Conclusions

Abstract

This conclusive chapter reaffirms some of the main arguments dealt during these pages and suggests that our aspirations for SD require us to resolve common problems and tensions and to recognise new horizons in our research and policy agendas. We need new conceptual approaches for education and culture as the main builders of the EUSM. Otherwise SD challenges will remain. Numerous laws, policy documents, economic measures, research papers, policy announcements and articles have been produced over the past two decades calling for public and private bodies and institutions to give greater focus to the integration of social, economic and environmental sustainability to face future challenges. However, public and private interventions addressing sustainability have been occurring at intervals and at various locations and instances rather than all together. As a consequence there has been much less attention given to the foundations of transforming some of our existing public and private institutions in order to ensure that a real integration of sustainability is successfully initiated. Education must find ways of responding to such challenges taking into account alternative knowledge systems often rooted in local realities with universal validity. Moreover, traditional economies need to be transformed into modern ‘knowledge’ economies helping to foster a system model that embeds the challenges of the desirable cultural transformation.