Background paper for a workshop at the 2012 Association of Law Teachers Annual Conference
Education for Sustainable Development and the Law Curriculum
Dr Hazel Dawe, Law Programme Leader, Greenwich School of Management and Sessional Lecturer, Birkbeck College, University of London
This workshop was inspired by a session at the Learning in Law Annual Conference (LILAC) 2011 which explored progress on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in Law in this country. After brainstorming definitions of sustainable development (SD), ideas around how to deliver ESD in the Law Curriculum were explored. So far, attempts to incorporate ESD into the Law Curriculum have concentrated on embedding it in existing subject areas. The suggestion was made at the workshop that, in order to be taken seriously, SD needs its own dedicated module. The principles of leadership around SD in law and continuing professional development were named as essential to the development of ESD in the Law Curriculum. The workshop at this conference is designed to take these ideas to the next stage and try to develop a curriculum for such a module.
This paper sets out the background behind the UN decade for ESD and looks at definitions of SD. It then examines actions by the Higher Education Academy and the UK Centre for Legal Education, the Law subject centre of the Academy to incorporate ESD into the Law Curriculum. It then summarises the results of the LILAC 2011 workshop before setting out the case for a separate legal subject area “Sustainable Development and the Law”. This is to be the main focus of the workshop at this conference.
The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development
2005 – 2014 has been declared the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has taken the lead on this issue. An important part of ESD is how tertiary education delivers on educating sustainably literate graduates. This paper examines measures already taken to incorporate ESD into the law curriculum.
In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development, a UN body,was chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland. The definition of sustainable development they createdwill form the starting point for definitions of SD in this article.
“development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”[1]
The Brundtland report linked sustainability and development thus making clear that SD is not purely an environmental concept.This had the effect of making it more accessible to academic disciplines other than those primarily concerned with the environment and ecology, including law. It highlighted three fundamental components to SD: environmental protection, economic growth and social equity. This has also been described as the “Triple Bottom Line (TBL) of economic, social and environmental responsibility.”[2]
The Rio Summit in June 1992 was the first UN conference to explicitly recognise that education had a key part to play in achieving sustainable development. It mentioned education as “critical for promoting sustainable development and improving the capacity of people to address environmental and development issues” but mentioned tertiary education merely as something which governments could choose to support but not as a separate stakeholder in its own right.[3]However, university education is then mentioned in the2005 report on the Decade for Sustainable Development from UNESCO. Which states that “Questioning, rethinking, and revising education from pre-school through university”[4]is important to society – both current and future.
Critique of SD
However, the expansion of the definition of SD into the areas of economic growth and social equity initiated by the Brundtland Report has been criticised as being too accommodating of economic growth by virtually equating economic growth with development. “Development is seen as synonymous with growth, and therefore that sustainable development means ameliorating, but not challenging, continued economic growth.”[5] Some ‘deep green’ ecologists have claimed that economic growth per se is inimical to sustainability: that sustainability is not possible with growth because growth, by its very nature, strains the limits of a finite ecosystem.[6]The Brundtlandt Report has also been criticized for being too anthropocentric and ignoring the demands of the environment. We cannot have ever more growth without using up the resources upon which life on this planet ultimately depends.
The term ‘sustainable development’ has been seen by some as amounting essentially to a contradiction in terms, between the opposing imperatives of growth and development, on the one hand, and ecological (and perhaps social and economic) sustainability on the other hand.[7]
The Brundtland report has also been accused of encouraging ‘business as usual’ by diluting the ecological content of sustainability by refocusing on sustainable development. Hence the American Bar Association can state that SD “is not about the environment alone; it is about the relationship between the environment and other human goals. It is not about the environment vs. development; it is about the environment and development.”[8] Some would argue that this is a fundamental problem with the Brundtland approach to sustainability.
Brundtland’s ambiguity allows business and governments to be in favour of sustainability without any fundamental challenge to their present course, using Brundtland’s support for rapid growth to justify the phrase ‘sustainable growth’.[9]
The American Bar Association acknowledges that it is a problem: “There will always be tension between industrial development and protection of ecological and social environments.”[10] but sees itself and its members as well placed to help solve that problem.
What measures have been taken to incorporate ESD into the Law Curriculum in this country?
