Settler futurity in the local and global: Problematising education for sustainable development in the Australian curriculum

Abstract

As global concerns about climate change deepen, Australian sustainability curriculum plays an increasingly significant role in the way students relate to concepts of home, belonging, and the future. Such futures are imagined in a local context shaped both by ongoing colonial processes and the continued presence of First Peoples, in which invader-settler futurity is the dominant force. As such, a global emphasis on Education for Sustainability raises questions of what types of relationships to place and country are produced through policy and curriculum, and what the implications are for students’ investments in the future of place and unceded Country. As a white invader/settler writing from the Country of the Kulin Nations (Melbourne, Australia), in this paper I offer an analysis of UN Education for Sustainability Declarations from the past five decades, alongside Australian national curriculum documents and its translation into state-level curriculum. In doing so, I reveal the ways that sustainability policy and curriculum works to collapse place and Country into the concept of ‘environmental resource’, largely oriented towards the future of the nation. I argue that in the global policy context, resources are framed to deliver equal distribution across nation states, functioning to obscure the operation of patriarchal white sovereignty within states such as Australia. I further identify that the ways this problem of resource management is deployed as a virtuous state policy through local curriculum, which functions to solidify invader-settler use of disembodied Indigenous knowledges, to secure futurity.

Keywords

Colonisation curriculum policy education sustainability Australia

Introduction

In this study, I build on and contribute to work at the nexus of sustainability and critical Indigenous studies. Although numerous studies have focused on how sustainability curriculum is practically implemented in schools (Green et al., 2013; Prabawa-Sear and Dow, 2018) or have attended directly to young people’s relationships to place in early childhood education (Blaise and Hamm, 2019; Duhn, 2012; Jobb et al., 2019), there have been limited studies that critically trace the relationship of local sustainability praxis to global policies in terms of their implications for postcolonising (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) processes, in which colonisation is a present and ongoing system. This is particularly true of sustainability policy literature in so-called Australia,¹ where sustainability curriculum holds relative dominance (Lowe and Yunkaporta, 2013). In using the term Sustainability curriculum, I point to the Cross-curriculum Priorities, of which sustainability is a focus. Sustainability is defined by the content areas and elaborations associated ‘the knowledge, skills, values and world views necessary to contribute to more sustainable patterns of living’ (ACARA, 2016) across all subjects from years 7–10. As a white invader/settler thinking and writing from the Country of the Kulin Nations in south-east Australia, my particular standpoint (Moreton-Robinson and Walter, 2009) compels me to ask, what understandings of place and Country are constructed in international Education for Sustainability policy? Further, what are the implications for local curriculum contexts?

This paper provides insights into the ways that the production of place and Country problematisation at a global level is practiced in local representations of sustainability in secondary school Cross-curriculum Priorities. The Cross-curriculum Priorities are intended to be embedded across subjects; they are a feature of the Australian national curriculum and have been translated into a Victorian state context. The Priorities comprise Asia and Australia’s place in Asia; Sustainability; and, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures. This study is concerned with the relationship between the latter two Priorities. I analyse the relationship of global Education for Sustainability policy and the Australian national and Victorian state curriculum. Although numerous studies have identified and critiqued how education policy and practice produces First Peoples² students and knowledges as policy problems (Brown, 2018; Maxwell et al., 2018; Patrick and Moodie, 2016; Vass, 2012), little analytic attention has been paid to the role of sustainability curriculum in such problematisations. I address this issue by drawing on Carol Bacchi’s (unmarked)³ What’s the What’s the Problem Represented to be approach (2012) to analyse global policy and national curriculum. I undertake the analysis through the theoretical lens of patriarchal white sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), in which the colonial processes of Australia is identified for its gendered and racialised logics of possession.

In this analysis of both UN sustainability Declarations and Australian national and Victorian state curriculum documents, I argue that sustainability policy and curriculum collapse place and Country⁴ into the concept of ‘environmental resource’. As a federation of states and territories, Australian education operates at two levels: strategies, standards, and curriculum are developed at the national level, while the seven states and territories hold responsibility for their implementation, and therefore exercise discretion in the translation of national priorities into state settings (Gough, 2011). In the global policy context, resources are further framed in relation to their equal distribution across states, functioning to obscure the operation of patriarchal white sovereignty within nation-states such as so-called Australia. On a curricular level, I identify the ways this problem of resources and their management is deployed in relation to the future of the postcolonising nation state. That is, in both the Australian and Victorian curriculum, environmental resources are the dominant language, used alongside references to Australia and the nation. In this way, Country is once again reduced to the resources available for extraction and ownership by the nation state. Moreover, this notion is secured through representations of resources for the nation alongside an absence of references to race, whiteness, colonisation or Indigenous sovereignty. Drawing on Goenpul scholar Moreton-Robinson’s (2011) concept of the virtuous racial state, I argue that the UN framework for developing Education for Sustainability functions to represent sustainability as a good, thereby working to solidify invader-settler futurity under the guise of virtuous sustainable action.

