What Should Education for Sustainable Development Carry Beyond 2030?
In this blogpost, Katrin Kohl, Co-Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability at York University, and Julia Heiss, Chief of UNESCO’s Section for Education for Sustainable Development, reflect on the importance and future direction of Education for Sustainable Development following the Global Expert Symposium in Munich, Germany, in September 2026. Drawing on the foresight consultation, they consider what ESD should carry forward beyond 2030, and where it needs to go next.
What should Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) look like beyond 2030? This question brought around 40 experts from different world regions, education levels and professional backgrounds together in Munich on 1 and 2 September 2026. The Global Expert Symposium on Education for Sustainable Development Beyond 2030 formed part of a wider foresight and consultation process examining the future of ESD as the current UNESCO framework approaches 2030. The discussions built on more than three decades of international work on ESD, alongside think pieces, peer review and consultation feeding into an emerging position paper that will be launched during the UNESCO World Conference on ESD in Kenya in January 2027. They also looked ahead. What should ESD retain? What should it leave behind? What needs revision? And what may need to be developed afresh?
Discussions were held under the Chatham House Rule, so the reflections here focus on broader patterns emerging from the symposium without attributing views to individual participants.
Continuity, without simply extending the current agenda
One of the clearest messages from Munich was that ESD has strong foundations to carry forward. Its broad purpose of advancing sustainability, including peace, human rights, social justice, and a healthy planet, remains crucial. ESD should stay firmly positioned within quality education, as defined in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, while retaining critical orientation. Sustainability competencies, systems thinking, participation, collaboration, action-oriented learning, and whole-institution and community approaches continue to provide an important basis for meaningful engagement.
Participants in Munich questioned the impact of ESD when it becomes a catch-all label, an add-on to existing education, or a tick-box exercise. A future agenda may therefore need greater clarity not only about what ESD includes, but also what falls outside its scope. They also challenged implementation that remains primarily top-down or divided across closely related education fields. The Munich discussions therefore pointed to continuity with considerably greater clarity about what ESD seeks to achieve, its potential to transform, and how learning connects with change. This may be one of the central challenges for ESD after 2030: an ambitious vision while becoming clearer about its distinctive educational contribution.
In a context of declining public financing for education, competing political priorities and growing demands on governments and multilateral organizations, ESD needs to be positioned strategically as integral to the purpose and quality of education. ESD is not another educational priority, but its role goes beyond: ESD can provide a lens, framework and set of methodological approaches through which education systems engage meaningfully with complexity, uncertainty and interconnected global challenges.
Connecting knowledge, agency and action
A recurring thread throughout Munich was the relationship between knowledge and action. Awareness of climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality and other sustainability challenges has expanded considerably. Knowledge remains essential, yet knowledge alone does not determine what people are able or willing to do. This shifts attention to agency, judgement, participation and sustainability competencies. Learners need opportunities to engage with complexity and uncertainty, examine different perspectives, make informed decisions, work with others and contribute to shaping responses. This will also give the role of participation a deeper meaning. Participation cannot be reduced to inviting learners into activities designed elsewhere. Co-creation, youth agency and shared decision-making raise questions about who influences priorities, whose knowledge counts and where learners and educators have meaningful space to act.
The Munich experts therefore positioned co-creation alongside safe learning environments, educator agency, autonomy and voice in governance. Participation depends on educational and institutional conditions that make critical engagement possible.
Learning across realities, institutions and generations
Another strong theme concerned where ESD happens, whose realities it engages and how it connects global and local levels. Global sustainability challenges are experienced differently across places, cultures and communities. ESD therefore needs to connect global knowledge with lived realities, including place-based and land-based learning, relationships with nature, Indigenous and other knowledge systems, community knowledge and different social and cultural experiences. This perspective also challenges the perception of ESD as a concept associated primarily with wealthy countries or Global North. ESD gains relevance and legitimacy when it is shaped by diverse knowledge traditions, regional perspectives and lived experience across the world, and when these different realities are treated as sources of knowledge for sustainability transitions.
The same principle applies across life stages and generations. This is an area requiring stronger attention. ESD beyond 2030 must broaden its frequent association with schools and young people. Children and youth remain central, while sustainability transitions require learning across adulthood, workplaces, communities, institutions and all generations to play important roles as citizens, knowledge holders, mentors and community leaders.
