The Journal of Environmental Education

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjee20

Caribbean dreams: Education for more than just

sustainable development

Nigel O. M. Brissett

To cite this article: Nigel O. M. Brissett (2022): Caribbean dreams: Education for more
than just sustainable development, The Journal of Environmental Education, DOI:
10.1080/00958964.2021.2023448

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2021.2023448

Published online: 12 Jan 2022.

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THE JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2021.2023448

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Caribbean dreams: Education for more than just sustainable

development
Nigel O. M. Brissett
Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Education has the potential to help address some of the most critical social and CARICOM Caribbean;
environmental issues of the Caribbean. However, I argue that this can only occur education for social
if there is a radical critique of the now dominant education for sustainable devel- transformation; education
opment (ESD) discourse, which is seemingly constructed primarily from the posi- for sustainable
development; small island
tionality and interests of the global powerful. I draw on repositioning theory to
developing states;
reframe the perspective from which the sustainability discourse is constructed sustainable development
to advocate for an educational approach that is more relevant to the context of
the Caribbean. The resulting education envisioned in this paper, Education for
Social Transformation (EST), challenges some of the assumptions and conceptions
of ESD by exposing broader issues of inequity that the latter concept implicitly
endorses. I argue that EST may help build sustainable Caribbean societies by
linking environmental preservation to broader social transformations. Thus, trans-
formation takes center stage in place of the limited notion of sustainability that
has become synonymous with capitalist development violence.

Introduction
Education has both transformative and reproductive components, but it is the reproductive element that
often dominates in the global discourse of education and development (Desjardins, 2015; Maclure et al.,
2009). Education for sustainable development (ESD), as it has been popularized to the extent that the
United Nations declared 2005–2014 as the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, is more
consistent with the reproductive form of education. I posit that ESD, which “has achieved a hegemonic
status as [a] global discourse” (Tikly, 2019, p. 224), will not advance the Caribbean region toward socially
and environmentally just societies. ESD is hamstrung by its conceptual and practical commitment to the
global status quo that is built on a capitalist pro-growth model that inevitably exploits the environment
and the historically marginalized, including those of the post-colonial Caribbean. I present an alternative
to ESD by drawing on the theory of repositioning, which is used to connote a way of looking at a par-
ticular issue from a different perspective or positionality than before (Gale, 2003; Simons et al., 2009).
Ultimately, repositioning is a conscious act of upending power by changing the perspective from which
a phenomenon is viewed. By this conceptual and political process of repositioning, instead of ESD, which
I argue engages with sustainability from the position of the privileged, I advocate for Education for Social
Transformation (EST), a concept and practice that is built aspirationally on challenging structures, and
the choices they engender, that have marginalized people and societies, as well as fueled the unconscio-
nable exploitation of the environment (Brissett, 2018; Maclure, 2018).
EST’s approach is particularly important given the history of exploitation of the Caribbean environ-
ment and its people, which has had continuing effects. I challenge the term Education for Sustainable
Development, given certain philosophical and critical perspectives that the term development invites and
the replication of this system that the expression sustainability signals. Misiaszek (2015) observes that

CONTACT Nigel O. M. Brissett nbrissett@clarku.edu

© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 N. O. M. BRISSETT

ESD’s early efforts at “connecting society and the environment within education…were hijacked to have
only economic and Western goals” (p. 286). EST, on the other hand, makes deliberate and explicit con-
nections between social equity and the protection of the environment. Here I posit that EST’s value is
that it implicitly and explicitly attempts to avoid decoupling of environmental protection from issues of
social and economic justice, as well as it deliberately focuses on transforming rather than sustaining a
deeply flawed system. Thus, I share Robinson and Shallcross’ (1998) position that EST is “fundamentally
about the links between the health of the human species and its supporting social systems and the health
of the planet which we inhabit” (p. 70). I proffer that ESD expresses and is implicitly tied to the commit-
ment of the world’s privileged by (1) advocating for the sustenance of a type of economic development
model that is exploitative, contested and unsustainable, and by (2) focusing primarily on human and
economic dominion over nature without sufficient attention to the environmental costs and the human
socio-economic inequities that this agenda produces as evidenced in the Caribbean region. EST on the
other hand deliberately engages with the dual and intersecting existential threats of environmental disaster
and social inequality of the world’s poor, including those of the Caribbean, and seeks to proactively
educate citizens with these concerns at the forefront.
The paper unfolds in the following manner. I begin by interrogating the concept of sustainable devel-
opment and the contradictions that the term embodies, and then make a case for why we need to repo-
sition how we view the sustainable development discourse. This repositioning, the act of examining an
issue from a different perspective, lays the groundwork for surveying the Caribbean context and why it
is important to transform these societies instead of sustaining these flawed systems. The final two sections
describe the aspirational Caribbean societies and outline the framework of education for social trans-
formation that may lead to such societies. I end with a brief reflective conclusion.