Contextualising the nexus of First Peoples’ sovereignty and education for sustainable development

The role of education in cultivating sustainable practices in Australian is situated within a global concern for the environment, largely formalised through the United Nations’ conferences, declarations, and policies. This global policy emphasis on Education for Sustainable Development was instigated in the form of environmental education at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Scholarly proponents of the most recent iteration of sustainability in schools – Education for Sustainable Development – extend on the emphasis in the environmental education literature on protecting rural environments from pollution via three educational pillars; concerns for environmental protection, economic growth, and social justice (McKeown and Hopkins, 2003: 122). Despite some differences in framing, education and training are proposed at the UN level as the central mechanism for change (see Sohn, 1973; United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1992a, e.g.), specifically: re-orienting education towards sustainability; enhancing public understanding; and providing training (McKeown and Hopkins, 2003: 120). In the context of the Australia, the body of literature surrounding the translation of the three pillars into education and training has largely been focussed on the extent to which it is implemented in early childhood and primary school settings (Green et al., 2013; Prabawa-Sear and Dow, 2018). More recently, enabling and limiting factors in teacher implementation have formed the focus of research, with particular emphasis on pre-service teacher education and access to resources (Dyment et al., 2015; Dyment and Hill, 2015). In this context, sustainability is an assumed good, and so the question becomes to what extent the goals of sustainability in education are being enacted in educational practices.

Assessments of educators’ sustainability practices within a ‘what works’ framework is largely prioritised in the literature over critical engagement, whereby educators seek to avoid what Fien (unmarked) and Tilbury (unmarked) term ‘paralysis by analysis’ (2002: 3) in order to continue to act for sustainability. That is, critical engagements are superseded by the urgent need to act for the environment. Similarly, the mobilisation of education for particular ends – sustainable development – has been subject to critique for the way it operates for pre-determined outcomes at the expense of critical thinking (Jickling, 1992). In this way, sustainability is largely thought about as a benevolent priority, to be enacted as effectively as possible, despite the lack of clarity surrounding both what this specifically involves and the key terms underpinning such enactment. The action-oriented nature of the literature relating to sustainability stands in contrast to those surrounding Land education (Calderon, 2014; Tuck et al., 2014) and Indigenous Climate Change studies (Davis and Todd, 2017; Liboiron, 2021; Whyte, 2017), both of which foreground critical analysis of colonial structures and processes. Land education in particular emphasises the naming of colonial processes as central to the development of Indigenous-led education practices (Calderon, 2014). Yet there are few analyses that critically consider the implications of conceptions of sustainability for First Peoples, educators and the relationships of non-Indigenous Australians to unceded Country and communities.

The position of Sustainability as a Cross-curriculum Priority in the Australian national and Victorian state curriculum is significant because it inevitably draws on and shapes students’ and educators’ conceptualisation of Country and place in a postcolonising (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) educational context. While the Sustainability Cross-curriculum Priority broadly references social justice, sustainability education frameworks neither stem from nor centralise Indigenous concerns and futures (Tuck et al., 2014; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Whitehouse et al., 2017). The cross curricular emphasis on Country/place reintroduces the concepts in a context where school systems routinely disavow the specific, local existence of the place and Country, in favour of a curriculum that works towards standardisation and globalization (Marker, 2006; McKenzie, 2012), in which schools become sites that are actively displaced and dispossessing.

Schools’ [have an] increasing emphasis on educating for “global citizenship” and participation in a post-industrial, rootless workforce. The proliferation of multi- national corporate logos, strip malls, and commodified culture products has produced an impression of sameness in the land-scape. This works in tandem with movements for standardizing knowledge such that the unique environmental histories of places, which would include the histories of local Indigenous peoples, are rendered irrelevant by the educational discourse of mobility and career opportunity (Marker, 2006: 490–491)

Homogenous classrooms appear to come from nowhere both physically and epistemologically (Brown, 2018), enacting simultaneous dispossession (of sovereign custodians of Country) and replacement (by white invader/settlers) (Marker, 2006), to create sites of educational violence. In this context, ‘the line, the continuing song line of colonialism is now sung up and enlarged as the song for globalization’ (Watson, 2007: 31). At the same time, the enactment of Sustainability, with its potential focus on place, holds immense possibility for critical engagements with the material ways education functions as part of the colonial project, but also the risk for further cultivating settler futurity.

Conceptualising settler futurity through sustainability policy and curriculum

In the Australian curriculum, Country is a core curriculum concept in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross Curriculum Priority (Lowe and Yunkaporta, 2013; Whitehouse, 2011). Sustainability praxis can either disrupt or reify colonial relationships to unceded territory, represented by Country/place. The term is contextualised by Moreton-Robinson as,

not only the tracks of land to which we are inextricably tied, but it is also the term used to denote Indigenous people who have a bloodline to that country through creator and ancestral birth. This interconnectedness is the basis of Indigenous sovereignty. (Moreton-Robinson, 2013: 335).

That is, the term ‘Country’ refers to a specific, complex, expansive, and relationally framed sovereign connection; the concept itself demands that attention be paid to past, present, and future Indigenous presence.

