Sustainable Development Literacy

One of the statements dealing with the UN SDGs says that: „One of the major mechanisms to enact lasting and impactful change toward achieving UN Sustainability Development Goals is educating future teachers in sustainability literacy. To do so, we should make a course for primary school teachers. The goal of the course should be to develop sustainability literacy among primary school teachers by providing engaging content knowledge and enabling them to employ these concepts in their future classrooms. SDL education should begin at the earliest age. It is conducted through non-formal and formal education where universities have a key place. Education should give a new vision, skills, and knowledge to future educators and their students. It is necessary to make clear what is ’sustainability’ and ’sustainable development in everyday life and in professional life.“
That is the reason why in this Unit you will be observing the connection between environment, society, and economy. You will watch video material explaining basic physical, social, and psychological human needs and identifying how these needs are currently addressed in their own physical urban/rural settlements. After that, you will have to answer some quiz questions. The next activity will be addressing the basics of sustainable planning and building. Also, you will learn how to decouple economic growth from natural hazards and natural degradation.

Please read the section from the scientific paper in front of you N-RS"> (Connelly, S. (2007). Mapping Sustainable Development as a Contested Concept. Local Environment,12(3), 259-278.

https://www.ftf.lth.se/fileadmin/ftf/Course_pages/Faff15/Filer/Connelly_2007.pdf

Look carefully at Figures no. 1 and 2.

„Probably the most prevalent and influential way of representing and introducing the concept of sustainable development has been through the image of three overlapping circles, separately representing concerns connected with the economy, society, and the environment. Sustainable development lies in the three-fold overlap at the center, where it integrates the three areas of concern. This representation, which appears to have been developed by the International Centre for Local Environmental Initiatives in the early to mid-1990s (ICLEI, 1996), has been both fertile and long-lived. It has been reproduced in its original form and close variants in many policies and educational documents across the globe over the past ten years, particularly though not exclusively in connection with Local Agenda 21. (A quick internet search yields many instances, of which a fairly typical selection is presented in Figure 2 alongside the ICLEI original.) Without the figure, the simple spatial metaphor has become part of the taken-for-granted language of sustainable development, exemplified for example by Beauregard’s definition: ‘sustainability is situated at the intersection of environmental protection, economic growth, and social justice (2003, 72).

The original figure has spawned further variations, of which a particularly suggestive example is Campbell’s early space-within-a-triangle figure—the ‘planner’s triangle’ (Campbell, 1996) (see Figure 3). Here the three corners of the triangle are given individual meanings as possible standpoints for planners to adopt. The edges, ‘axes’, between these represent conflicts between the positions, and sustainable development is placed in the center as the potential, elusive reconciliation towards which planners can strive—unreachable in any complete and final way yet ever-present as a guiding pole in relation to which planners can orient themselves. The image of the three circles and the metaphor it captures are powerful, their longevity testifying to their attractiveness as a way to communicate what is special and (once) new about sustainable development (Myerson & Rydin, 1996). They neatly capture the difference between sustainable development and the previously separate concerns of policy and politics, suggesting not only the holistic scope of the concept but also its characteristic claim to integration—it is an easy step from the overlapping circles to claims of possible ‘win-win–win’ policies (see, for example, Pinfield, 1996). The boundary they mark out between sustainable development and the separate concerns is well defined, setting it apart as essentially different. Within the boundary, the concept is internally undifferentiated, communicating the sense that ‘sustainable development is a unitary, unambiguous concept or goal. This gives the image its rhetorical power and usefulness as a presentation of the ‘first order’ of the meaning of the concept—the level over which agreement is easy (Jacobs, 1999b).“

• Explain how you understood the win-win-win policy.

• What does the SD represent according to Figure 1?

• Look at Figure 8 on page 273 of the same article and read the following sentences: