Societal sustainability: The contribution of adult education to sustainable societies

The idea for this special issue arose from the Second Conference of the Network on Policy Studies in Adult Education (active under the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults, ESREA), held in Aalborg, Denmark, on 18–20 June 2014. The theme of the conference was ‘‘Interrogating Sustainability in Adult Learning Policy’’. At this conference, the question of how sustainability is, and could be, integrated into policies for adult learning in the multi-level context of different national, social and cultural environments was thoroughly and vividly discussed in sessions and plenaries. Taken together, the six articles which compose this special issue provide conceptual and empirical readings of past, present and possible future relationships which societal sustainability holds with adult education. Different contributions from the Anglophone world, Latin America, a welfare-state model society like Denmark, and finally China, highlight significant failures in education policy to learn from the history of adult education as a social institution which has contributed to issues of social progress, equity and justice. Further, they present novel perspectives enabling us to make sense of the past and the present by bringing to the fore alternative epistemologies, which deconstruct anthropocentric stand- points on human existence and development. In short, the contributions presented in this special issue show that adult education has already contributed to societal sustainability, but could contribute much more in the future, provided it is not subjugated by the kind of economic rationales and ideologies which are feeding much of the contemporary discourse on sustainable development on national and global scales.