On this basis, sovereign theorists have established the importance of centring Indigenous Peoples’ connections and claims to Country in order for education to properly respond to the colonial past and present (Bang and Medin, 2010; Lowe et al., 2014; Martin, 2007; McKnight, 2016). This has looked, for example, like Megan Bang’s (Ojibwe and Italian) work with community members and colleagues to theorise examples of Land education on urban territory (Tuck et al., 2014), in which Land and critical engagement with the implications of colonial processes are enacted via science education on Turtle Island (Bang et al., 2010, 2014; Bang and Medin, 2010). The term Country is operationalised in the Australian national curriculum as a key concept for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures Cross-curriculum priority. Despite Country/place – understood as referencing both western and Indigenous ways of knowing and being – being identified as one of three key concepts, Country is largely absent from content elaborations at a national level (Lowe and Yunkaporta, 2013; Whitehouse, 2011). In this context, the extent to which global sustainability policy shapes local understandings holds immense power to produce particular types of relationships to place and Country in a colonial context premised on dispossession.

The ways in which education operates at the nexus of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures and Sustainability can in this way be understood as underpinned by possessive logics (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), where Country becomes property and resource. Property refers both to the use of Country as a resource, and as a site for permanent dwelling; a home constructed through curriculum to ensure what scholars Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and Rubén A Gaztambide-Fernández (unmarked) articulate as settler futurity (2013; Wolfe, 2006). The white possessive is employed as a key theoretical framework in this paper. Colonising practices – including those central to education – are contingent on dominating and possessing place. White possessive logics also rely on rendering people as property. In this way, the home and future for invader/settlers is premised on the erasure of Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures (Morgensen, 2011). Thus, conceptions of place matter: The practices that stem from these understandings have shaped the possibility, reproduction, and justification of unceded Country as a home for invader/settlers.

Tracing policy problematisation between the local and global

The question I am responding to in this paper is, what problems do sustainability policy and curriculum produce at global and local levels? And, what are the implications for the production of concepts of Country and place? In order to answer these, I employ Carol Bacchi’s (unmarked) methodology, What’s the Problem Represented to Be. In utilising her methodology, I first identify UN Declarations relating to Education for Sustainability, created and implemented since the 1970s. I then analyse these in relation to recent Australian national and Victorian state curriculum according to Bacchi’s six questions. Bacchi’s (2012) questions centre on how problems are produced and what is ignored or obfuscated in the process of such problematisation. These questions centre on how problems are produced and what is ignored in the process. For example, I emphasise the following questions in my analysis:

“1. What’s the ‘problem’ (for example, of ‘problem gamblers’, ‘drug use/abuse’, ‘gender inequality’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘global warming’, ‘sexual harassment’, etc.) represented to be in a specific policy or policy proposal?....

4. What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be thought about differently?

5. What effects are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?” (Bacchi, 2012)

In asking questions of problematisation across policy scales, I also analyse the relationship between the local and global. That is, to what extent is there evidence of global problematisations in the local, and vice versa. In order to undertake such analysis, I excerpted all national and state curriculum content areas and elaborations tagged against the sustainability Cross-curriculum priority, to analyse through asking the same core questions associated with What’s the Problem Represented to Be. Bacchi’s questions also include a recognition of absence. In this context, Moreton-Robinson’s (2011) emphasis on Indigenous sovereignties and their interaction with UN policy production provided a conceptual framework through which to consider the absences in relation to First Peoples in policy and curriculum. That is, I asked the question, what is the implication of this policy presence (or absence) for Indigenous sovereignties?

States govern through the construction of policy problems: this is particularly significant on unceded Country, where governance of Indigenous sovereignty seeks to be legitimised through problem constructions. Bacchi’s argument is that policy does not merely respond to problems, but produces the problems to which they simultaneously respond (2012: 21). In an Australian context, the Sustainability Cross-curriculum Priorities are theorised (Salter and Maxwell, 2016) against a background of deficit discourse (Brown, 2018; Vass, 2012), whereby First Nations young people are represented as the problem. What’s the Problem Represented to Be is useful for unsettling the premises underpinning such problematisation, in addition to opening up considerations of ‘subjugated knowledges’ (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016: 51) to actively engage with the knowledges that are silent in, or absent from, the construction of policy problems. The What’s the Problem Represented to Be methodology enables me to identify the production of problems through policy that frame sustainability, place, and Country in particular ways.

Sustainability has been conceptualised through key developments in global environmental policy: The UN-led conferences and their attendant Declarations from the past five decades. An initial desktop search of Australian curriculum and national policies revealed the use of UN Declaration language, such as Education for Sustainable Development. On this basis, I identified the key Conferences and associated Declarations from the past five decades, each of which is associated with a body of literature describing the implications of such declarations for subsequent educational praxis. A shared concern with the degradation of the ‘human environment’ formed the basis of the first of five UN-led ‘mega conferences’ (Seyfang, 2003). In response, I identified the following documents as central to global conceptualisations of Sustainability in the context of education.

