional curricular development principles that serve political education through environmental and developmental issues. This is what this book serves to provide.
Jean-Marc LANGE
University Professor of Education Sciences and Training, University of Montpellier
Angela BARTHES
University Professor of Education Sciences and Training, Aix-Marseille University
January 2021
Introduction
Environmental and development issues (EDIs) have emerged as a matter of public interest through a new type of political mobilization that has characterized contemporary human societies: ecological mobilization (Zaccai and Orban 2017). These mobilizations, which act as alerts for a global ecological crisis, reflect an awareness of the potentially catastrophic effect of human activity on the ecological functioning of the planet (Little 2017). EDIs have thus appeared as indicators of a turning point in political life in the Anthropocene.
Ecological mobilizations have been brought to life in the form of popular movements at the global/international level, such as the Cities in Transition1 movement, and at the regional level, such as the Climate Justice Action2 movement in Europe. While the first proposed alternatives for a more resilient urban life to economic and climate crises (Krauz 2014), the second demanded a democratization of the climate discourse and a broadening of the scope of climate change action through a confrontation with the dominant capitalist system in order to break it with acts of disobedience. A recent analysis of the discourse of transitions shows that it is becoming heterogeneous and divided between two trends: a “localist” and politicized discourse in citizen and public policy initiatives on the one hand, and a mainly economic technocentric discourse (Audet 2016) on the other.
Comparing the conceptions of “political community” in these two movements also makes it possible to illustrate other trends running through them. In fact, actors in the Cities in Transition movement tend to see themselves as a harmonious geographical community linked to similar local communities (depoliticized conception), whereas actors in the Climate Justice Action movement conceive society explicitly in conflictual terms and consciously integrate themselves into this explicitly politicized context of contestation (Kenis 2016).
Parallel to these popular movements, the international political scene also has a movement aimed at institutionalizing these mobilizations. The first wave of institutionalization took place within the framework of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which was aimed at formulating expectations surrounding the link between environmental problems (resulting from the ecological crisis) and the development of human societies (Boutaud 2005). The second wave took shape within the World Commission on Environment and Development (1983–1987) leading to the “Brundtland Report3”. This report made it possible to reformulate the environmental issue in the light of the interests and expectations of various stakeholders. The third was within the framework of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, leading to declarations and thematic conventions (the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Declaration on Forests and the Convention to Combat Desertification), Agenda 21 and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The most recent wave gives rise to the Agenda 2030 in the form of 17 goals (with their targets and indicators) for sustainable development by 2030. This agenda, developed by UN expert groups, is reviewed by the Economic and Social Council (the body responsible for coordination and dialogue on economic, social and environmental issues) and then approved by the UN General Assembly (the deliberative and decision-making body).
In fact, in the international arena, several EDIs – such as those arising from agroecology – constitute “contested” territory between institutionalization movements and social movements. There are two camps of actors in the field of agroecology: the camp of the World Bank and its “allies” (agricultural universities, governments, private sector, etc.) on the one hand, and the camp of social movements (Latin American agroecology movement, Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology, International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, etc.) on the other. These two types of actors mobilize two opposing visions: one that sees agroecology as a set of tools to perfect the technical procedures of modern agriculture, and another that sees it as an alternative which provides tools to transform agricultural policy monocultures (Giraldo and Rosset 2018).
In Tunisia, environmental struggles re-emerged in the period following the events of 2011. In fact, the context of political change which was triggered has been accompanied by the emergence of environmental social movements in a way that makes it difficult to characterize such movements, even in general terms (Vernin 2017). However, the frankly political imprint of these movements remains salient. It is also noteworthy that the political management of conflicts over state land shows a trend towards institutionalizing this type of mobilization in Tunisia. This institutionalization has taken the form of a project called “Promotion of Organizations and Mechanisms of the Social and Solidarity Economy” (PROMESS). The project, advanced by the Tunisian government in its cooperation with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and funded by the Netherlands, was spread over a four-year period from 2016 to 2019 (Mokadem 2018). The creation of a legal and institutional framework specific to the social and solidarity economy is one of the main axes within this project. A draft law4 on the social and solidarity economy was already being finalized by the Ministry of Social Affairs by May 2018.
Field studies of environmental mobilizations show that these practices are part of an informal5 political education through the learning that develops among the actors who take part in it (Seguin 2015). These civic apprenticeships (Biesta 2011) on conflict and the construction of collective agreements through participation and deliberation form an informal educational process of socialization for a democratic citizenship. According to Kluttz and Walter (2018), these mobilizations involve three interconnected levels of informal political learning:
– the first level, which is microscopic, corresponds to learning that takes place in self-directed situations (individual study of environmental issues, for example), in situations where activists
