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Contents -- Contributors -- Part I: Orientation to Education for Sustainable Development and Schools in Africa and Education for Sustainable Development Learning Processes -- Chapter 1: ESD, Learning and Quality Education in Africa: Learning Today for Tomorrow -- 1.1 The African Context -- 1.2 Methodological Note -- 1.3 ESD Learning Processes in Focus -- 1.4 ESD and Situated Learning -- 1.5 ESD and Quality Education -- 1.5.1 ESD Enables Learning as Connection -- 1.5.2 ESD Involves Critical Thinking, Action Competence, Agency and Developing Capabilities

In this response article, I draw on critical realist perspectives to engage with the argument put forward in Bengtsson's study, which sees agency as an ontological necessity for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) policy engagement. Bengtsson supports a notion of the logic of contingent action over the logic of power as dominance, suggesting possibilities for agency and resistance. Although I do not in principle disagree with the agentive possibilities embedded in this aspect of the Bengtsson argument, it is the scope of the conceptualization thereof that I consider in this response. I start with considering the limitations of a Westphalian analysis of policy appropriations and agency for ESD, and argue that the Westphalian frame for policy analysis may be inadequate for capturing the significance of non-state actors and wider generative mechanisms such as informal normative structures, and private, economic power in the global political economy. Drawing on Fraser's (2008) concept of the transnational public sphere, I explore other potential possibilities for agency-centered appropriations or negations of, and/or resistance to ESD policy discourses, potentially expanding the agency-centered perspective referred to in Bengtsson's analysis and critique of policy making for ESD, or, at the very least, by offering a wider view of possibility for what he refers to as the 'ineradicable moment of conflict, or antagonism.' In particular, I broaden the notion of the transnational public sphere to be inclusive of Dussel's (1998) three concerns of transformation, namely; poverty and wealth inequality, environmental degradation, and narrow rationalities involving ongoing colonization of people, territories and resources. In doing this, I concur with Fraser, who suggests that the concept of the public sphere may well be "so thoroughly Westphalian in its deep conceptual structure as to be unsalvageable as a critical tool for theorizing the present" and suggest that public sphere thinking and associated conceptions of agency require expansion, which I offer from postcolonial and decolonization literature, critical realism, ontological experiences, and reflection on Environmental Education (EE) /ESD policy in the southern African region. Ultimately, I propose need for a more radical framework for EE/ ESD policy research that reaches beyond analyses of appropriations of policy within the Wesphalian state framework, and that moves beyond critiquing or seeking out resistance moments associated with the assumptions of trickle down effects from UN level policy, or analysis that is centered on the EE versus ESD debate. Such a framework requires a revitalized notion of agency involving commitment to collective, relational (including the socio-materially relational) and transgressive forms of agency for deep societal transformations all round. Overall, it seems that environmental education policy and praxis research conceptualized within a decolonizing transnational sphere frame appears to still be an open and as yet under-explored terrain.

This think piece captures some of the thinking that emerged in and through the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Regional Environmental Education Programme research programme. This research programme emerged over a five-year period (2008–2012) and involved ten southern African teacher education institutions from eight countries (see 'Acknowledgements'). The research programme sought to understand what contributions environment and sustainability education could make to debates on educational quality and relevance. Issues of educational quality are high on the national agendas of governments in southern Africa, as it is now well known that providing access to schooling is not a sufficient condition for achieving educational quality. Educational quality is intimately linked to the processes of teaching and learning, but the concept of educational quality is not unproblematic in and of itself. It is, as Noel Gough (2005) noted many years ago, an 'order word' that shapes the way people think and practise. Our enquiries during this research programme involved a number of case studies (that were reported on in the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education (SAJEE) in 2008, and are again reported on in this edition of the SAJEE), but the programme also involved theoretical engagement with the concept of educational quality and relevance. This think piece helps to make some of this thinking and theoretical deliberation visible. The author of this think piece was also the leader of the regional research programme and was tasked with synthesising the theoretical deliberations that emerged from the research design which were found to be useful for guiding interpretations and deliberation on more detailed case studies undertaken at country level.