• Stockholm Declaration (Sohn, 1973)

• Tbilisi Declaration (United Nations Environment Programme, 1978)

• Brundtland Report (1987)

• Agenda 21 (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1992a)

• Johannesburg Declaration (World Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002)

• UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2012, 2014; Wals, 2009)

Each of these Declarations has been analysed through Bacchi’s question, asking what was what is the problem represented to be in sustainability education discourse? I excerpted all chapters and sections identified as pertaining to education before applying Bacchi’s questions as methods of analysis. To attend specifically to the implications of such policies for First Peoples representation in education, I identified the items referencing First Peoples (often referred to as Indigenous in Declarations). In drawing out dual policy areas, I asked Bacchi’s questions of the parallel streams, and worked to identify the implications of sustainability framing for the ways Indigenous sovereignties, rights, and knowledges are conceptualised. The theoretical framework I work with in this paper of white possessive logics shapes the attention I pay to questions, and to silence and absences. In this instance, I took up Bacchi’s question four to attend to the silences and absences in policy texts, to consider how Indigenous sovereignties were present or absent, and similarly the ways in which invader/settler governments were represented – or not – as part of policy problematisation.

While the first section of analysis focuses mostly on understanding the conceptualisations underpinning the Declarations, at the end of the discussions section I focus on the range of implications for curriculum in Australia. I analyse the global policy landscape in relation to two local curriculum documents: the Australian national curriculum and the state-centred Victorian curriculum. Sustainability is produced in this context as ‘the ongoing capacity of Earth to maintain all life. Sustainable patterns of living meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’ (VCAA, 2014). This definition mirrors closely the Brundtland Report’s definition of sustainability as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Brundtland, 1987), pointing to a relationship between the global and local, oriented by the future.

Victoria was one of the earliest states to take up the Sustainability Cross-curriculum Priority, previously supported by the Sustainable Schools Initiative, and with subsequent support from Resource Smart.⁵ Often framed as one of the most consistent implementations of sustainability (Dyment et al., 2015; Green et al., 2013; Prabawa-Sear and Dow, 2018), the Victorian curriculum shares in the nationally articulated emphasis of the Sustainability Cross-curriculum Priority, to provide students with ‘the knowledge, skills, values and world views’ (ACARA, 2013a; 2013b, n.p.) to live sustainably into the future. This replicates the understanding of sustainability in education established in the Brundtland Report and reiterated by UNESCO, as an aim underpinning the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development ‘to transform society by reorienting education and help people develop knowledge, skills, values and behaviours needed for sustainable development’ (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 2021). The Victorian curriculum represents a key point of analysis, whereby there is a localised engagement with both the international framing of Education for Sustainability and the translation of this into content drawn from the national curriculum’s Priority areas.

What’s the Problem Represented to Be presents a tool of analysis, to better understand the ways that postcolonising processes are enacted through policy attempts to govern Indigenous sovereignties on unceded Kulin Country. Bacchi’s methodology involves recognising the ways through which policy problematisation constructs the places, subjects, and objects through which governing occurs. In addition to Bacchi’s (2012) key questions for identifying the production of a problem, the way that place is constructed through problematisation is also significant. Aikens et al. argue that there are few approaches to policy that engage with materiality as a source of analysis, ‘a land and place-based framework for educational policy research has yet to be articulated; however, increased engagement with intersectional, Indigenous, and materialist methodologies suggests new ways of imagining policy research’ (2016: 20). In this context, Land education (Calderon, 2014; Tuck et al., 2014) informs my reading of the construction of place through what’s the problem represented to be, in which First Peoples’ sovereignty is centred simultaneously to naming the implications of colonial logics and realities for the health of Country.

The problem of knowledge for sustainable action

From its inception, Environmental Education has been concerned with the future, and the ways in which increased knowledge might change behaviour for such futures. Principle 19 of the Stockholm Declaration prescribes the following as the significance and mandate of Environmental Education, in which lack of knowledge or awareness is framed as the cause of global environmental harms.

Education in environmental matters, for the younger generation as well as adults, giving due consideration to the underprivileged, is essential in order to broaden the basis for an enlightened opinion and responsible conduct by individuals, enterprises and communities in protecting and improving the environment in its full human dimension. (Sohn, 1973: 480–481, emphasis added)

Thus, education is rendered a central strategy to prevent further environmental harms in a context where ‘action’ is the crucial concern. In asking What the Problem is Represented to Be in this context, a lack of awareness is framed as the cause of inequity and unsustainable development. This form of problematisation fails to recognise the ways in which systems – such as the systems through which colonisation is enacted – are active and intentional, in contrast to a natural result of not-knowing. Further, what this awareness of ‘environmental matters’ should comprise is largely undefined.