Contesting sustainable development and education as its handmaiden

One of the first and obvious questions when engaged in a discussion about “sustainable development”
is what does this term mean? There have been extensive discussions over the years about its meaning,
with much consternation that it is too vague (Tisdell, 1988). Selby (2013), for example, claims that sus-
tainable development “has become for many a vague slogan, a bold platitude, susceptible to manipulation
and deception” (p. 355). The now well referenced Brundtland Report’s (World Commission on
Environment and Development, 1987) definition attempted to invoke a shared meaning, noting that
sustainable development is development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 6). Yet even with this definition, there continue
to be arguments that the term is still too imprecise and liable to misuse. In fact, Dobson (1996) identified
over 300 definitions and interpretations of the concept of sustainable development. And even though
the original intent of the Bruntland agenda was to present an alternative approach to the dominant
economic paradigm, corporate and neoliberal interpretations and institutionalization of the concept
have been geared toward elevating economic growth at the expense of the environment and justice
(Banerjee, 2003; Irving & Helin, 2018). As Banerjee (2003) observes, such “discourses of sustainable
development are becoming increasingly corporatized” (p. 162).
While this paper’s primary focus is not a historical analysis of the various meanings, there are a few
important points of contestation that are important to my discussion of sustainable development. I share
Nazir et al.’s (2009) view that “work needs to be done in unpacking the term…in particular, the terms
education, sustainability and development” (p. 25). For example, each term and the practices that support
them, that is, development and sustainability, raise concerns even before they are combined to form
sustainable development. First, the term development, as used in the dominant post World War II devel-
opment discourse, has been challenged by multiple critical scholars (Banerjee, 2003; Escobar, 2012;
Rahnema, 2000). From a postcolonial analytic perspective, the basis of critique is that modernist capitalist
development ideas and practices have emerged from a history of imperialism, plunder and exploitation,
and is structured on unequal global relations of political and economic power that can be traced back
to colonialism (Tangi, 2005). As such, capitalist development in its current state is seen as oppressive and
an almost unattainable aspiration for the Global South, including the Caribbean (Brissett, 2018). Further,
 THE JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION 3

capitalist development is based on an infinite growth model with fundamental and disastrous effects on
the health of the planet in multiple ways. For instance, the drive toward development, which seems to
have no defined end, has resulted in resource extraction and the displacement of various species, pollution
of air and land, destruction of animal and plant species, rising and dangerous levels of carbon dioxide
(CO2) with accompanying climate change effects and imbalances of the earth’s delicate ecosystem (United
Nations Environment Programme & Division of Early Warning and Assessment, 2014; Bonneuil et al.,
2015). Secondly, the term sustainability by itself literally means “a capacity to maintain some entity,
outcome, or process over time” (Jenkins, 2009, p. 380). With reference to the economic growth meaning
of development, this connotes maintaining (or sustaining) exploitation of the Earth and its most vulner-
able in service of economic growth (Irving & Helin, 2018). This notion of continued environmental
exploitation that sustainable development conveys has resulted in the “environmental paradox,” meaning
that there is a mismatch between what is demanded of the Earth and what the Earth is capable of sup-
plying (Fitzpatrick & Cahill, 2002; Goldin, 2018; Williams & Millington, 2004). There is some research
that suggests that if everyone on the planet were to live like Americans, the society considered to be at
the height of modernist capitalist lifestyle and to which others should aspire in the dominant development
discourse, we would need 5 planet Earths (Global Footprint Network, 2009). Thus, as Banerjee (2003)
notes, “sustainability and development are based on very different and often incompatible assumptions”
(p. 158). Further from a postcolonial analytical perspective, this idea of sustainable development also
advances the notion of sustaining a historically unequal and inequitable system that transfers power from
the Global South to the Global North, and from poor and vulnerable to wealthy individuals through the
Global North’s unconscionable contamination of the Earth for economic gain, with the Global South
bearing the consequences inequitably. Thus, the idea that sustainable development “meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” is rendered
deeply problematic for the Caribbean.
Therefore, in education for sustainable development (ESD), education is set up to serve as accomplice
for the continuation of a system that enables the further transfer of power from the Global dispossessed
to the Global haves, and the unsustainable abuse of the Earth for economic gain. “Why educate for such
a thing”? Jickling (1992, p. 3) rightly asks. Given our discussion of the conceptual and practical challenges
that sustainable development poses to the Caribbean, this handmaiden role of education is deeply prob-
lematic. Critiquing the proponents of ESD for their lack of conceptual analysis of the concept, Jickling
(1992) highlights several fundamentally flawed areas of ESD. One, is the imprecise and oxymoronic
nature of sustainable development as discussed earlier, which Kopnina and Meijers (2014) also surmise
“might lead to misguided efforts in measuring something that has questionable value” (p. 194). Second,
the deployment of education in the advancement of a predetermined agenda (one that is vague at that,
which also lends itself to neoliberal capture) and mode of thinking is inconsistent with nature of educa-
tion, which is to “enable people to think for themselves” (p. 8); thus ESD “smack[s] of indoctrination”
(Jickling & Wals, 2012, p. 51). Wals (Jickling & Wals, 2012) also identifies a “colonizing instrumentality
that characterize[s] ESD,” reflecting my own critique ESD for the formerly colonized region of the
Caribbean.
Admittedly, it is not unreasonable harbor the idea that the ambiguity and vagueness of the definition
of sustainable development does not only allow reactionary interpretations; some will hold the view that
there is also the potential for ESD to facilitate ready adaptability to local contexts, including the Caribbean
(Down, 2015). And one must also acknowledge that there are scholars and practitioners who have done
progressive work under the banner of ESD (see examples, Down, 2015; Nazir et al., 2009, among others)
in the Caribbean. However, I posit that ESD as a global discourse is littered with and has been bent more
toward misuse and environmental vandalism that the term has become burdened by its preceding history
and has been “hijacked to have only economic and Western goals” (Misiaszek, 2015, p. 286). Possibilities
for redemption for ESD are therefore limited and it poses even greater threat for the Caribbean going
forward. A different concept and nomenclature that convey the concerns for the equitable consideration
of the social and environmental is therefore necessary. Thus I share Jickling’s views that though some
have insisted on the potential of ESD, “in the end it is a kind of ‘feel good’ education only – because it is
ultimately constrained by the idea of sustainable development” (p. 55). Huckle & Wals (2015) crystalize
4 N. O. M. BRISSETT

