Towards sustainable development : A comparative case study of ESD for TVET policies and practices between Cuba and Sweden

Abstract: The development methods mostly applied until today provoked severe environmental imbalances in the world. To deal with this, almost twenty-five years ago the environmental issues were introduced in the agenda of discussions in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, intending to introduce a more sustainable approach of development (Desai and Potter, 2002, p 478). The current study explores how sustainability is transferred, interpreted and integrated into national education, through the comparison of experiences between Cuba and Sweden. Based on a qualitative research approach, the study first presents and analyses the international discourse on the topic, as well as the conceptual and theoretical framework that has been formed mainly from the narrative of UNESCO and UNEVOC. Afterwards, national education curricula are being examined to understand ow the sustainability concept is addressed in TVET, while an empirical analysis presents how the university teachers and the students of two Agroecology programs perceive and interpret sustainability. To achieve this, the methods of document analysis and semi-structured interviews have been employed. The findings of the study indicate that the international discourse has detected the main goals of sustainability for TVET, the conditions that lead to this necessity and the importance of this part of education, since it is the only one that is directly connected to labour. However, the interpretation is different in each case, since it is affected by the socio-political, economical and historical context of each country. In Cuba, sustainability is the means of autochthonous development, efficient use of the natural resources with respect to the environment, in order to deal with the economic crisis and food insecurity of the Special Period. In Sweden, sustainability emerged as a need of alternative ways of producing energy and consuming, as environmental awareness raised against the exploitation of the natural environment. Using the two contrary cases, the study intends to explore the dimensions that the concept can have. The World Commission on Environment and Development’s report in 1987 (p.41) first defined sustainable development as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. To conclude, this study intends to contribute to a better understanding of what sustainable development means. The experiences of university teachers and students present sustainability, as understood in the set of agroecology in higher vocational institute. This study is a small contribution in the total work towards sustainability. It could be the beginning of exploring in the future how sustainability is interpreted and integrated in other countries of the world.