Education for Sustainable Development policy further produces the problem as one of unequal access to – and use of – the environment. Principle three of Rio states, for example, that ‘the right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of the present and future generations’ (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1992b: 1). Here, the environment is framed through the lens of development and understood as a resource. Similarly, the report from the 1977 Tbilisi Conference introduces a primary concern for the relationship between the environment and economic development, naming in the first recommendation that,

whereas it is a fact that biological and physical features constitute the natural basis of the human environment, its ethical, social, cultural, and economic dimensions also play their part in determining the lines of approach and the instruments whereby people may understand and make better use of natural resources in satisfying their needs. (United Nations Environment Programme, 1978: 25, my emphasis)

An emphasis on ‘improving’ the environment in these documents is evident. Within these development-oriented declarations, the dominant understanding of place is as a resource, as identified in Sauve’s et al. (2007) work on the categorisations of the environment in association with Education for Sustainable Development policies. Place is represented as the environment; as a resource to be developed for the ‘protection and improvement’ (World Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002) of the largest number possible. That is, the Declarations centre the social and economic implications for the destruction of resources on which broadly conceived ‘humans’ depend. Where Bacchi and Goodwin (2016: 15) emphasise the construction of places and objects, here, place is rendered an object through the construction of Country as a resource.

The creation of the problem in terms of resources invokes environmental management for economic development as a core way of relating to unceded Country. Both the Stockholm and Tbilisi Conferences identified environmental harms as of central concern, which was subsequently expanded to equally include and value development (McKeown and Hopkins, 2005). The problem of unequal development is primarily framed from an emplaced position across hemispheres. The Tbilisi Report points to the role of poverty in this relationship, imploring that ‘there is an urgent need for development. Poverty itself is a form of environmental degradation. Viewed in this light, it is no longer possible to contrast the preservation of the environment with the necessity for development’ (United Nations Environment Programme, 1978: 11). Through positioning poverty as a primary factor in environmental harm and therefore development as necessarily core to the environment, ‘developing’ countries are represented as the problem, in need of ‘training and expertise’ (World Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002: 59) while neoliberalism is rendered a ‘common sense’ good (McKenzie, 2012; Tuck, 2013).

Although the expansiveness of city growth does not go unproblematised, the corresponding actions belie the ways in which ‘developed’ countries are nevertheless produced via policy as the holders of expertise about sustainable practices. Moreton-Robinson (2015: xii) the ways that the white possessive is a mode of rationalisation: Here, the harms perpetuated through colonial relationships to Land, characterised by extraction, are normalised and obscured through emphasising the impact of those in poverty on the health of Country. In this way, ‘humans’ are produced as a policy object recognised as dependent on their surrounds (articulated in Tbilisi as the ‘human environment’), while not all humans are represented as equally contributing to the problem.

The ways in which UN Declarations have conceptualised place is evident in the dominant terminology used in the national Sustainability priority, of the environment. In the Australian national curriculum, ‘environment’ and ‘environmental’ are collectively the most used term in sustainability curriculum. Within the Victorian content elaborations, education about the systems Organising Idea⁶ operationalises an epistemology centred on responding to a perceived disconnect between humans and their ‘surrounds’, where human agency is often foregrounded. For example, one of the year 7&8 geography sustainability content areas is listed as: ‘human causes of land degradation, the effects on landscape quality and the implications for places’ (VCAA, 2014: VCGGK119). Whitehouse identifies the implications of the conceptualisations of the environment for conceptualisations of Country in curriculum: ‘“environment” in Australian formal education policy, curriculum and research is still largely imagined from within colonial framings, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readings of country relegated to an extramural positionality’ (2011: 57). Where the term environment is centred, the complexities of Country are obscured through the concept of environment-as-resource, impacted by ‘humans’. In these instances, the binary between humans and the environment is exacerbated, at the expense of acknowledging the different relationships to Country across communities. Instead of the possibilities held in the systems Organising Idea for engaging with interconnectedness, the emphasis is on protecting the environment as a future resource, from broadly conceived ‘human’ harm.

The emphasis on human harm is connected to futurity in curriculum elaborations, where the future constitutes a core Organising idea. The conceptual pillars of worldviews, futures, and systems are present across both national and state curriculum. The Victorian elaboration of sustainability is introduced within the specific temporal framework for establishing a sustainable economy, ‘Australia’s future prosperity will be impacted by past, present and future decisions, particularly in relation to the environmental, social and economic challenges’ (ACARA, 2013a, emphasis added). In this context, futures are used synonymously with technology to describe technological ‘progress’. In Victoria this looks like the alignment of the design and technology subject with many of the sustainability elaborations. The Victorian curriculum design and technologies year 9&10 curriculum asks that students ‘critically analyse factors, including social, ethical and sustainability considerations, that impact on designed solutions for global preferred futures and the complex design and production processes involved’ (VCAA, n. d.: VCDSTS054, emphasis added). At a moment of possible reconsideration, instead, ‘human’ harm is reimagined through the lens of increased knowledge for progress in ways that continue to reify an invader/settler worldview, with increased certainty about its place in and for the future.

