Oxford September 2015 Skills for Sustainable Development Vocational Education and Training Beyond 2015 What are the big questions An Overview of the Argument TVET remains largely locked in a nonsustainable approach that stresses shortterm considerations about jobs skills and p ID: 246475
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Slide1
Simon McGrath & Lesley Powell
Oxford, September 2015
Skills for Sustainable Development: Vocational Education and Training Beyond 2015
Slide2
What are the big questions?
An Overview of the Argument
TVET remains largely locked in a non-sustainable approach that stresses short-term considerations about jobs, skills and production
Orthodox approach is also weak at addressing poverty and community development
There are attempts to build green skills but too many tend towards assumption that growth can be given a greenwash
Need for an urgent reconsideration of what skills development for sustainable development might mean as core part of “transforming TVET”Slide3
What are the big questions?
Context
Work of UNESCO-UNEVOC on skills for sustainable development
Moment of opportunity with SDGs
Pressing and enormous sustainable development challenge
– Pushing beyond planetary boundariesContinued poverty, inequality and lack of decent work in the SouthEffects of austerity agenda in the NorthNorthern summer has reinforced the need to think more about skills and migrationSlide4
What are the big questions?
Green Skills
New skills, jobs and sectors are emerging as part of wider greening
Neoliberal view that new technologies will prevent the need for radical changes in consumption and will generate new products, services and opportunities for profit
Argued that skills shortages are limiting the speed of uptake of new technologies
Green and greener skills are important but not sufficientComplex relationship between green, decent and pro-poorSlide5
What are the big questions?
Sustainable Work
Neoclassical approach to work is threatening individuals, communities and the environment
Strips work of any value apart from as a means of income generation
Current focus on employability is unsustainable on multiple levels
Other traditions (e.g., Marxist, Catholic, Feminist, Human Development) have notions of work for self-actualisation and human well-being that contributes to societyNeed to blend these with sustainability thinkingSlide6
What are the big questions?
A Green and Just Economy
Engages people in human
, community and intergenerational
development
Keeps us within / moves us back towards planetary boundaries Reduces poverty and inequalityPromotes individual and community wellbeing Builds agency, solidarity and subsidiarity Cf. Fien, Goldney and Murphy (2009); Raworth, Wykes and Bass (2014)Slide7
What are the big questions?
Skills for a Green and Just Economy
Draw on recent work on skills and human development and on UNESCO’s transformative vision
Confront
how skills development is complicit in promoting indecent, precarious and unsustainable
workUnderpin this with a political economy reading that robustly engages with why the world is in the state it is in, and with the obstacles to genuinely sustainable development; whilst maintaining the courage to hope in a better futureMinimise the costs and risks of any transformation for the poor and lock them into the positive aspects of sustainable development