the limitations of education for sustainable development by noting that the lack of success of the UN
Decade for Education for Sustainable Development was because “it failed to acknowledge or challenge
neoliberalism as a hegemonic force blocking transition toward genuine sustainability” (p. 491). More
specifically, they find that “the majority of those who determined its rationale and developed educational
projects and programs under its umbrella failed” in their efforts due to their “misplaced idealism or the
censoring of more critical [educational] ideas and content” (p. 492). As Orr (1994) notes under ESD,
“without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the
earth” (p. 5). This is why Tikly (2019) argues that if education is to play a transformative role in relation
to sustainable development then education…needs to be fundamentally re-oriented and harnessed to
wider processes of economic, cultural and political transformation in the interests of social and environ-
mental justice” (p. 223).

Repositioning the subjects in sustainable development discourse

Tikly’s (2019) call to reorient education to wider processes and context is consistent with the more
deliberate and political act of repositioning. Repositioning builds on the notion of positioning which is
used to denote “a loose set of rights and duties that limit possibility for action. A position implicitly limits
how much of what is logically possible for a given person to say and do…” (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003,
p. 5). These authors further add that “positioning someone…affects the repertoire of acts one has
access to.” (p. 5). In consequential ways positioning is fundamentally about the power to participate or
be represented in an event or issue. Thus re-positioning holds “that alternative knowledge practice can
be imagined to unsettle the structure” (Takayama, 2016, p. 19). Repositioning, then, shifts the power, in
this case, to the participation and perspective of the less powerful; it is a concept that is generally used
to connote a way of looking at a particular issue from a different perspective or positionality than before
(Gale, 2003; Simons et al., 2009). Applied to public policy or social initiatives, such as education and
sustainable development, repositioning involves examining policy issues from the perspective of the
most vulnerable social, political and economic stakeholders. How might a repositioning of how we view
an important discourse of our time, sustainable development, be interpreted from the perspective of a
Global South region such as the Caribbean? What might we learn about how and the extent to which
environmental sustainability policy discourses, framed at the international and global levels, are inclusive
of the contexts and interests of the Caribbean region? And how do such lessons shape the way we envision
education’s role in positive social change?
Implicitly referencing the principles of repositioning, Shearman (1990) provides a potential path to
having a productive engagement with sustainable development and education by noting that for any
conceptualizing of sustainability to be productive it should be context specific. He suggests that instead
of the term sustainability, it is “its implications for any given context to which it is applied” that “requires
definition or clarification” (p. 1). In other words, as Shearman continues, we need to define “the concep-
tual framework surrounding sustainability (not sustainability itself) so that we might achieve a greater
understanding of the issues involved” (p. 3). Therefore, he proffers that if we are advocating for the idea
of sustainable development, we should clearly identify both the notion of what constitutes a sustainable
society and the means necessary to bring a sustainable society to fruition (Shearman, 1990). Here,
Shearman is both recognizing sustainable development’s vague, acritical and apolitical nature as a concept
but also advocating for deeper understanding of and engagement with specific contexts. This allows us
to reframe the core concept of sustainability, its nomenclature and the practices that support it in more
progressive ways that are responsive to particular settings. In other words, Shearman’s approach allows
for a repositioning of “sustainable development” and the education that it requires and looking at them
from the perspective of the Caribbean context. Using Shearman’s approach also allows us to (1) unmask
the political nature of the sustainable development discourse(s), revealing that both the product and
process of what constitute sustainability and how we get there are grounds on which power of various
forms compete, (2) take the position that there are multiple global societies that share very different
histories, which has implications on how we conceptualize and contextualize both the product and process
of desirable and sustainable Caribbean societies, and (3) position the Caribbean as a basis on which the
 THE JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION 5

discourse and practices of education for sustainable development are constructed. The acknowledgement
of these three positions invites deeper analysis of the implications of sustainable development strategies
across time and space. What this means, then, in the context of the Caribbean, is that we must chiefly
ask: What kinds of Caribbean societies ought to be desirable and sustainable given the region’s context?
What expectations should we have of education in pursuit of these sustainable societies?