The ‘where’ of sustainability policy: Obscuring the internal operations of postcolonising states

Policy representations actively constructs places; the ‘no-place’ of global resource management imaginary is constructed in a way that obscures the internal operation of nation-states. Extending on Bacchi and Goodwin’s (2016) question of how place and objects are represented in policy problematisation, the where of sustainability policy raises the question of how difference across and within nation-states is represented. The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development explicitly drew on the concerns outlined in Agenda 21, identifying the following contexts as essential to prompting the Decade: ‘Fostering peace; fighting against global warming; reducing north/south inequalities and fighting against poverty; fighting against the marginalisation of women and girls; and having a different vision of the world’ (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1992a: 2–3). The problems identified in the above are represented as the problem of broadly conceptualised ‘humans’, but located in ‘developing’ nations, in ways that have international implications. While there is a broad field that attends to the language and assumptions of the Global North and South (Breidlid, 2013; Dirlik, 2007), there are further implications in this context of the metaphor of the Global North and South for the internal operations of postcolonising nation states such as so-called Australia.

The metaphor of the Global hemisphere divide is utilised in international policy to represent the interrelated flows of globalisation. Moreton-Robinson extends on the Foucauldian notion that politics is war by other means, to identify the ways that ‘Indigenous sovereignty and its disavowal have shaped Australian nationalism’ (2015b: xxi). In other words, the intersection of sovereignty and race have and continue to shape the internal production of state formation, which is obscured in the inter-national emphasis on equal resource distribution in the UN’s orientation towards environmental futures. That is, representation through Education for Sustainable Development of the division of hemispheres serves to both reify state sovereignty as a priori, and locate the problem of unsustainable use of resources in developing nations, which further works to construct virtuous representations of postcolonising states.

The construction of subjects: Absence of racialised and sovereign differentiations

The role of colonisation in environmental harms was recognised and named in the first document associated with Environmental Education. The first principle of the first UN-mandated international conference concerning Environmental Education – the Stockholm Declaration – foregrounded ‘policies promoting or perpetuating apartheid, racial segregation, discrimination, colonial and other forms of oppression and foreign domination’ as those that must be ‘condemned and eliminated’ (Sohn, 1973: 452). Despite the verbatim repetition of international sustainability policy concerns across the decades – such as an emphasis on the role of education in responding to sustainable development – systems of racism, ongoing colonial processes, or naming the dominant presence and operation of whiteness and western epistemologies, are all largely absent from subsequent international policy. While the Stockholm Declaration represents a moment of opportunity through its formal recognition of the function and implications of racism and colonial processes, this is the first and last time in UN environmental education policy that such systems are referenced in the Declaration stemming from an Earth Summit or comparable mega-conference in relation to environmental concerns.

Part of the production of the problems of environmental harm and development is the absence of Indigenous sovereign concerns in Education for Sustainable Development, at international, national, and local levels. Instead, there are references made to ‘minority’ and ‘vulnerable groups’, conflating specific Indigenous sovereign claims with generalised minority status associated with disadvantage. For example, in the report following Johannesburg in 2002, the participants note that ‘we recognize that the implementation of the outcomes of the Summit should benefit all, particularly women, youth, children and vulnerable groups’ (World Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002: 8). In Agenda 21, while Chapter 26 lists Indigenous concerns, in Chapter 36 (with its emphasis on education for sustainability), Indigenous claims are consistently positioned alongside the inclusion of women and ‘other minorities’ (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1992a: 5.21). Here, difference and vulnerability are foregrounded at the expense of specific self-determining claims, which works to represent Indigenous peoples as ‘damaged’ (Tuck, 2009) and without sovereign rights.

This power-avoidant representation of brokenness also serves as the basis for justifying intervention:

In addition to meeting basic health needs, specific emphasis has to be given to protecting and educating vulnerable groups, particularly infants, youth, women, indigenous people and the very poor as a prerequisite for sustainable development. Special attention should also be paid to the health needs of the elderly and disabled population. (Agenda 21 6.18)

The conflation of Indigenous sovereignty with the needs of multicultural and minority groups aligns with critiques of the deployment of multiculturalism as ‘… a form of colonialism… [that] works to distract from the recognition and redress of Indigenous rights’ (Denis, 2011: 308), whereby sovereign concerns and power differentials are collapsed into an appreciation or concern for difference. Such an absence in policy of recognition of specific sovereign connections and legal concerns corresponds to a gap in the literature surrounding Education for Sustainable Development practice in terms of critical frameworks, including those concerned with race, whiteness, colonisation, and their relationship to Country and education (cf. Gough, 1998; González-Gaudiano, 2005; McKenzie, 2012; Sauvé et al., 2007; Whyte, 2016). Thus, sustainability is produced on behalf of ‘vulnerable groups’ in contrast to a recognition of Indigenous communities’ knowledges and sovereign claims, which in turn shape local, unceded conceptualisations of sustainability.

The limited presence of references to colonisation and racialisation at an international level are amplified in the local. Curriculum is characterised by silence: Searches in both national and state curriculum documents for references to the terms race, whiteness, and colonisation level yielded only one reference. In light of this, worldview is not about different ways of knowing, being or valuing but is reduced to a point of view or range of opinions, in a power-avoidant framework (Carrillo Rowe, 2010). Similarly, colonisation is referenced only once in the whole of the 7–10 national curriculum, as a displaced and decontextualised concept for discussion. Reconciliation was the dominant language of the Melbourne Declaration, which in turn influenced the retrospective application of the Cross-curriculum Priorities (Donnelly and Wiltshire, 2014). Consequently, the curriculum is characterised by the absence of the language of power, sovereignty, or race. The language utilised is instead around historical ‘patterns of change’, for which there are neither subjects nor objects listed, and from which simply flow ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ consequences (ACARA, 2013b: ACDSEH020). Thus, systems of power – particularly those related to patriarchal white sovereignty – are rendered absent in curriculum construction of the problem.

