As one of 12 members of the drafting committee of Agenda 21’s Chapter 36, ‘Education, Public Awareness and Training’, Charles Hopkins reflects on the process of working on the now-famous document. Although it was noncontroversial at the time, Chapter 36 spawned education for sustainable development when it was given to UNESCO to administer within the UN system. Hopkins chronicles how UNESCO struggled to establish an identity for ESD, separate from environmental education and the other related ‘adjectival education’ approaches, to infuse all education through a series of reports, assessments, guides and the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.
UNESCO. 2005a. Guidelines and recommendation for reorienting teacher education to address sustainability. Education for Sustainable Development in Action Technical Paper, no. 2. Paris: UNESCO. Available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001433/143370E.pdf