The context of the Caribbean

The CARICOM Caribbean1 is a project of modernity, of the process of European colonial expansion into
the “New World” and the drive to develop and enrich European empires under the patronizing guise of
civilizing heathen societies (Beckles, 1997; Bernstein, 2000; Hall, 2001). European’s harsh treatment of
the native peoples of the Caribbean, along with their diseases, led to the extinction of most of these native
societies across the Caribbean (Agozino et al., 2009). Land grab, enslavement and transport of Africans
to the region, as well as indentured servitude of other peoples, furthered the exploitation of people and
the environment and in turn enriched European colonial empires, processes that were instrumental to
the development of Western capitalism and the Industrial Revolution which set the stage for today’s
Western wealth and global power imbalances (Williams, 1994). These early systems of exploitation
established the mechanisms for the unequal relations of power, such that even after their independence,
Caribbean societies have limited voice in political economic decisions and in steering the development
agendas and discourses like sustainable development. They have also resulted historically in the massive
transfer of wealth (economic, cultural, intellectual and political) away from the region to the Global
North through processes such as debt, unfair trade rules and practices and other forms of political-eco-
nomic coercion by Western industrialized countries, bilateral and multilateral organizations (George, 2007).
The contemporary Caribbean is plagued by some of the most persist development challenges, includ-
ing high levels of indebtedness whereby two thirds of the countries in the region are well above the
debt-to-GDP ratio of 60 per cent threshold used by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to define
high level public debt vulnerability (OECD, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean,
CAF Development Bank of Latin America, & European Commission, 2020). Crime, much of which
has been attributed to the region’s violent plantation slavery and colonial history, as well as the living
conditions precipitated by structural adjustment policies, is also problematic, particularly in urban areas
where it is estimated that an average of 15% of individuals in capital cities in the region are victims of
crime (Agozino et al., 2009; Sutton & Ruprah, 2017). And the region is also a transshipment area for
illicit drugs on their way to North America for consumption, which has helped fuel the influx of guns
and violent gang activity in the Caribbean (Agozino et al., 2009). A report, funded by Inter-American
Development Bank, also estimates that crime and insecurity cost the region 3% of GDP, with the greatest
financial impact on the poor (Sutton & Ruprah, 2017).
Environmentally, the Caribbean is one of the most vulnerable regions of the world and is “prone
to increased incidence of severe weather, coastal zone erosion, effects of flora, fauna and agriculture
and other concerns” (CARICOM, 2014, p. 26). And even though the Caribbean accounts for a mere
fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is disproportionately vulnerable to the consequences
of climate change (Fuller et al., 2020). Heavily tourism dependent, the Caribbean is “both the most
tourist-intensive region in the world and set to become the most at-risk tourist destination between
2025 and 2050” (UNESCO, 2016, p. 158). The IMF (2013) notes that most CARICOM countries
have at least a 10% chance of being struck by a hurricane each year and the probability is even as
high as 24% in Jamaica and 20% in the Bahamas, and even moderate storms can reduce growth by
about 0.5% of GDP. Such economic problems also help to fuel high unemployment levels in the
region, with an average of 11.7% (Alleyne et al., 2021) with much higher levels among the youth
population which are said to be between 18% and 47% (CARICOM, 2018). Further, high levels of
unemployment reflect deeper issues of persistent poverty and inequality. In his study, Constantine
(2020) notes that inequality in individual countries in the region, which seems likely to persist
overtime, can have serious negative impact on growth and equality and may engender elite-centric
politics.
6 N. O. M. BRISSETT