In light of the silences evident in the worldview Organising Idea of race, whiteness, and colonisation, I employ Bacchi’s (2012) turn to presences; the ways Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and knowledges are represented in the sustainability curriculum elaborations and content areas. At a state level, the dominance of resource management frameworks has implications for representations of such relationships to, and sovereign knowledge of, Country.

“Identifying the contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge to the use and management of landforms and landscapes” (ACARA, 2013b: ACHGK052).

“Researching the role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in environmental management” (ACARA, 2013b: ACHGK072).

“The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ approaches to custodial responsibility and environmental management in different regions of Australia” (ACARA, 2013b: ACHGK072).

First Peoples are represented in relation to sustainability primarily through the lens of knowledge about resource management, in ways that render knowledge holders separate to, and separable from, the knowledge itself.

Curricular production of a virtuous racial state

In contrast to the binaries that uphold patriarchal white sovereignty, the systems Organising Idea appears to hold a possibility of recognising relatedness, connected to an ontology articulated by Noonuccal theorist, Professor Karen Martin:

The strength of our country can also be seen in the relationships between these Entities; hence, it is a truly relational ontology. All things are recognised and respected for their place in the overall system. Whilst they are differentiated, these relations are not oppositional, nor binaric, but are inclusive and accepting of diversity. (Martin and Mirraboopa, 2003: 207)

However, this opportunity for relatedness being brought into focus is framed in terms of an emphasis on future prosperity, which functions to delimit systems to the ways their health enables the further production of wealth for the nation state. That is, systems are framed in terms of scarce resources for human life. Moreover, systems are not referenced in terms of Country. Instead, systems and their entities are conceptualised in the language of ‘the environment’.

The progress narrative is an extension of the notion of development. As Salandy (2018) has outlined, development functions on both an ideological and conceptual level: developmentalism accounts for some of the ways that technology is represented as underpinning the future. This, in turn, hinges on the postcolonising binary of traditional and modern, within a progress narrative (Moreton-Robinson, 2000: 76). In this context, modernity is associated with settler emplacement into the future, of settler futurity (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). Working from the backdrop of the international policy scene whereby the problem is represented to be the environmental harms caused largely by a lack of development, invader/settlers of western ‘modernity’ are able to be represented as the solution to such a problem.

The term ‘humans’ is invoked consistently across policy and curriculum, and serves to homogenise distinct experiences, interests and claims in the presumed singular relationship between ‘humans’ and place. Systems – which holds some possibility for recognising interconnectedness – is largely used interchangeably at a national level with ‘the resources on which humans depend’ (ACARA, 2016). This sits in contrast to the Organising Idea of worldviews in the Victorian curriculum, created to ‘present the issues surrounding sustainability in a global context. This concept allows for a diversity of worldviews on ecosystems, values and social justice to be discussed and linked to individual and community actions for sustainability’ (VCAA, 2014: n. p). There are some elements of the Victorian Learning about Sustainability document (VCAA, 2014) that recognises the significance of relationships between humans. However, in the content elaborations at a state and national level ‘human impact’ is reiterated in ways that mirror those of global policy, assuming a white population’s relationship to place with occasional reference to ‘diverse worldviews’ on the environment.

The reduction of sovereign cosmologies to disembodied concepts of resource management in the context of scarcity works to create an opening for invader/settler possession of such knowledges. In light of the above forms of curriculum aligned with systems thinking, ‘humans’ are located as subjects responsible for harm of place, which fails to recognise the specific ways the logics of patriarchal white sovereignty result in harm of Country. Instead, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges of environmental management are produced as distinguishable from Country, in ways that serve the narrative of the ‘new native’. Moreover, if all humans are represented as responsible for environmental harm, and knowledges about management can be researched and understood, the possibilities for white invader/settlers to be read as environmentally responsible and therefore benevolent is opened up through curricular engagements.

The concurrent emphasis on the development of nations and silence on specific Indigenous claims works to reify what Moreton-Robinson terms the virtuous racialised nation state. Virtue circulates as property in that the ‘…sovereign power is a state’s internal self-realisation of its truth and virtue whereby will and possession operate discursively. Virtue functioned as useable property within the legal doctrine of discovery, which provided the rationale for sovereign wills to take possession of Indigenous lands’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 178). Moreton-Robinson (2015) refers to the Christian origins of liberalism, in which postcolonising states operate on the basis that they hold divine right as external manifestations of truth and virtue located in individuals’ connection to God. When writing in response to the development of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN General Assembly, 2007), Moreton-Robinson notes two co-occurrences for the states who voted against the declaration, which includes Australia: ‘the first assertion is that the declaration is a moral and political document, but not a legally binding one, and the second is that the internal laws of the state will prevail’ (2015: 176), in line with the founding principles of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) in which the sovereignty of nation states is protected and reified.

