Beyond the Paradigm of Disjunction: Sustainability Education, Complex Thought, and Epistemic Justice
Abstract
Sustainability education has produced four major traditions, Environmental Education, Climate Education, Education for Sustainable Development, and Climate Justice Education, that have developed largely in parallel. This fragmentation prevents cross-tradition comparison and leaves the most transformative dimensions of the field systematically underdeveloped. This article proposes a four-dimensional Taxonomy of Sustainability Education Design, organized around Educational Approach (D1), Cognitive Depth (D2), Disciplinary Integration (D3), and Real-World Connection (D4), for diagnosing dimensional gaps across educational programs and traditions. The taxonomy was constructed inductively from a critical literature review and interpreted through Edgar Morin’s philosophy of complex thought, whose seven principles explain why dimensional underdevelopment is paradigmatic rather than merely programmatic. The framework is illustrated through two contrasting cases: the UNESCO Associated Schools Network and the Brazilian National Environmental Education program. The mapping suggests a structural asymmetry: the dimensions most consistently underdeveloped, D1 Criticality and Advocacy, D3.5 Community and Indigenous Knowledge, and D4 Systemic and Political, are those most closely associated with transformative and epistemically plural education. The normative and policy implications of these gaps are examined in relation to the geopolitics of epistemological authority, climate-displaced communities, the historical production of colonial vulnerability, and the risk of epistemicide at algorithmic scale in AI-mediated education.