The deep inequalities persistent in Caribbean societies manifest themselves in education, where even
after extensive post-World War II and post-independence investments in primary and secondary edu-
cation, these countries still have significant divisions in terms of who has access to quality education.
And even with the recently increased focus on early childhood and tertiary education to accompany
previous investments in primary and secondary education (CARICOM, 1997; CARICOM, 2018), these
reforms, while consequential, have not been able to fully undo deeply embedded values of colonialism,
the system under which education in the Caribbean was founded. The earliest form of education in the
region developed solely to educate White settlers who could not afford to return to Britain for education,
and the extension of schooling to the formerly enslaved populations was strenuously resisted by White
plantation owners (Bacchus, 1990; Jules, 2008). Some disjointed formal education was only extended to
the masses through religious means and just prior to emancipation to facilitate their citizenship in a
changing society (Bacchus, 1990). And even after these expansion endeavors, education provision con-
tinued to be plagued by race, ethnicity, skin shade, gender and irrelevant content fit for the working class
in England rather than the Caribbean (Bailey, 2019); these systems of discrimination are now evolved
and are intersecting with socio-economic class issues.
However, even with these historical challenges, the region has made significant advances in criteria
that measure contemporary human development, such as health, school enrollment and other social
services. CARICOM countries achieved universal access to education (except for Haiti) and near universal
access to secondary education with increasing access to tertiary education through the commitment of
regional governments, such that the region has met many of the targets of the MDGs that came to an
end in 2015 (CARICOM, 2018; CARICOM, 1997). The Caribbean has always viewed education as
important to national development and personal social mobility and this can be reflected in the level of
support to education from governments across the region. Disparities persist, however, which can also
be seen within these very accomplishments. For example, CARICOM (2018) has identified “low levels
of performance among secondary school students, male disengagement from the education system, large
numbers of out of school children and youth not engaged in education, mismatch between the skills of
graduates and the needs of the 21st century and society” (p. 29) among other problems. As it relates
specifically to secondary school achievement, CARICOM (2018) notes that the examination system at
this level (Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate) does not serve majority of students well as
evidenced by the fact that only about 30% of the eligible age cohort is allowed to take these examinations,
and of those who do, only 25% obtain enough passes (5 or more subjects) for entry into most tertiary
programs or to meet minimum requirement for decent quality jobs in the labor market. Scholars and
educators have also pointed to the still deeply colonially influenced “plantation pedagogy” that charac-
terizes pedagogy across the Caribbean whereby classrooms spaces are not defined by creative learning
but by command-and-control forms of knowledge transfer (Bailey, 2019; Brissett, 2018; Jules, 2008;
Lavia, 2006).
Thus, while Caribbean societies have made significant strides through heavy investment and policy
reform toward building their societies, its turbulent history, which has also shaped its place on the lower
rungs of the global political economic hierarchy, has resulted in societies that have high levels of poverty,
anti-social behavior and social inequalities. Environmental challenges are also significant in a region
that is heavily dependent on its environment but which also disproportionately bears the negative effects
of global climate change. Education is one of the sites where these inequalities are present in significant
and consequential ways through a system that is unfit for the purpose of creating critical consciousness,
transforming society and improving standards of living for the majority (CARICOM, 2018). As we think
about the concept, education for sustainable development, then, we must ask – is this the type of devel-
opment that ought to be sustained in the Caribbean? Given the foregoing analysis, the answer should be
a resounding no. Instead, transformation seems more relevant and urgent. Thus, the question that nat-
urally follows: is the present education system designed for such a transformational task? I posit that the
answer is also no, and this is why, through the process of conceptual repositioning, I offer the term and
ideas of education for social transformation (EST) in place of education for sustainable develop-
ment (ESD).
 THE JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION 7

Aspirational Caribbean societies

Drawn from the desire to reverse the pathologies in the societal context described above and from nor-
mative Caribbean societies as described by other Caribbean scholars, I develop a set of guidelines for
education for social transformation. Caribbean anti-colonial, counter neoliberal and social justice scholars
and activists have given voice to different forms of Caribbean consciousness, including promoting “New
Caribbean Thought” that attempt a “home-grown grassroots philosophy of Social Living” ( Cooke, 2008,
p. 184; see also Garvey, 2013; Meeks, 2003; Meeks & Lindahl, 2001; Girvan, 2001). Thus there are many
visions of “Caribbean imagined communities,” “reasoned utopias,” and “feasible constructs” for what a
better Caribbean future might look like, including reinscribing its collectivist culture born of collective
struggle of slavery and colonialism, and rural appreciation of nature given the history of agriculture and
farming community development (Meeks, 2003). Education scholars and activists have focused on devel-
oping and fomenting Caribbean societies characterized by social solidarity and a deep knowledge of
their responsibilities to each other and the environment with justice as a key reference point (Bailey,
2019; Brissett, 2018; Hickling‐Hudson, 2004; Jules, 2008; Lavia, 2006; Maclennan & Perch, 2012). My
framework below is consistent with these scholars’ and activists’ views that, given Caribbean region’s
social and economic history, as well as its environmental characteristics as aforementioned, the type of
sustainable societies that the region demands requires a kind of critical education which engenders social
change for equity and environmental protection that goes beyond commodification, with the two goals
in a symbiotic relationship. Based on the Caribbean context, I propose a set of characteristics that would
define transformative and sustainable Caribbean societies.

Frameworks for transformative Caribbean societies and EST

Transformed Caribbean societies will be those that are characterized by:

1. A sense of justice that connects people and environment. This symbiotic connection has impli-
cations for issues of distribution of wealth and poverty reduction, management of crime, stew-
ardship of nature and land by its inhabitants, and equity based on various social and identity
markers. These characteristics combine with but are also dependent on the following:
2. Reduction in individualism, a system fomented under colonialism and further valorized by neo-
liberal capitalist globalization. Here, I emphasize the development of a greater sense of social
responsibility that transcends individualistic social mobility. This has significant implications for
how Caribbean people understand their responsibility to society, as well as how they view the
purpose of the environment and their normative relationship between each other and with the
environment.
3. Redefinition of the sense of the “good life” away from crass capitalist modernity’s materialism
and consumerism that push the limits of the Earth and distort notions of what constitutes human
self-worth.

