Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a concept referring to all teaching, learning and capacity building that seeks to develop a citizenry that can live more sustainably on the Earth. It focuses on learning processes and learning environments that can foster the qualities and competencies people need to contribute to more sustainable forms of being. Typically these qualities and related competencies include being caring, mindful, respectful, compassionate, and critical in the way we relate to each other to people elsewhere and future generations, but also to other species; systems thinking; dealing with uncertainty and (eco)anxiety; moral reasoning; anticipatory thinking; and the ability to make change. Within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, ESD became a component of one of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): SDG 4 ‘Quality Education.’ Newly emerging strands in the context of ESD, also seeking to transcend ESD, include a critical transgressive strand emphasizing the important of not just developing agency and competence that citizens need to learn to live equitably and meaningfully within planetary boundaries, but also helping learners in critiquing and changing or even disrupting structures and systems that normalize unsustainability. Another emerging strand is a posthuman, relational strand that emphasizes the importance of decentering the human and becoming aware of our inevitable entanglement with nature and other species. While receiving much attention in international governance and policy contexts, enactment of ESD in practice lags behind, in part due to different priorities in education at the country level and a lack of understanding of its meaning and its potential significance in reforming education and learning in times of global sustainability challenges. At the same time some scholars critique ESD for being overly instrumental, anthropocentric, and having colonizing tendencies that ignore Indigenous and local perspectives on both education and sustainability.
