The Aichi-Nagoya Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development

At the time when the UN member states were preparing to conclude negotiations on the global post-2015 agenda and launch a set of sustainable development goals, UNESCO has conducted the World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development in Aïchi-Nagoya, Japan, on 10-12 November 2014. The conference has declared the Global Action Programme (GAP) on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), an action to mainstream ESD and include ESD in the post-2015 development agenda. The main background of this conference concern on the deep economic and social inequalities, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, disruption caused by natural disasters and climate change. At this time education must play a decisive role in providing learners across the world with the knowledge, skills and values to discover solutions to today’s sustainability challenges. This carries benefit for present and future generations. More than 1,000 participants gathered for the three-day conference under the theme “Learning Today for a Sustainable Future.” Among them were 76 ministerial-level representatives of UNESCO Member States, NGOs, academia, the private sector and UN agencies, as well as individual experts and youth participants from 150 countries.

The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) took place from 2005 to 2014, with the goal of emphasizing education in all its forms (formal, non-formal and informal) as an indispensable element for achieving sustainable development. In November 2014, as the official follow-up to the DESD, UNESCO launched the Global Action Programme (GAP) for ESD with the overall objective to scale up action on ESD worldwide. Two basic and very important objectives of GAP on ESD are: 

1. Reorienting education and learning so that everyone has the opportunity to acquire the values, skills and knowledge that empower them to contribute to sustainable development; and 

2. Enhancing the role of education and learning in all relevant agendas, programmes and activities that promote sustainable development. 

The GAP focuses on generating and scaling-up action in five Priority Action Areas: 1. Advancing policy; 2. Transforming learning and training environments; 3. Building capacities of educators and trainers; 4. Empowering and mobilizing youth; 5. Accelerating sustainable solutions at local level. Due to its strong linkages with sustainable development, the GAP on ESD provides an excellent framework for understanding the types of education, training and public awareness initiatives conducive to enable people of all ages to understand and implement solutions for solving the complex problems presented by climate change. UNESCO’s work on Climate Change Education (CCE) within the framework of its GAP on ESD aims to make education a more central and visible part of the international response to climate change; to support countries to integrate CCE into their education and training systems; and to support countries in achieving a smooth transition to green economies and resilient societies through education and training.

The framework is based on Result-based Management (RBM) to strengthen transparency and accountability, as well as help track outcomes systematically according to objectives. The guidelines are divided into 4 phases and 10 steps:

Phase 1 is initiation, including 4 steps as follows (1) Establish coordination (2) Gain a strong conceptual base (3) Take stock of existing national policies and policies (4) Create a monitoring and evaluation plan. Phase 2 is planning, including 3 steps as follows (1) Assess needs and delivery capacities (2) Create draft strategic plan (3) Conduct stakeholder consultations. Phase 3 is implementation, including 2 steps as follows (1) Establish cross-sector partnerships for implementation (2) Mobilize financial and technical resources. And phase 4 is monitoring, evaluation and reporting, including one step (1) create a monitoring, evaluation and reporting plan.

The principal objective of these guidelines is to facilitate the implementation of Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) at the national level, in accordance with the Doha Work Programme on Article 6 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This common objective is anchored in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in its Article 6 pertaining to education, training, public awareness, public access to information, public participation and international cooperation (referred to popularly as Action for Climate Empowerment – ACE), as well as in Article 10 (e) of the Kyoto Protocol and Article 12 of the Paris Agreement.

The Aichi-Nagoya Declaration calls on all nations to implement the Global Action Programme on ESD (GAP) to move the ESD agenda forward. According to Mr Qian Tang, Assistant Director-General for Education of UNESCO, The Aichi-Nagoya Declaration was able to share successful initiatives from all over the world, to help government representatives and other key stakeholders formulate new goals and objectives. The Aichi-Nagoya Declaration has shaped these into a Roadmap for ESD that will implement the Global Action Programme. The Declaration also ensures that the outcomes of the Conference will be taken into account at the World Education Forum 2015 to be held in Incheon, Republic of Korea, a continuation of the Education for All (EFA) movement and the Millennium Goals on Education, and many of its goals were based on a review of progress made since the 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar. 

