Global Action Plan International

The UNECE Strategy for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) was adopted in Vilnius in 2005. A Steering Committee was appointed, and it had its 3rd meeting in Geneva on 31 March and 1 April 2008.

Countries reported on progress during 2007. ”It is not so easy to recognize the relation between what is reported on official level and what is happening in reality,” writes ECO Forum. ”There is a serious delay in the official process in some countries (Strategy is still not approved by several governments), while good progress seems to be done in others (the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, etc.).”

Meantime, an Expert Group on Indicators for ESD has drafted a reporting format for assessing progress. ”The proposed indicators assess to which extent the ESD Strategy goals were achieved, but do not address the quality of the ESD itself, which could be much more interesting.”

Phase II of implementation of the Strategy (2008 – 2010) starts this year. Administrative work should be finalized and real work with students should be the most important task. As usual, there are big delays in many countries. On the other hand, the most important thing is that the Strategy already exists, is highly respected, has numerous tools for implementation and evaluation and therefore could be used as a good argument and tool in the work of teachers and educators.

At the end of the meeting, ECO Forum mentioned several problematic issues from the NGOs’ point of view – the difference between “paper reports” and daily reality in some countries, big differences in understanding (or misunderstanding) what the ESD is even within the responsible institutions, and sometimes lack of good coordination between UNECE ESD and UNESCO.

The documents of the meeting are available at http://www.unece.org/env/esd/SC.Meet.htm

For more information contact:
Jirka Dlouhý
Coordinator of the European ECO Forum’s Education Issue Group
E-mail: jiri.dlouhy@czp.cuni.cz