Over the last two decades Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has received increasing attention. Due to the close affinity that geography as a school subject shares with both theoretical constructs and methodologies of ESD, geography has assumed a key position in the implementation of ESD in formal education. Still, little attention has so far been paid to the specific geographical understanding of (E)SD as implemented in geography curricula as the official frameworks of formal education. Twenty years after the Earth Summit and five years after the Lucerne Declaration, this paper now takes a closer look at three approaches of conceptualizing sustainable development (SD) and implementing ESD in lower secondary geography curricula by means of mixed methods. The sample consisted of lower secondary geography curricula from Bavaria (Germany), Romania, and Mexico. The results show that despite the existence of both the Agenda 21 as a general guideline and various subject-specific ESD frameworks such as the Lucerne Declaration, national geography curricula construct different SD concepts. Elements of ESD are subject to neoliberal, Marxist-materialistic, or post-colonial ideological interpretation. In spite of geography's close affinity to theoretical constructs of (E)SD, lower secondary geography curricula not always foster ESD.