Apping lunch and earning keep: Eco-Schooling in an unequal world

Abstract

Eco-Schools is the world’s largest sustainable school program. Drawing on biopolitical theory and fieldwork conducted in Rwanda, South Africa, Sweden and Uganda, this article explores and compares how Eco-Schools is enacted in contexts marked by widely differing socio-economic living conditions. Attention is drawn to the biopolitical rationalities and techniques through which Eco-Schools is rendered operable and to how the program’s peculiar combination of global standardization and flexible adaptation to context enables differentiation. The analysis demonstrates how poor students become educated for micro-entrepreneurial subsistence and community self-reliance, whereas wealthy students are targeted as mass consumers and rendered aware of problems that exist elsewhere for ‘others’. Ultimately the article suggests that the biopolitical rationalities and techniques though which Eco-Schools operate undermine the program’s efficacy to challenge inequality. These findings support previous studies arguing that current modes of local adaptation of sustainability education risk reproducing a global biopolitical divide between rich and poor.