The Higher Education Academy (HEA) published a report on the state of teaching of SD in Higher Education inthe UK in 2005.This identified a very uneven spread of efforts regarding ESD in the Higher Education sector. Law did not feature as one of the subject areas where efforts to incorporate ESD were already being implemented. The report concluded that the very fact of undertaking the research had itself raised the profile of ESD. It also proposed that the report itself should operate as a toolkit to stimulate and inform ESD activity in the HE sector. The report found that definitions of sustainability were ‘very variable’[11]but Subject Centres did not view this as a problem. Instead ‘Some respondents recommended using multiple definitions in order to stimulate students’ involvement.’[12]For example, the Bradford Ecoversity project on ESD at the University of Bradford considered discussions around definitions of SD to be a useful part of establishing ESD within the Faculty.[13]Early discussions at the University resulted in a framework definition of SD which was seen as “an effective stimulus for thought and…a benchmark for existing and future ESD activity.”[14]Recommendations from the report include the use of the Subject Centres to ‘explore and develop approaches to ESD teaching and learning and curriculum’[15] ‘The academy should continue to develop the framework started by this report”[16]The report started a process of ‘stimulating the dissemination of ESD policy, research and practice across HE and the professions.’[17]
Subsequently the HEA arranged regional events on ESD in the East Midlands, 2006, the South West, 2007 and in Wales 2008.[18] They also arranged an event on Sustainability and the Curriculum: progress and potential at the University of Bradford in 2007. This brought together the Subjects Centres and showcased what had been happening around the country on sustainability in the HE curriculum. HEA also held an internal development day on ESD in 2010 and then workshops on ‘the Circular Economy, in London and Edinburgh in 2011[19] The UK Centre for Legal Education held a conference on Environmental Justice in Legal Education in 2010which later led to work on ESD in law by a member of the Centre together with two academics from the University of Plymouth. This was eventually published as a chapter in a book on Sustainability Education.[20] The subsequent 2011 Annual Conference of the UK Centre for Legal Education included a stream on ESD.
How does ESD fit with the Law Curriculum?
At a workshop on ESD and the Law Curriculum at the 2011 LILAC Conferencebrain storming sessions were held. Initially participants’ perceptions of SD were challenged using a word association technique. Workshop participants proposed environmentally themed concepts, which were to be expected such as ‘environmental resources, global warming, and climate change’.[21]However, theyalso submitted the principles of intergenerational equity and interstate equity as being relevant to SD. Equity is obviously a subject area of its own within the law and equitable jurisdiction is taught in many areas of law. Equity is therefore a concept with which legal academics are familiar and with which they feel comfortable.
When the workshop moved on to consider where SD could fit within the Law Curriculum these themes appeared to still be influencing the participants. Law subject areas proposed fell into several different groupings corresponding to those themes.
Law subjects cited at the workshop which could be grouped under intergenerational Equity included: Legal Services Act (Token), Pension Law, Tax Law, Property Law and possibly some aspects of Intellectual Property Law.To that could be added Family Law and Child Law which are also relevant for intragenerational equity butwere not mentionedby workshop participants.
Interstate equity was represented by the following Law subject areas: EU Law, in particular Competition Law, International Development Law, International Law and possibly Water Law.
Human Rights and Social Justice were also cited at the workshop as relevant to ESD. These still relate to the theme of equity but personal or individual equity rather than interstate equity. As far as the general principle of equity is concerned in law there is obviously the subject area of Equity and Trusts. Trusts can also be considered to be part of the intergenerational equity matrix.
There were also some overlaps and some new themes which had not specifically been mentioned in the earlier word association exercise. Some subjects were associated with resource management: Water Law, Food Law, and Property Law. Referring back to one of the Triple Bottom Line themes of the Brundtland definition for SD, economic concerns were represented by EU Competition Law, Property Law and Intellectual Property Law.
This seems to illustrate how the expanded Brundtland definition, which includes economic and social development, has stimulated the academic imagination in ways in which purely environmental sustainability would, arguably, not have done. Some of the Law subjects mentioned would fit an exclusively environmental definition of sustainability: Water Law, Food Law; perhaps also elements of International Development Law and EU Competition Law. However, that is only a small proportion of the subjects mentioned and would have fettered legal academics and hampered efforts to incorporate ESD into the law curriculum. Environmental Law per se was not mentioned by the participants, but this was probably because it had already been covered by the workshop presenter in the presentation.
Is there the need for a separate legal subject area of ‘Sustainable Development in the Law’?