Given the above aspirations drawn from the analysis of the Caribbean context and the works of
Caribbean thinkers, the central question that emerges is, what is the type of education that can foster
these characteristics? Drawing on the concept of repositioning, education for social transformation (EST)
is used in the place of education for sustainable development (SD) as the former more deliberately
embodies Shearman’s (1990) suggestion of defining and clarifying sustainability’s “implications for [the]
context to which it is applied” (p. 1). Education for social transformation takes the position that social
and economic transformation is symbiotic with positive environmental change and defines the purposes
of education. In other words, for the world – including and especially the now Global South and the
Caribbean specifically – to feel invested in the idea of sustainability (that is, transformation in the
Caribbean context), there must be a sense that it promises and is delivering on societies that are fair and
equitable, and ways of life that provide holistic fulfillment. Education is central in this process within
8 N. O. M. BRISSETT

the context of the environmental and socio-economic historical context of the CARICOM Caribbean, a
region with a history of social and economic turbulence and deep inequalities in terms of who benefits
from exploiting the planet and who pays. Without addressing the intersection of human-social inequalities
and environmental degradation, the term sustainability is hollow, devoid of real resonance within the
regions of the poor and marginalized. With a better understanding of the desirable Caribbean societies,
we can develop a framework for education that is more geared toward the transformation of such soci-
eties. I share Jickling and Wals’ (2008) position that “if enabling social transformation is the inherent
expectation, then we would expect to find ‘educated’ citizens who are active participants in ongoing
decision-making processes within communities” (p. 8). Yet “educated citizens” cannot be expected to
emanate from the current educational system. A component of social transformation, therefore, is the
development of an education system that mirrors the normative societies described above. Thus, the
educational framework should:

1. Reframe the logic of education reform

2. Construct a critical education pedagogy
3. Produce integrative education

Reframing the logic of education reform

There have been numerous attempts at education reform at the CARICOM level and also across various
individual countries in the Caribbean to improve access and quality. But such heavy investments and
reform efforts have not led to the broadly hoped for improved results based on societal change and
examination results, especially at the secondary levels (CARICOM, 2018). Hickling‐Hudson’s (2004)
rightly attributes this limited success to the notion that these reforms along with externally devised
interventions “are unsupported by critical analysis of what kind of education is being offered to ‘all’” (p.
296). As a result, educational reforms have merely expanded already flawed systems (Jules, 2008; Knight
& Rapley, 2007) and reinscribed the “dysfunctional” education “inherited from European colonial history”
(Hickling‐Hudson, 2004, p. 296). In the current era, the colonial system has been replaced by the “logic
of the capitalist underdevelopment” in which inequality is modeled by the education system that produces
its workers. With this reproductive logic so deeply embedded in reform approaches, “large proportions
of Caribbean populations” have become “victims of gross educational discrimination” and “poorly
endowed school” (Hickling‐Hudson, 2004, p. 296), creating individuals that are easily exploitable in the
current economic system. Thus, reforming the dual education system in which opportunities to access
traditionally privileged schooling are reserved for a few while the majority attend substandard ones, may
best be started by rethinking how educational opportunities are stratified and linked primarily to people’s
worth in the knowledge-based economy.
Reframing the logic of education reform, therefore, requires significant departures from what has
traditionally defined reform. I share Hickling‐Hudson’s (2004) view that this should mean “shed[ding]
19th century characteristics of stratification, didacticism, authoritarianism, competitiveness and selfish
individualism, and become open, accessible, socially responsible and facilitative, instead of closed, cus-
todial and often humiliating” (p. 298). It must involve radical approaches that can upend the traditional
system, including abolishing the selection mechanisms that reinforce class privilege, and provincializing
the neoliberal-induced high stakes testing that has been woven into the fabric of Caribbean educational
approaches (Bailey, 2019; Hickling‐Hudson’s 2004; Misiaszek, 2015). Reframing educational reform would
also mean analyzing the inequitable distribution of learning resources, especially teachers, across various
schools to address the structural hierarchy of access to quality learning environments (Torres del Castillo,
1996). Progressive reform would reshape how knowledge is constructed and distributed, to whom and
where, keeping mind how certain class structures have deemed who is worthy of different types of
knowledge, which is evident in how children are streamed/tracked from early in their schooling (Hickling‐
Hudson, 2004). Similarly, reforming teacher training is significant in any reform structure that attempts
a radical change from the past. As I discuss below, teachers should be prepared to move beyond the
plantation pedagogical mode of instruction (Lavia, 2006; Torres del Castillo, 1996). As Misiaszek (2015)
 THE JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION 9

