Design for sustainable cultural landscapes - A whole-systems framework

This article explores how Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) could be used as a guidance framework for the capacity development of those engaged in the process of identifying, protecting, conserving, presenting and transmitting cultural landscapes. It draws insights from the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) curriculum intended to serve the purpose of educating for the transition to a comprehensive sustainable culture; and incorporates learning objectives from the Education for Sustainable Development Goals report by UNESCO. The framework follows the pattern of the EDE curriculum organised in four dimensions of sustainability and the three dimensions of learning - cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural. Each of these four dimensions, in turn, contains five modules- thus twenty subject areas in total, all of which need to be considered by sustainable cultural landscape educational programmes. The paper concludes that in order to create a whole-systems guidance framework addressing cultural landscape complexities, a wide variety of viewpoints needs to be considered including community, nature rights and traditional ways of knowing and other panicipatory epistemologies.