Sustainability education, biopolitics and affirmative ethics

This article interrogates the contested terrain of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) by situating it within broader debates on sustainability, inequality, and ethics. While ESD has been globally institutionalized through United Nations initiatives, its anthropocentric and instrumentalist framing risks subordinating education to external agendas and reproducing neoliberal biopolitics. Drawing on Knutsson et al.’s (Citation2024) empirical study of ESD across diverse socio-economic contexts, the article highlights how ESD often reinforces inequality by differentiating between affluent and impoverished communities, privileging human needs while neglecting more-than-human entanglements. In response, the article advances sustainability education as a more generative concept, one that decentres human exceptionalism and embraces immanent ethics. Through Spinoza’s distinction between potestas (domination) and potentia (capacity), sustainability education is reframed as a practice of response-ability, cultivating learners’ capacities to act creatively within ecological assemblages rather than conforming to predetermined goals. The discussion integrates African philosophies of ukama and ubuntu, reinterpreted as ecosophical frameworks that affirm relationality across human and non-human domains. By aligning posthumanist thought with African relational ethics, the article proposes affirmative alternatives to ESD’s prescriptive logic, envisioning sustainability education as a biocultural and ethical project that nurtures ecological subjectivities, interdependence, and justice in an unequal world.