Simon McGrath & Lesley Powell 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 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”

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 boundaries  Continued poverty, inequality and lack of decent work in the South  Effects of austerity agenda in the North  Northern summer has reinforced the need to think more about skills and migration

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 sufficient  Complex relationship between green, decent and pro- poor

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 society  Need to blend these with sustainability thinking

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 inequality  Promotes individual and community wellbeing  Builds agency, solidarity and subsidiarity  Cf. Fien, Goldney and Murphy (2009); Raworth, Wykes and Bass (2014)

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 work  Underpin 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 future  Minimise the costs and risks of any transformation for the poor and lock them into the positive aspects of sustainable development