notes, this requires “critical pedagogical training and greater socio-environmental understanding of
teachers with different expertise” (p. 288).
To be clear, reframing educational reform should go well beyond merely expanding the established
system, which has been the fundamental approach to post-independence education reform, to perform
an overturning of the current system which has deep roots in coloniality. Previous reforms have merely
tried to serve the logic of a capitalist market system and its “growth strategy that has failed to serve the
world’s poor majority, that has delivered most of the world’s wealth to the rich few, especially industri-
alized countries…” (Trainer, 1990, p. 72). Regional governments have often noted that they are no longer
educating their people for their own country; they are educated them for the world (CARICOM, 2018;
Task Force on Education Reform, 2004). Yet such declarations seem to miss the deeper implications of
educating citizens primarily for the global capitalist market economy and the deep inequities that such
education perpetuates. In fact, Robinson & Shallcross (1998) observe that “the worsening of environ-
mental crisis over the past 20 years is a clear sign that formal environmental education has failed to
prioritize local [contextual challenges and] solutions” (p. 73). Thus, reframing that logic of reform to
focus on local and regional societal change and creating equitable societies where citizens understand
the type of societies out of which they have emerged and the ones they want to create, is a fundamental
prerequisite for educational reform to build sustainable Caribbean societies. Here, I am not advocating
education reform that is parochial or myopic, especially given “the ever-increasing impact of distant
influences on local matters” (Misiaszek, 2015, p. 280); rather, it is for an education to create societies that
are equipped to respond to their own needs and values of equity, conservation and sustainability in their
specific contexts.

Raising a critical education pedagogy

A second major phenomenon that should define education for transformation in the Caribbean is a
critical approach to pedagogy. I share Jules’s (2008) view that Caribbean “educators [need] to be bold in
their thinking and be willing to question and rethink the foundations of education…” (p. 204). Lavia,
(2007) also talks about the role of the “postcolonial teacher” in the “development of systematic forms of
resistance in the face of socially unjust practices” (p. 285). Regarding the pedagogy I am proposing, Lavia
notes that it should be “putting on the table a productive, critical and engaged role of educating students
and radicalizing of teachers’ practice” (p. 286). As explored earlier, the pedagogy of the region (between
teachers and students) has been described as a destructive form of plantation pedagogy because of its
resemblance to the master-slave relationship that dominated the slave plantation system where power
was mostly exerted in one direction and with the sole purpose of maximizing economic production
(Bristol, 2012). As a result, critical and inclusive approaches are not built into the learning systems. This
educational system has therefore served primarily to reproduce the existing relationships in the economy
and labor with very little challenge to the status quo, including the economic framework, class structures
and the use of the environment. Here I draw on various terms to describe the type of content and ped-
agogical approach that should define education for transformation in the Caribbean, including ecopeda-
gogy and critical pedagogy, which share similar critical DNA, as well as postcolonial pedagogy that is
especially geared toward interrogating former colonial societies and their continuing effects in order to
contest them.
Hickling‐Hudson (2004) notes that a postcolonial approach “calls for deconstructing modernist
assumptions which equate non-sustainable development with progress” (p. 293). Thus postcolonial ped-
agogy connects with ecopedagogy, which is guided by critical and popular methods of Freire, and “crit-
ically question[s] who benefits, who does not, and why socio-environmental disparities exist” (Misiaszek,
2015). Unlike in the plantation pedagogy, “learning spaces in ecopedagogy [and postcolonial] perspective
should be democratic in the sense that both teachers and students work together to develop shared
meanings of socio-environmental issues” and their relationship to people’s lives (p. 281). Such approaches
must consciously include examining and challenging the colonizing effects of power and knowledge in
global educational policy discourse and the educational practices that they produce. In practice, this
would mean more deliberate policy guidelines at regional and national levels to teach critical history as
10 N. O. M. BRISSETT

a way of linking the economic, political, cultural and environmental past to the present so students can
make connections between their own current and future actions and the changed and just aspirational
societies.
Thus transformative education must also interrogate the ways in which global discourses, like
Education for All (EFA), Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), produce policies and practices that, on one level, rhetorically advocate for access and equality,
but in practice subversively cling to and implement a type of growth model of development that merely
continues the exploitation of the environment for the benefit of a few societies and individuals. Lavia
(2007) has identified how such global discourses have infused educational planning in the Caribbean
whereby quality in regionalized education reform is tied to and conflated with a primarily instrumentalist
role in “economic development and the movement toward the Caribbean Single Market and Economy
(CSME),” (p. 292). Other scholars have explored how the language of dominant discourses on sustainable
development goal 4 is mediated by economic growth (Brissett & Mitter, 2017). Thus, global development
discourses that rhetorically espouse education’s transformative facets – access, quality and lifelong learning –
actually render these targets in service of economic market participation, in both content and pedagogy.
This drives a type of pedagogy that is uncritical and functionalist rather than problem posing, democratic,
subversive and transformational. Many of these ideas have found their way into the CARICOM’s recent
CARICOM Human Resource Development 2030 Strategy: Unlocking Caribbean Human Potential policy
planning document meant to ‘serve as a roadmap for the CARICOM Regional Education and Training
Agenda’ (CARICOM 2018, XIII; Brissett, 2021). CARICOM must therefore critically revisit and reevaluate
the ways in which this document serves to inscribe neoliberal ideals that undermine the aspirations of
more just Caribbean societies described here. For one, CARICOM must revise the way it presents citizens
as economic agents less attuned to issues of social justice, which has laid the groundwork for the
Caribbean’s educational planning that is infused with neoliberal logics in its curriculum and pedagogy.
Instead, CARICOM must frame the purposes of education to elevate values that are more attuned to
critical and transformative education rather than the functionalist and utilitarian values of the global
economy. This regional reframing will signal to Caribbean national systems a collective regional com-
mitment to transformative education.

