Sustainability, cleaner production and an international learning resource

Sustainable development is a central theme in environmental science education and this implies that the only appropriate dimension for such education programmes is global. We therefore feel that a world-wide sharing of knowledge is a most needed instrument in educating the peoples of the world in how to behave responsibly towards the environment and each other. Of course there will always be some tension between this global dimension and the good educational practice of taking examples from the daily life experience of students, but it would be an attractive idea to create a flexible international learning resource from which people could draw materials for implementation in different learning environments. During the process of adaptation to national/regional use or specific target groups, aspects concerning national legislation and daily life examples can be added to the building blocks obtained from the learning resource. The course on cleaner production strategies developed at the Open University of The Netherlands will be used to illustrate the idea.