Reference

1. UNESCO, World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development calls for renewed commitment by all countries, accessed on 26 May 2017, see: http://en.unesco.org/news/world-conference-education-sustainable-development-calls-renewed-commitment-all-countries

2. Global Education Magazine, Aichi-Nagoya Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development: Shaping the Future We Want, accessed on 26 May 2017, see: http://www.globaleducationmagazine.com/aichi-nagoya-declaration-education-sustainable-development-shaping-future/ 

3. UNESCO, World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development calls for renewed commitment by all countries, accessed on 26 May 2017, see: http://en.unesco.org/news/world-conference-education-sustainable-development-calls-renewed-commitment-all-countries  

4. Wikipedia, Education for Sustainable Development, accessed on 26 May 2017, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_for_sustainable_development 

5. UNESCO and UNFCCC (2016), Action for Climate Empowerment: Guidelines for Accelerating Solutions through education, training and public awareness, UNESCO - UNFCCC, pp. 4-6. Link: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002464/246435e.pdf 

6. Ibid, pp. vii

7. Ibid, pp. xii

8. Ibid, pp. 2

9. UNESCO, World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development calls for renewed commitment by all countries, accessed on 28 May 2017, see: http://en.unesco.org/news/world-conference-education-sustainable-development-calls-renewed-commitment-all-countries

10. Global Education Magazine, Aichi-Nagoya Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development: Shaping the Future We Want, accessed on 26 May 2017, see: http://www.globaleducationmagazine.com/aichi-nagoya-declaration-education-sustainable-development-shaping-future/

11. Wikipedia, Incheon Declaration, accessed on 28 May 2017, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incheon_declaration 

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What is the Future? (A Book Review of John Urry’s)

There are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct 
- George Friedman -

John Urry is a British sociologist, a Professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility. He has written books on many other aspects of modern society including the transition away from 'organized capitalism', the sociology of nature and environmentalism, and social theory in general.

“What is the Future” is a book which is published on 8 August 2016 by Polity Press, United Kingdom. In this book, John Urry seeks to capture the many efforts that have been made to anticipate, visualize and elaborate the future. This includes examining the methods used to model the future, from those of the RAND Corporation to imagined future worlds in philosophy, literature, art, film, TV and computer games. He shows that futures are often contested and saturated with different interests, especially in relation to future generations. He also shows how analyses of social institutions, practices and lives should be central to examining potential futures, and issues such as who owns the future.

The future seems to be characterized by wicked problems. There are multiple causes and solutions, long-term lock-ins and complex interdependencies, and different social groups have radically different frames for understanding what is at stake. Thinking about the future is essential for almost all organizations and societies. States, corporations, universities, cities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future. But what exactly is the future? It remains a mystery perhaps the greatest mystery, especially because futures are unpredictable and often unknowable, the outcome of many factors, known and unknown. Just as the quote of George Friedman mentioned above that “there are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct”.

So what can be done to anticipate the upcoming future for the sake of our selves, our groups, communities, societies, companies, industries, states, and so on? John Urry in his preface argued that the first reason for writing a book on futures is to demonstrate the many efforts made, in the past and now, to anticipate, visualize and elaborate the future(s) within various domains of human activities.

Powerful social institution and thinkers are developing various kinds of anticipatory discourses and techniques (see Szerszynski 2016, on Anticipation). This future orientation is big and significant business for companies like Google or Shell, environmental organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or Forum for the Future, government bodies like BAPPENAS in Indonesia or Foresight in the UK or European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS) in the EU, military organization such as Pentagon, academic bodies such as London School of Economics in the UK, Harvard University in the US or even SGPP – Indonesia.

Specific methods have been developed for envisaging, visualizing and assessing potential upcoming futures. Some of these originated from scenario planning exercise that Hermann Kahn initiated at the Rand Corporation during the 1950s (Son 2015: 124). He especially promoted the development of alternative scenario, noting how they enabled the imagining of different future possibilities. Also, many imagines future worlds have been developed within literature, art, film, TV, computer games and so on. These often involved spectacular future technologies such as time-travel, personal flying machines, roads and trains in the sky, teleportation, robots, walking upon water, off-earth communities, vacuum powered propulsion, driverless trains, equal utopias, as well as many dark dystrophic futures. In this book, John Urry documented and assessed some of these ways in which organizations, intellectuals, scientists, artists, policy makers and technologists, have developed, or are developing, futures.

