Decolonising sustainability: Subverting and appropriating mythologies of social change

Abstract

This essay explores some possibilities for decolonising the concept of sustainability in southern African discourses of environmental education by drawing attention to examples of the ways in which imperialist interests appear to be privileged in local expressions of selected transnational mythologies of social change. In a previous issue of this journal the author argued that southern African environmental educators should be suspicious of globalisation - pressures on nation states to integrate their economies into the international marketplace. Here it is argued that there may also be reasons to be suspicious of pressures to comply with international policy trends in environmental education, such as those reflected in publications from the World Commission on Environment and Development ( Our Common Future , 1987), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature ( Caring for the Earth , 1991), and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development ( Agenda 21, 1992).