Settler futurity in the local and global: Problematising education for sustainable development in the Australian curriculum

Abstract

As global concerns about climate change deepen, Australian sustainability curriculum plays an increasingly significant role in the way students relate to concepts of home, belonging, and the future. Such futures are imagined in a local context shaped both by ongoing colonial processes and the continued presence of First Peoples, in which invader-settler futurity is the dominant force. As such, a global emphasis on Education for Sustainability raises questions of what types of relationships to place and country are produced through policy and curriculum, and what the implications are for students’ investments in the future of place and unceded Country. As a white invader/settler writing from the Country of the Kulin Nations (Melbourne, Australia), in this paper I offer an analysis of UN Education for Sustainability Declarations from the past five decades, alongside Australian national curriculum documents and its translation into state-level curriculum. In doing so, I reveal the ways that sustainability policy and curriculum works to collapse place and Country into the concept of ‘environmental resource’, largely oriented towards the future of the nation. I argue that in the global policy context, resources are framed to deliver equal distribution across nation states, functioning to obscure the operation of patriarchal white sovereignty within states such as Australia. I further identify that the ways this problem of resource management is deployed as a virtuous state policy through local curriculum, which functions to solidify invader-settler use of disembodied Indigenous knowledges, to secure futurity.