0009-0006-7194-5898The current trajectory of global development is fundamentally unsustainable. A model historically powered by fossil energy, resource extraction, and the pursuit of economic growth for short-term gain is now destabilizing the very systems that sustain all life. More than fifty years ago, The Limits to Growth (1972) warned that continued exponential growth in population and industrial production on a finite planet risked ecological and economic overshoot and decline. The risks it identified are increasingly evident. The 2025 Planetary Health Check reports that seven of nine planetary boundaries have now been breached (Planetary Boundaries Science, 2025). The cascading disruption of interconnected systems—climate, biodiversity, water, food, political, and social—exposes the limits of a global architecture increasingly struggling to address the polycrises it has helped produce.
The post-war development architecture—organized through multilateral institutions, foreign aid, modernization agendas, and a growing commitment to economic growth as a measure of progress—is under increasing strain. Official development assistance has fallen sharply, with cuts concentrated among several of the largest donors, while geopolitical tensions, rising defense and security spending, fiscal pressures, and shifting domestic priorities are reshaping development finance. Multilateral channels are also under growing pressure, including substantial reductions in core funding to UN institutions (OECD, 2026). At the same time, long-standing definitions of progress and prosperity are being questioned, including the continued reliance on GDP as a dominant measure of societal progress despite its inability to account adequately for social and ecological wellbeing (Nature, 2025). A development model long presented as a pathway toward global equity and sustainability has not prevented ecological overshoot or persistent social inequities. Humanity is living outside the safe and just corridor for people and the planet (Rockström et al., 2021).
Education became closely entangled with industrial and growth-oriented economies, including through labor-force preparation and the organization of schooling around competition and individual achievement. Influential critiques of capitalist schooling have documented how education can reproduce labor-market hierarchies and prevailing economic relations (Bowles & Gintis, 1976). Human-capital theory further strengthened the framing of education as an investment in individual productivity and economic growth (Schultz, 1961; Becker, 1964). This framing remains influential in contemporary development policy, where education and skills continue to be positioned as drivers of employment, productivity, and economic growth (World Bank, 2026). In higher education, these connections extend across curriculum, research, institutional operations, governance, and relationships with wider society (McCowan, 2025). Efforts to “green” education can remain within assumptions of petroculture and perpetual growth when innovation, technological solutions, and green growth are pursued without deeper reconsideration of economic expansion, educational purpose, and human–nature relations (for related critiques and alternative framings, see Karsgaard & Shultz, 2025; Kwauk & Casey, 2021; Silova et al., 2025).
Importantly, the development paradigm is not only an economic model; it is also an organizing framework for how education is understood and governed. Sterling (2001, 2024) traces how mechanistic and instrumental assumptions—privileging fragmentation, prediction, control, and measurable outcomes—have become embedded in educational thought and practice. These assumptions resonate with the human-capital and modernization logics through which education has been positioned in relation to economic growth, productivity, employment, and societal progress (Schultz, 1961; Becker, 1964; World Bank, 2026). Together, these logics can narrow educational purpose toward standardized and economically legible outcomes while marginalizing other purposes and pathways, particularly those rooted in care, cultural renewal, land-based practices, relationality, and more-than-human relations. They also leave deeper questions about what education is for—and for whom—less visible.
Education's entanglement with growth-oriented development can reinforce patterns that contribute to ecological overshoot while undermining conditions for human and more-than-human flourishing. To operate within the safe and just space for humanity (Raworth, 2017; Rockström et al., 2021), education must be reconfigured as an essential infrastructure for sustaining life within ecological limits and across biocultural diversity—the interconnected vitality of ecosystems, languages, lifeways, and knowledge systems. Such reorientation also calls for greater epistemic plurality, bringing Earth system science into dialogue with Indigenous, local, land-based, and relational knowledge systems while respecting their distinct foundations and forms of validation. These knowledge systems offer distinct ways of understanding ecological change, socioecological relationships, adaptation, and responsibility to place, while their encounters can expand the possibilities available for responding to planetary change (Tengö et al., 2014; IPCC, 2022).
These conditions mark a moment of rupture and reorientation. As the limits of growth-centered development become increasingly visible, education is implicated both in reproducing existing systems and in opening possibilities for alternatives. Reorientation reaches beyond improving efficiency within existing arrangements; it involves deeper shifts in educational purposes, relationships, institutions, and measures of success. Education can contribute to collective resilience by strengthening interdependence, sustaining plural ways of knowing and living, and supporting the collective learning and action needed to navigate change within the limits of a shared and finite planet.
This reorientation is already taking shape across diverse contexts through educational practices grounded in reciprocity, resilience, and more-than-human ethics. These are situated responses to changing conditions and vital resources for rethinking education’s purposes and possibilities. Read together, they suggest that alternatives to growth-centered education do not follow a single model; they emerge through different histories, relationships, struggles, and ways of knowing. The question is not whether change is possible, but whether we are willing to confront the political, economic, and epistemic forces that keep education tethered to a growth-centered paradigm that is destabilizing the conditions of life itself.