Badiou's ontological work draws attention to multiplicities – the oneness of ontology, which he explains can only become ontologically differentiated into events or sites through political, artistic or amorous practices that philosophies can think and invent from. He also draws attention to the fusion of events and sites, and he explains that events (such as producing special issues of journals located in particular sites) are reflexive. He also tells us, however, that the reflexive structure of an artistic or scientific event (such as producing a special issue of a journal) is not always immediately evident. In writing this response article I work with this concept – and probe how the production of events (such as a special issue of a journal produced in a specific site) may be reflexive. This is the purpose of the article. This response article therefore probes some of the political, structural and intellectual processes that come to shape scholarship in different sites, and here I draw on the insights into social imaginaries provided by Charles Taylor to develop a perspective on the scholarship that is reflected in this journal. Through this, I seek to open the notion of multiplicities, oneness and the particularities of our social imaginaries as themes for thinking about educational scholarship events produced within and across geo‐physical, socio‐ecological and socio‐economic spaces in different parts of the world.

Recent international policy literature on Education for Sustainable Development puts forward utopian concepts of sustainable development and transformed learning as objects for educational thinking and practice. This paper, drawing on three illustrative educational investigations with youth in a South African context, critically examines how we might engage with utopian concepts such as those put forward in the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. It incorporates an engagement with other related utopian concepts such as democracy and social justice, which feature strongly in post-apartheid societal reconstruction in South Africa. The paper argues that if we are to avoid valuable utopian concepts such as democracy, sustainability, and social justice from becoming doxic knowledge, a reflexive realist orientation might best guide our educational engagements with such concepts. Such an approach to utopianism would take account of contextual realities and situated learning processes, and foster a creativity of action that is constructivist in nature, but not relativist.

publisher version ; This short Viewpoint paper considers the role and value of conference recommendations in shaping the field of environmental education. It explores the social politics, and often contested nature, of conference recommendations and their institutional histories, arguing that the act of producing conference recommendations forms part of the practices of new social movements. The paper recommends historicising conference recommendations and OEcross readings' to consider changing discourses and new developments in the field. Accompanying the short Viewpoint paper, are two sets of recently produced conference recommendations, one from the 4th International Environmental Education Conference held in Ahmedabad, India, and the other from the 1st International Conference on Mainstreaming Environment and Sustainability in African Universities held in Nairobi, Kenya.

1. Why critical realism, environmental learning and social-ecological change? Introducing the book / Heila Lotz-Sisitka and Leigh Price -- 2. Key critical realist concepts for environmental educators / Leigh Price -- 3. Using critical realism to explain change in the context of participatory mapping and resilience / Million Belay Ali -- 4. Networking : enabling or constraining institutionalization of environmental education courses in universities / Justin Lupele -- 5. Underlabouring systems thinking with critical realism in understanding Rhodes University's response to the sustainability imperative / Muchaiteyi Togo -- 6. Bhaskar and collective action : using laminations to structure a literature review of collective action and water management / Jane Caroline Burt -- 7. Absenting the absence of parallel learning pathways for intermediate skills : the 'missing middle' in the environmental sector in South Africa / Presha Ramsarup -- 8. The emergence of environmental ethics discourses in laminated, open systems : some educational considerations / Lausanne Laura Olvitt -- 9. Working with critical realist perspective and tools at the interface of indigenous and scientific knowledge in a science curriculum setting / Rob O'Donoghue -- 10. Indigenous knowledge and critical realism on the Eastern coast of Tanzania / Daniel Sabai -- 11. Dialectical critical realism and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) : exploring and expanding learning processes in sustainable agriculture workplace contexts / Mutizwa Mukute -- 12. Community learning as a passage through the dialectic? Engaging with absences in an irrigation scheme in Mozambique / Aristides Baloi -- 13. Exploring contradictions and absences in mobilizing 'learning as process' for sustainable agricultural practices / Tichaona Pesanayi -- 14. Exploring critical realist insights into transformative environmental learning processes in contexts of social-ecological risk / Ingrid Joan Schudel -- 15. Emergent properties and position-practice system of university educators in the mainstreaming of education for sustainable development / Adesuwa Vanessa Agbedahin -- 16. Steel Valley and the absence of environmental justice in the new South Africa : critical realism's kinship with environmental justice / Victor Munnik -- 17. Absenting absence : expanding zones of proximal development in environmental learning processes / Heila Lotz-Sisitka -- 18. Some implications of metaReality for environmental educators / Leigh Price.