Integrative education
As I have consistently argued, education for sustainable development frames education merely as instru-
mental to development, a particular interpretation of modern life that is rooted in the notion of sep-
arateness and individualism. Here humans assume dominion over nature, and their separateness from
it, and this conception, allied with modernist consumerist notions, fuels the commodification of the
environment with deleterious consequences. Through this interpretation of life, education becomes less
organic with nature and is, instead, designed primarily to exploit nature for its economic usefulness with
inequitable results, especially for Caribbean societies that have already been historically marginalized
and exploited. Therefore, the type of education I advocate here, EST, is one which should facilitate a more
integrative understanding of humans and nature, and their interdependence. Such an integrative approach
has the potential to improve the sense of collectivism, in this case, for the Caribbean, in ways that may
transform these societies that have been traumatized by colonial and more recent neoliberal experiences.
Like Hickling‐Hudson (2004) I advocate for an education where “collectivity and equity principles inform
the learning needed to transform problematic social landscapes” (p. 293) such as those of the Caribbean.
Integrative education in the context of the Caribbean will help to transform these societies by reshaping
how they interpret notions of the “good life” and the role of the environment in this cycle. As former
enslaved and colonial subjects, it is not surprising that these societies are deeply class-conscious, which
impacts the instrumentalist ways in which education is used for social mobility and to show class status.
Some have referred to these materialist views as the “spoils mentality” (Down, 2015; Miller, 2013).
Caribbean scholars over time have explored how social systems, politics, and identity have all been
impacted by colonial histories and the struggles to redefine them (Bennett & Scott, 1968; Brodeber, 1997;
Hodge, 2000; Lamming, 1991; Manley, 1975). Education has always been at the center of these processes
 THE JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION 11

because of its value as a reliable and legitimate way to achieve social mobility and with it the trappings
and showy display of success, which includes a visible materialist and consumerist lifestyle. Thus edu-
cation for social transformation should cultivate a type of consciousness that induces “moral responsi-
bility” which involves “attempting to achieve considered, reflective choices on the type of life to live” and
linking individual actions to broader social consequences (Robinson & Shallcross, 1998, p. 73). This type
of education must rise above merely preparing students for global economy and personal wealth accu-
mulation that fundamentally views nature as a resource to be exploited and schooling as tool to effectively
prepare people to undertake such tasks. In practice, here again the application of the principles of ecopeda-
gogy and a critical postcolonial pedagogy can develop curriculum approaches that are more democratic
and deliberately designed to interrogate why socio-environmental disparities exist and how they are
related to socio-economic inequalities. Such inquiries will also be linked to understanding how environ-
mental exploitation threatens human quality of life and especially for those most marginalized, including
those of the Caribbean. Here, also, “both teachers and students work together to develop shared meanings
of socio-environmental issues” and their relationship to people’s lives (Misiaszek, 2015, p. 281). Such
curriculum would serve to integrate the material, environmental and justice components of the Caribbean.

Conclusion
In this paper I have discussed the problematic and contradictory goals and assumptions that the increas-
ingly popular sustainable development discourse engenders generally. Specifically related to the Caribbean,
education for sustainable development is inappropriate because it implicitly seeks to continue a system
of exploitation of people and the environment due to its advocacy of a type of education designed to
perpetuate a particular form of modernist capitalist development. In its place, I suggest a repositioning
of the subjects of sustainable development and the education that supports it, the result is education for
social transformation. EST demands a more context specific understanding of different societies and
their needs, which moves away from the grand narrative of change that the global economy demands.
In the context of the Caribbean, education for social transformation should aim to address socio-eco-
nomic inequality and environmental precarity as part of the same problem of historical exploitation.
These societies will be defined by a sense of justice that connects environment protection, reduction in
individualism and redefinition of what constitutes the “good life.” Education, in the logic of educational
reform in the region, must therefore be reframed to be more critical in its pedagogy and temporal focus,
as well as its approach to reinscribing a sense of interdependence of human and nature.

Note
1. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is a grouping of twenty countries: fifteen Member States and five Associate
Members. CARICOM Member States: Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana,
Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Republic of Suriname, Trinidad
& Tobago. CARICOM Associate Members: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Island, Cayman Islands, and Turks and
Caicos Islands.

ORCID
Nigel O. M. Brissett https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1740-7459

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