New learning coalitions beyond schools were consequently identified among the areas that ESD may need to develop further. This is significant for any beyond-2030 agenda. Education systems alone will not be able to carry sustainability transitions. Schools, universities, TVET institutions, communities, employers, public institutions and civil society all form part of wider learning ecosystems.
From individual competence to conditions for change
Munich also reinforced the importance of looking beyond individual learners. Teachers and educators remain central, and their preparation for ESD needs sustained attention. Yet asking educators to foster transformation while curriculum, assessment, governance or institutional culture work in different directions creates obvious limits. The discussion therefore repeatedly returned to whole-institution and systemic approaches.
The question becomes larger than what learners know or which competencies they acquire. It includes whether institutions create opportunities for participation, whether educators have agency, whether assessment reflects what education values, whether governance supports ESD, and whether organizations can learn from evidence and adapt their practice.
New approaches to assessment, monitoring and evidence were identified as an area requiring further development. Despite decades of ESD implementation, questions remain about how progress and impact can be understood beyond knowledge acquisition, including how transformation is defined, how learning and institutional change are captured, and which indicators are meaningful across different contexts. Strengthening proportionate evaluation frameworks and the evidence base for ESD could support institutional learning, policy influence and accountability beyond 2030. Systems thinking is central to this context: Learners and institutions need to recognize relationships, actors, decision points, barriers and possibilities for change, and to use evidence to understand where change is occurring and to inform action where needed.
A future-oriented narrative without losing ESD’s critical edge
Munich also asked how the case for ESD can be communicated more effectively. The challenge is substantial. ESD addresses escalating sustainability pressures while education itself is being reshaped by technological change, geopolitical tensions, and shifting social and economic conditions.
Critical hope, imagination, creativity and regenerative possibilities entered the discussion as dimensions of a wider future-oriented approach to go beyond the language of urgency and crisis that we have seen in recent years. These approaches can help learners explore alternatives, assess possible futures and see space for action. The broader message is about educational possibility: people of all generations need capacities to engage with changing realities while retaining a sense that futures remain open to influence. This requires a positive and accessible ESD narrative, one that emphasizes agency, opportunity, resilience and educational quality, while retaining ESD’s critical edge with different ways of communicating its purpose to different audiences. Munich explicitly identified this as an area requiring fresh work.
From Munich to Nairobi, and beyond 2030
Overall, the meeting in Munich provided a structured opportunity to test existing assumptions, identify what deserves to continue, confront approaches that have reached their limits and consider where new thinking is required. The process now continues. The work on ESD Beyond 2030 is expected to feed into the Nairobi Consensus at the UNESCO World Conference on ESD in January 2027, while the executive summary is also intended to inform wider SDG 4 foresight discussions.
The emerging direction: ESD beyond 2030 needs to connect individual learning, collective action and institutional and systemic change. It needs to remain grounded in sustainability while responding to complexity, different realities and changing conditions. And it needs to build bridges across knowledge and action, education and society, institutions and communities, and across generations. That is a larger task than extending an existing programme for another decade. It is a question of what education is for in the futures that societies are already beginning to face.
One central challenge for ESD beyond 2030 is to retain its key enabler role and its visibility and coherence as a distinct policy concept while becoming more deeply embedded as an educational approach within education systems and societies. Its principles, competencies and approaches can then help learners, institutions, and communities engage in a hopeful way with increasingly complex and uncertain futures.
If you wish to learn more about the UNESCO World Conference on ESD, please find the conference website here: https://www.unesco.org/en/sustainable-development/education/2027-conference
About the authors
Katrin Kohl is Co-Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability at York University and works internationally on Education for Sustainable Development, higher education and whole-institution approaches. She is the commissioned consultant and draft author for UNESCO’s ESD Beyond 2030 position paper, including the Munich foresight consultation.
Julia Heiss is Chief of UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development Section, with nearly 30 years of international experience in education policy and programme development. A social anthropologist and education planner, she leads UNESCO’s global work on Education for Sustainable Development, drawing on extensive experience across education planning, climate change education, global citizenship education and teacher development.