In the section about the Past Futures, Urry explored that although it is impossible to ‘know’ what the future has in store for us, most recorded societies developed procedures and discourses through which they believed the future could be anticipated. And this is so whether that perceived future was in the hands of God or humans. People imagined, predicted, divined, prophesied and told many different futures, good and bad. According to Urry, how these assemblages of the future were achieved tells us much about a society’s working. The forms of future anticipation have many implications for the nature of each society and especially regarding how relations of power are structured and flow. A key element of power is the power to determine – to produce – the future, out of many ways it is imagined, organized, materialized and distributed.

John Urry emphasized that within social science there are three main approaches to anticipating social futures. First, and most powerful is the individualistic model of human action, in which theories and methods emphasizes the capacity of individuals to behave in some sense rationality, or at least independently of others, so as to determine what to determine what to do and why. Second, a set of theories emphasizes the importance of relatively fixed and enduring economic and social structures. And third is that od complexity theory, now present within many disciplines. A complex system approach brings out that the future cannot be reduced either to the actions of individual actors or to persisting social structures. In relation with the complex system, there are two factors that intertwine, they are time and networks.

Can we innovate the future? If it can, how the innovation should be done? It might be the main discourse of this book. He argued that the central of many future scenarios are novel and unexpected sociomaterial systems. But in developing anticipations of the future we should resist a technology-first analysis – technologies do not develop only for endogenous reasons. Nor do they then transform the economic and social landscape in their own image once they have been developed. Technology are embedded within many forms of economic, social and political life. Such systems are not autonomous, or free from the influence of non-technical factors.

According to Urry, the best innovation will not be the one that ultimately shapes the future. Innovation involves processes that are different from the linear notions often spoken about and promoted by policy makers. They typically describe innovation as a top-down process developed and implemented by hierarchical actors, resulting from the brilliance of an entrepreneur, or the chance ‘discovery’ of a new technology, or the system of knowledge-creation put in place by far-sighted policy makers. If only the conditions are right, then policy makers maintain that the innovation will materialize and the future will be successfully remade.

Innovation involves combining isolated elements into a new system, oftem over a lengthly period, such new systems being not technological or economic or social or political but all of these. System innovation involves the co-evolutrion of numerous interrelated elements; there are changes in both demand and supply sides; many agents are involved; long-term processes occur over decades. An example of the problematic character of policy development can be seen in the ‘need’ for people to reduce their carbon footprint.

Therefore, innovation likely to be important in the future must also confront the momentum of existing systems since the future is not at all empty. Societal changecan be glacially slow that stems from many limits in futures. Such limits include cognitive and non-cognitive human capacities, the embedded practices and traditions within each society, the power and conserving effect of national and international states, interlocking global processes operating on multiple scales, the relative fixity of the built environment, various economic, technological and social path-dependencies. And it is also almost impossible for social groups to anticipate what exactly will generate desired change.In other words, while many groups seek to realize change, it is enormously hard to ensure a preferred future.

Thus knowing what will produce desired future change is almost impossible. But if a new momentum does get established, then benefits flow throughout networks and result in extensive ‘increasing returns’ to scale, Urry cited Athur argument in economic terms in “Increasing returns and Path Dependece in the Economy” (1994).

Urry also showed that “small” technology can bring big consequences in society. A small technology such as ATM card and credit card, that facilitates new forms of movement away from home and work, since large amounts of money no longer need to be riskily carried upon each person who is on the move.

In this book, Urry explore some methods for making futures. First, learning from past visions of the future. Second, studying ‘failed’ futures. Third, developing dystopic thought. Fourth, utopia. It means utopia as method that the presence of a utopia, the ability to think alternative solutions to the festering problems of the present, may be seen therefore as a necessary condition of historical change. Fifth, extrapolating from elements of the present. And sixth, the final – and in a way the most significant – method is that of scenario building. Scenario development involves establishing characterization of the economy or society for a future year in the light of known trends, the main sources of change and the likely patterns of economic and social life.

In the end part of the book, John Urry explore about some explanation on how to manufacture future worlds, cities and climate.

To end this review, this book is actually a comprehensive sociology discourse on social change or social engineering to the future. How did the society change and how the change can be constructed for the future. To enclose this review, I would like to recite once more the George Friedman’s quote that there are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct.

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