There is, in both documents, an underlying refusal to recognise self-determination. As is evident in the simultaneous absence of reference to Indigenous sovereignties in Education for Sustainable Development policies, Indigenous knowledges can be incorporated into the nation state for improved ‘sustainable development’ and to the benefit of the state’s self-representation as virtuous. This stands in contrast to centring Indigenous claims for self-determination – whereby ongoing dispossession and postcolonising harms are produced as the problem – and the possibilities for legal and political rights to Country that stem from this position. While Education for Sustainable Development is framed as a ‘re-orientation’, in light of the above, it works instead to reify the neoliberal imperative to extend the capacity of resources to uphold the present economic system and the nation states around which these systems of extraction are operationalised. Re-orienting to consider the environment alongside economic and social needs is one way through which the economic and social structures are legitimated without disruption to the racialised postcolonising processes on which they are founded. This serves to reify the nation state as a virtuous actor to ‘protect and improve’ the environment. In doing so, Education for Sustainable Development obscures sovereign claims while simultaneously claiming to ‘reaffirm the vital role of the Indigenous peoples in sustainable development’ (World Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002: 4).

The absence of the term itself and thus concern for Country in the above functions to obscure both the ways in which imperialism and colonialism have prescribed historical relationships across hemispheres, and the ways in which present iterations of global colonising processes persist across, and is enacted within, countries. That is, in the context of the Australian curriculum, the conceptual frontier of ‘development’ functions to obscure the ways that colonial processes also continue to take place within postcolonising nations through extractive processes (Kothari, 2006; Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013: 74; Wolfe, 2006). As a consequence, Education for Sustainable Development’s translation into this nation state-bound postcolonising context serves to legitimise invader-settler investments in both education and future resource use. Further, in the translation and production through the development of the national curriculum, the emphasis produced by Education for Sustainable Development of access to resources largely produces place as either the environment or a resource, with the implication being that Country is absent, while place is reduced to displaced resources for ‘equal’ distribution and development into the future.

Conclusion

While policy analysis tends to work towards recommendations, my position as a white invader/settler writing into the policy space on unceded Kulin Country prompts me to instead rearticulate the problem to which we (fellow invader/settler educators, researchers, and policy makers) are responsible. In doing so, I am guided by Land education frameworks (Bang et al., 2014; Tuck et al., 2014), whereby the possibilities for otherwise are held in the centring of local knowledges and sovereign rights. One step towards sovereign education is found in naming the ways in which colonial logics actively impede such possibilities (Calderon, 2014). As such, I name two key issues to which invader/settler systems are responsible, and which hold particularly violent implications for the education space. In doing so, I also work from the basis that these systems have not emerged as a result of not-knowing but are instead representative of active imperatives and attempts to complete the colonial project, to secure settler futurity.

The dominant problem construction of international policies mandated by the United Nations work to create understandings of Country as the environment, as a resource. In this context, a lack of development is associated with a lack of environmental ‘protection and improvement’ (World Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002). The implications of this development narrative for postcolonising contexts are first that the internal workings of nation states like Australia are obscured, maintaining their virtuous status as working towards environmental protection, in contrast to the environmental degradation associated with poverty and the process of ‘developing’. In this way, the basis of the UN – its recognition of state sovereignty – serves to reify the nation state in the name of environmental protection. Moreover, white futures are positioned as natural extensions of ‘progress’, rationalised through the problematisation of developing nations.

The UN framing of the environment simultaneously collapses place and Country into the concept of environmental resources and works to align these resources with the future of the postcolonising nation state, solidifying settler emplacement under the guise of virtuous action. The relationship of the environment and the nation in curriculum in turn shapes articulations of worldview, systems and futures, whereby these Organising Ideas function to frame sustainable development in terms of technological development for the future ‘prosperity’ of the nation. In this way, Country is reduced to a resource for development in the rational project for modernity, in contrast to the partial, subjective, and emotional building of the white postcolonising nation state. The implication of the above is that the existence of multiple, simultaneous relationships to Country – along with the ongoing self-determination of the communities who belong to such Country – are actively erased in policy and curriculum. Naming the ways that such systems operate (in their representations of both presence and absences) is understood here as only one small movement towards the recentring of First Peoples’ sovereignty in education settings.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the support and contribution of Professor Elizabeth McKinley and Professor Johanna Wynn to this research, as supervisors of the thesis on which this paper is based and for their feedback on the development of this paper. My thanks also go to the reviewer of this paper for their generative insights. I acknowledge the First Peoples of the Country on which this research was produced, and the First Peoples - students, friends and colleagues - who continue to shape my thinking with such generosity.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by funding provided through the Research Training Program (RTP) and an Endeavour Fellowship.

ORCID iD

Fi Belcher

Notes

Fi Belcher is a white invader/settler living and writing on unceded Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung Country. She is a Research Fellow with the Atlantic Fellows for Social Equity, based at the University of Melbourne.

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