Education for Sustainable Development in Saudi Arabia: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Media and Government Policy Documents

Shaemaa Essa,Blane Harvey

doi:10.21601/ijese/11519

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s policy of integrating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) into the Saudi education system under the country’s Vision 2030 sustainable development strategy. The study specifically asks: how is the policy of integrating ESD in the Saudi education system presented in the discourses of the Saudi government policy documents and the written media? The study examines two types of documents, namely official policy documents published by the governmental entities involved in the planning and/or the execution of the ESD integration policy, and newspaper articles collected from the three top-ranked Saudi newspapers (Arab News, Asharq Al-Awsat, and Al Riyadh). Thematic coding was used to identify themes and sub-themes in the collected documents. In addition, Fairclough’s model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was employed to offer a deeper understanding of whether Saudi Arabia meaningfully aims at integrating sustainable development into its education planning in Vision 2030. Results suggest that Vision 2030 does not consider ESD as a main tool to achieve sustainability and preserve the environment. The analysis reveals that there are very limited discussion of ESD integration in Vision 2030, both in the media coverage as well as the government official documents. Moreover, the CDA of the collected data shows there is a great generalism in the language used in presenting the road map to implementing ESD, and considerable vagueness on the proposed procedures for integrating ESD into the Saudi education system. Consequently, there is a lack of a comprehensive strategic plan with pre-determined steps. The findings of the study suggest that despite statements to the contrary, the Saudi government is not taking the plan of ESD integration into education seriously.

Highlights

AND OVERVIEWDuring the 70th session of the United Nations’ General Assembly in September 2015, 195 nations gathered and adopted the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The analysis in this study addressed the following question: How is the policy of integrating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the Saudi educational system presented in the discourses of the Saudi government policy documents and the written media? In an attempt to answer this question, we looked at these documents for the occurrence of three concepts within the context of education: sustainability, climate change, and sustainable development
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (P3) and The National Environmental Strategy (P4). It seems that the news articles were more engaged in providing some details in relation to the ESD integration plan in Vision 2030

Summary

Introduction

AND OVERVIEWDuring the 70th session of the United Nations’ General Assembly in September 2015, 195 nations gathered and adopted the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced that, in demonstrating its active participation, the international community should aim at accomplishing those goals by the year 2030 (UNESCO, 2015) To effectively ensure these goals are met, an emphasis was placed on the full cooperation and commitment of the international community and the participation of its respective states’ public sectors (government and education), private sectors (businesses), media, and NGOs. In December 2015, 196 countries signed and adopted, by consensus, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Parties committed themselves to establish local and national policies as a path to achieve a set of longterm goals These goals include the commitment to limit climate change’s impact on the environment by limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius and aiming to limit warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius (Clean Development Mechanism National Designated Authority, n.d.; UN, 2021). Saudi Arabia, as a signatory country to the agreement, has promised to make a great effort to reach an annual avoidance; “up to 130 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent emissions ... by 2030” (Wagon et al, 2019, p. 5)

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