Rethinking Education for Sustainable Development: Ontological Fragmentation and the Case for Situated Non-Dual Alternatives

Abstract

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is extensively theorised as pedagogy and policy, but the ontological assumptions of the traditions informing it remain largely unexamined. This paper derives three ontological requirements from sustainability's own internal logic — interdependence, intrinsic value and ecological limits — and applies immanent critique to four traditions dominant in ESD: neoliberalism, strong social constructivism, and the Foucauldian and Habermasian strands of critical theory. None satisfies all three, and their assumptions are mutually incompatible, a condition the paper terms ontological fragmentation. Because incoherent frameworks can be juxtaposed but not combined, this is not a difficulty that better curriculum design can resolve. The paper then argues that adequate alternatives are more likely to be found in situated, living ontological traditions than in ontologies constructed in the abstract, and tests three such traditions — Advaita Vedānta, Mahāyāna Buddhist non-dualism and Daoist correlative cosmology — against the same requirements, recording the distinct cost each carries. It closes with a protocol for auditing existing provision against the three requirements, and with implications for pedagogy, assessment and teacher education.