Shaping the GAP: Ideas for the UNESCO Post-2014 ESD Agenda

This paper explores how ESD activities may be viewed on a continuum from "causal" approaches, seeking to cause change in others, to "enabling" orientations where efforts are made to enable people to implement the principles of ESD and respond to the environmental challenges they face from their own context. An enabling orientation seeks to both "mobilise" participants' perspectives and engage with them in a systems-wide or holistic space. They tend to make more meaning for learners by making useful connections between theory and context-relevant practice, thus enabling application to new contexts. The paper develops the notion of capabilities and the importance of reflexivity through which one learns to respond in different ways in different circumstances. Finally the paper explores some outcomes of the DESD and develops pointers for enabling education processes in the next decade and forthcoming Global Action Programme (GAP). [This article was first prepared for the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (IAS).]