Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an initiative that dates back to the early 1990s. Whilst policy statements at this time referred to ESD as a bringing together of environmental and development education, in the UK, as in most other industrialized countries, it has been the environmental agenda that has tended to dominate. In the UK, policy-makers have since 1997 played an increasingly leading role in promoting ESD, particularly within schools. However, the drive behind these initiatives poses wider questions about their ultimate purpose: a learning agenda or one based on seeking behavioural change? Development education has always been the junior partner in the ESD debates in the UK, in part because of its low academic profile but also because of the policy separation by governments.This has, however, begun to change through the merging of policy initiatives around ESD and global citizenship which, by their very nature, are again posing the wider questions about the purpose and goal of these agendas.
