Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review is the only journal on global education published in the island of Ireland. It features contributions from practitioners in a range of education settings based in Ireland, the United Kingdom, across Europe, North America and the developing world. It is in its fifth year of operation, and is now available as an open-access online publication to increase accessibility and global reach. It aims to widen the global education sector’s understanding of the delivery and effectiveness of development education at local and international levels.
6Education for Sustainable Development
Spring 2008
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In the past decade, the concept of education for sustainable development (ESD) has grown remarkably, bolstered by strong international support. The most significant and well-known recent international initiative being the United Nations proclamation of the years 2005-2014 as the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD). The Decade is the culmination of many initiatives that have developed on the international stage since 1980, when the term ‘sustainable development’ was first introduced by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Seven years later, the Brundtland Report (Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development) stated that the aim of sustainable development is to ‘meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. In 1992, Agenda 21 identified education as the most important tool that could be used to achieve sustainable development. However, ten years later the progress made by its initiatives...
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