Education for Sustainable Development: National, Regional and Global Perspectives

This paper focuses on the correlation between education and sustainable development unveiling the human dimension of development process. In authors’ opinion, success in revising unsustainable trends will, to a large extent, depend on the flexibility in understanding the type of education needed for sustainable human development. For the national level of analysis, it has been used neo-institutional mental models to interpret the environment in which education takes form. Knowledge acquisition is underlain by perceptions derived from the process of collective learning across generations, and is a cumulative process subject to social and cultural filtration. As learning incentives are also influenced by culture, there is nothing to guarantee that the amount of experience gathered by society can adjust the incentives so as to support the solution identification for sustainable development. The inertia of path dependence phenomenon much impedes the progress towards the implementation of the sustainable development goals. From a European perspective, education for sustainable development is a lifelong process and goes beyond formal education. By promoting essential social and civic values such as equality, tolerance, respect and active citizenship, education makes a significant contribution to strengthening social cohesion and thus mutually human cooperative actions. For the global perspective on the issue some incremental mentality and paradigmatic shifts toward global intelligence are needed. That is developing ability to understand, respond to, and work for what is in the best interest of and will benefit all human beings and all other life on our planet. The global intelligence presupposes a holistic mode of thinking, a transdisciplinary one, and also new kinds of knowledge emerged from intercultural cooperation. This is indeed a drastic change in the rhetoric of sustainable development, one that will bring viable alternatives for the unilateral economic logic.