Abstract
The 30th anniversary Human Development Report, entitled The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene, was released by the United Nations Development Programme in December 2020. It marks an important step forward as a high-profile publication trying to radically re-think the challenge of sustainable development and revisit what it means to develop as human beings interconnected within earth systems. This article provides a critical reading of the report, and human development literature more widely, in assessing the role of lifelong learning in educating for just transitions, which it broadly understands as the transformation of all social systems, including economic systems, to bring them back into balance with earth systems in which they are embedded. The report maintains its trademark “human development lens” which has characterised the series since their inception in 1990. It prioritises consideration of capabilities, agency and values as central to the challenge, and opens up a discussion of how we need to change our understandings, values and actions, including what it means to be human, in order to effect just transitions towards sustainability. However, as the authors demonstrate, the report falls short of considering the lifelong learning challenge inherent and central to just transitions. The authors argue that the pressing challenge of responding to the climate emergency requires a richer understanding of how humans learn throughout their life course. In so doing, this article is a contribution to both the literature on education and human development, and the growing body of literature in the field of adult education and sustainability.
Highlights
The 30th anniversary Human Development Report, entitled The Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene, was released in December 2020
Given that the International Review of Education (IRE) is edited by a UNESCO Institute and produced five special issues featuring the keyword sustainab* in the past five years, this journal’s absence from HDR 30 does appear noteworthy. This significant lacuna in this otherwise ground-breaking report for re-imagining the human development journey in the age of climate and biodiversity emergency begs us to ask the questions: “what might the body of adult education/lifelong learning literature have contributed?”; “what could be the role of alternative education spaces for learning about becoming individuals and communities who live more justly and sustainably?”; or, to paraphrase the “learning to become” motto of the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative,7 “what could be the contributions of adult education/ lifelong learning for learning to become?”
We have argued earlier in this article that HDR 30 missed an opportunity to learn from adult education literature, but it is worth noting that the report is an example where that literature too could move in a new direction
Summary
The 30th anniversary Human Development Report, entitled The Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene ( referred to as HDR 30), was released in December 2020. Given that the International Review of Education (IRE) is edited by a UNESCO Institute and produced five special issues featuring the keyword sustainab* in the past five years, this journal’s absence from HDR 30 does appear noteworthy This significant lacuna in this otherwise ground-breaking report for re-imagining the human development journey in the age of climate and biodiversity emergency begs us to ask the questions: “what might the body of adult education/lifelong learning literature have contributed?”; “what could be the role of alternative education spaces for learning about becoming individuals and communities who live more justly and sustainably?”; or, to paraphrase the “learning to become” motto of the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative,7 “what could be the contributions of adult education/ lifelong learning for learning to become?”. They mean that it is not good enough to see ALE as a transmission mechanism
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