This response to McKenzie suggests that the issues of representivity, legitimacy and politics, inscribed within an institutional continuism characteristic of modernity within the McKenzie discourse, could well be recast within a reflexive view informed by insights derived with developing social theory. It briefly overviews the struggle for human agency that played out within the deconstructive engagements of the posts and probes how perspectives in social theory are opening the way for a break with features of environmental education as an institutional field. The review points to a reconstituting of the idea of environmental education research from scholastic field of/for environmental awareness and sustainable development, to a reflexive engagement within processes of social reproduction and reorientation in a changing world. A shift such as this would constitute a subtle change in a developing field of research, to situated design decisions of reflexive engagement (research) in social fields constituted within developing cultural contexts of risk.

In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of instrumentalist assumptions associated with pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We also point to ideological blind spots and blockages that persist in disallowing social politics and history to illuminate the complexities of human social habitus, and we reveal some of the complexities that have been set aside in the Kollmuss and Agyeman article.

The work of creating the future is being done now ─ and much of it is unsustainable in terms of natural and cultural resources. How will the next generation of leadership for environmental sustainability be raised up? Can we imagine sustainable futures, and can we enable transformative leadership to help us realize them? How can we best ensure that the several generations share their particular knowledge? What are the ethical frameworks, methodologies, curricula, and tools necessary for advancing and strengthening education for intergenerational sustainability learning and leadership?In this book, 82 authors from 26 countries across 6 continents seek answers in 32 essays to the many questions related to the intergenerational collaboration that holds promise for creating sustainable futures. The authors themselves represent a diversity of geography, gender, and generation ─ and include the institutions comprising the emerging International Intergenerational Net-work of Centers. They speak to key principles, perspectives, and praxes at the intersection of intergenerational learning and transformative leadership in the context of education for sustainability.A visionary tour de force, this book explores the challenges and complexities of future learning models beyond the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. It provides a timely discourse encompassing intergenerational and cultural dimensions, including ethics. Contributors articulate a deeper understanding of leadership in the post-Enlightenment era. Chapters in the book offer examples cutting across a diverse range of experiences worldwide, making this volume not only refreshing for practitioners, but also invaluable to policy-makers.─ Dzulkifli Abdul RazakPresident, International Association of UniversitiesFormer Vice-Chancellor, Universiti Sains MalaysiaThese are critical times for

publisher version ; Introduction: This year there has literally been a cacophony surrounding the implications of climate change, as the world geared up for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) in Copenhagen, where it was expected that the largest ever gathering of world leaders would sign binding agreements to reduce carbon emissions to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2⁰C. As we make the final contributions to the refinement of this editorial, late in December 2009, it is concerning to note that this did not happen, that civil society voices were marginalised at the COP 15 and that there has been little progress on a socially just and ecologically sound global climate change deal. The stark reality remains that developing countries – southern African countries in particular – remain most vulnerable to the risks associated with global climate change. Havnevik (2007) stated a while ago that: The ways in which poverty, consumption and climate change are addressed, tend to blur historical, structural and power features underlying global inequalities. This makes possible the focus on market forces, such as carbon trading, to resolve the problems. However, these market solutions will not suffice, and may only delay a real solution, which will then have to be developed in a situation of more acute global social injustice and possibly deeper conflicts … Issues related to inequality, energy and climate are of a global character: there is no longer one solution for the South and one for the North. (18,19) So where does the current state of climate change and the political failures surrounding responses to climate change leave education research in developing and developed nations? What are the implications for environmental education researchers in southern Africa and elsewhere? These are some of the questions pondered in this edition of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education (SAJEE). As one of us (Kronlid) reflects in a Think Piece in this journal: 'the world is one and many and … the complexities associated with climate change means that we have a shared global systematic problem manifested in a myriad different concrete ways in people's everyday life throughout the globe. We need many different kinds and modes of climate change education research' (Kronlid, this edition).