So far the development of ESD in law in this country’s Higher Education institutions has concentrated on integrating SD into the existing Law Curriculum. [22] However, the suggestion was made at the workshop was that SD might be accorded more respect and understanding if it was taught as a subject in its own right. The analogy was drawn with Human Rights where, according to one workshop participant, when it was first introduced, “No one quite knew what it was about”.[23] Now it is an established part of the legal curriculum. Not only does it have its subject specific modules, Human Rights and Civil Liberties, but it is also increasingly taught in other law subject areas e.g. the Human Rights Act now forms part of Constitutional and Administrative Law.Similarly, the Act is relevant to certain areas of Tort Law and Criminal Law. Human Rights often form an integral part of Legal Methods or Legal Systems modules. Workshop participants suggested that creating a discrete module specifically for Sustainable Development and the Law would give the subject a similarly high profile and stimulate efforts by other subject areas to include SD issues within their own teaching. The suggestion was that, without a specific dedicated module as a ‘home’, the subject could simply become subsumed and diffuse. There was also the view that leadership and continuing professional development were needed to ensure that ESD did not become ‘simply a paragraph in a module handbook without any real commitment’.[24] Lecturers involved in dedicated SD and the Law modules would be the obvious candidates for providing subject leadership and stimulating colleagues to include SD issues in their own subject areas.
The question arises as to what topics should be included in such a module. It is hoped that the workshop will create ideas as to what should be the content of a module in Sustainable Development and the Law. How is SD relevant to various areas of law perhaps starting with the obvious contender: Environmental Law?What parts of existing subject areas could or should be incorporated? This will be explored at this workshop.A discussion of the appropriate structure for such a module is also planned. Legal subject areas could be grouped around the Triple Bottom Line framework building on the Brundtland definition of SD. This could further be subdivided as discussed above into personal and interstate equity and inter- and intragenerational equity. Or should it be ordered around completely different thematic strands? What else needs to go into such a module? It is hoped that the ideas generated at the workshop can be taken forward to start drafting a module syllabus for a module in SD and the Law and perhaps even lead to writing a text book.
1
[1]See OUR COMMON FUTURE, United Nations, 1987 (last visited August, 26 2010)
[2]See December 2, 2010 Rev.17: Final ABA SEER Sustainability Framework for Law Organizations, AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION, available at last, visited March 2011
[3]See Rio declaration, 1992, A/CONF. 151/26 (Vol.1)UN General Assembly
[4] UNESCO Education Section, International Implementation Scheme, 2005
[5]See John Robinson, Squaring the Circle? Some thoughts on the idea of sustainable development, ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 48(2004) 369 0 384, Elsevir
[6] Meadows, D., Meadows, D., and Randers, J., 1992 Beyond the Limits: global collapse or a Sustainable Future?, Earthscan et al, 1992, p.132
[7]See supra note 5
[8] See Full report on Resolution 108, American Bar Association, available at last visited April 12, 2011
[9]Bill Hopwood,, Mary Mellor, Geoff O’Brien, Sustainable Development: mapping different approaches, Sustainable Development, Feb 2005, Vol 13 Issue 1 p.38 - 52
[10]Seesupra note 2.
[11] Dawe et al, 2005, Higher Education Academy, p.35
[12] Ibid p.35
[13]See Peter Hopkinson, Peter Hughes, and Geoff Layer, Sustainable graduates: linking formal, informal and campus curricula to embed education for sustainable development in the student experience, ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION RESEARCH 14:4, 435 - 454, downloaded August 24 2010
[14] Hopkinson et al p.444
[15]Dawe et al, p.36
[16] Dawe et al, p.36
[17] accessed 11th March 2012
[18]HEA, Past ESD events, Accessed 12th March 2012
[19] Ibid
[20] Varnava, Travey, Lowther, jason and Payne, Simon, Sustainability – Is IT Legal? The Benefits and Challenges of Introducing Sustainability into the Law Curriculum, in Ed. Jones, Paula, Selby, David and Sterling, Stephen, Sustainability Education: perspectives and Practice across Higher Educationa, Earthscan, london, 2010
[21] LILAC 2011 workshop comments
[22] Jason Lowther, Joanne Sellick, Embedding sustainable development into legal education, International Journal of the Humanities, Volume 7, Issue 6, pp.11-22.
[23] Workshop participant, LILAC Conference 2011
[24] Workshop participant, LILAC Conference 2011