ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights that when responding to sustainability challenges just by emphasizing adaptation in light of inevitable changes, this can draw attention away from the need to disrupt the systems, routines and structures that are causing unsustainability in the first place. Deliberative democracy ideally involves the articulation of reasoned argument in public spaces that is non-coercive, open and transparent as well as progressively transformative, that is, moving toward some accepted and effective resolution. However, when education and science become tools to prescribe how people should live their lives, both become fundamentally undemocratic and, indeed, unsustainable. Education and science for sustainable development instead require social learning that includes space for alternative paths of development, but also alternatives to ‘development’; new ways of thinking, valuing and doing; participation minimally distorted by power relations; pluralism, diversity and minority perspectives; and deep consensus, but also respectful dissent. With the bankruptcy of science for impact factors nearing and the loss of public trust in science rising, the call for greater connectivity between science and society is growing louder. The networked society opens doors to a new era characterized by the cooperation of amateur and professional scientists where enhanced computing and computation power, along with big and linked data, signal an exciting mix of local and global, humans and machines, humans and nature in the transgressive pedagogical paradigm that moves beyond the industrial scientific model of applied science. When dissonance is introduced carefully in such knowledge co-creation processes and dealt with in a proactive and reflective manner, it can help participants reconsider their views and invite them to co-create new ways of looking at a particular issue and generate new thinking that can thaw frozen mind-sets and break deeply entrenched systems and routines. Transformative processes are more likely to occur when those involved are or become aware of the frames or filters through which they perceive their reality and are able to deconstruct and reconstruct them in their joint pursuit of sustainability.
