This article contributes to the scholarship on integrating education for sustainable development (ESD) into global development frameworks, which emerges from the need to investigate and propose solutions to enrich and enhance the nexus between policy and practice. The article responds to two of the four guiding questions of this special issue: (a) How does the field of ESD align or misalign with global development objectives? (b) What kind of education do we need to address the pressing challenges of the twenty-first century? This article argues for the centrality of sustainable development/ESD policy, practice and change-oriented methodological approaches to human and global development. It presents five examples of generative and analytical change-oriented methodological approaches. These include (a) Cultural Historical Activity Theory and the associated expansive learning; (b) social learning; (c) position–practice systems; (d) social morphogenesis; and (e) laminated system. It argues that these can propel learning, practice and change processes and tackle context-dependent and cross-cutting human, global, environmental and sustainability issues and risks supported by policy. They also have the potential to help develop an in-depth understanding of individual and collective SD/ESD change-oriented learning and change processes towards a more sustainable human and global development.
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