Sustainability in and through Lifelong Learning: Making Space for Everyday Knowledge and Regionalism in a Globalising World

Abstract

Lifelong learning presents itself as an important idea through which to enhance environmental, economic, and cultural sustainability by building on everyday knowledge. Both lifelong learning and sustainability are, though, totalising normative philosophies of human development, which raises the questions of the extent to which each is compatible with the other, each leaves space for everyday knowledge and each may draw upon regional perspectives. Addressing those three questions, this paper argues: firstly, that there is a high degree of congruence in the moral value frameworks of lifelong learning and sustainability, indicating the appropriateness of using lifelong learning as a framework for offering programs of education for sustainability; secondly, that, although there is no space for everyday knowledge in either philosophy, there is generally ample space for it to be used in implementing both philosophies; and, thirdly, that transnational regional perspectives may be seen as providing another level of opportunity for negotiating the realisation of the universal moral imperatives of lifelong learning and sustainability philosophies in policy and practice.