How Formal Education Policy Quietly Erases Community Sustainability Knowledge

Two trends have run in parallel across the past decade, and a new theoretical paper argues they may be structurally connected rather than coincidental. In November 2019, UNESCO adopted its Education for Sustainable Development framework, known as ESD for 2030, which launched at Berlin in 2021 and has since driven a global expansion of formal sustainability education. Over roughly the same period, researchers documented traditional ecological knowledge eroding among communities on the periphery of the Bangladesh Sundarbans, where elders still retain sophisticated understanding of tides, winds and species behaviour but younger community members increasingly do not. A Perspective article published in Discover Education by Sayeed Bin Ataur Rahman Aditta of the University of Pécs proposes that these two trajectories are not merely neighbours in time. The paper introduces a causal mechanism, the Formalization Trap, which holds that the very act of formalising sustainability education can actively displace the informal knowledge systems it grows alongside.

The argument begins by naming what gets damaged, because damage requires an object. Traditional ecological knowledge is judged too narrow a category, tacit knowing describes only an individual cognitive condition, and non-formal learning classifies provision rather than epistemic content. Instead, the paper defines Embedded Sustainability Knowledge, or ESK, as sustainability knowledge whose operational validity depends jointly on three constitutive properties. Place-specificity means the knowledge is calibrated to one ecological and social setting, so abstraction destroys adequacy even when accuracy survives. Practice-embeddedness means the knowledge lives inside doing rather than in propositional form, so transmission demands sustained participation. Relational dependency means the knowledge is distributed across a network of holders rather than carried whole by any individual. Strip away any one property, the author argues, and the knowledge does not merely lose precision; it stops governing the ecological relationships it once regulated.

Bangladeshi evidence anchors each property. In the Sundarbans, master harvesters read tides, winds and species behaviours as a single integrated signal system, a competence that holds only where specific channels, seasonal tides and local species behaviours actually converge. The paper draws on James Scott’s classic contrast between techne, which travels as explicit rules, and metis, which cannot, arguing that ecological calibration is constitutive rather than merely historical. Kantha quilting in Bengal illustrates practice-embeddedness: rural women layer discarded saris and bind them with a running stitch, using embroidery thread drawn from the borders of the very garments being reused, so nothing enters the practice from outside. The recent commercial revival of nakshi kantha, however, has substituted new cotton for reused saris, meaning the stitch survived while its zero-waste logic was decoupled from context by market demand alone, well before any curriculum or ministry arrived.

Relational dependency is exemplified by the Nayakrishi Seed Network, in which roughly 300,000 farmers across three agro-ecological zones circulate locally adapted varieties through regional centres and village seed huts. Women custodians lead the network, holding variety-specific cultivation requirements in memory, and what travels between households includes drying techniques, particular earthen pots, neem leaves against pests and experiential judgement about moisture content. That judgement belongs to nobody individually; the network itself is the knowledge. Replace circulation with distribution, as formal seed programmes do, and certified packets arrive without the judgement matching a variety to a particular soil. The paper notes that community seedbanks worldwide share this architecture, suggesting relational dependency is no Bangladeshi peculiarity.

Having defined the object, the paper specifies three displacement mechanisms through which the Formalization Trap operates: money, curriculum and credential. Resource displacement works through budget lines rather than hostility. Formal provision is countable while community transmission is not, and a 2023 joint World Bank, UNESCO and ILO report defined its object as vocational training leading to diplomas, degrees or certifications, leaving everything beyond certification outside the frame. Six weeks after that report warned of risks, Bangladesh signed the EARN project, committing 300 million dollars to reach roughly 900,000 young people outside employment, education or training through vocational centres and accelerated diploma curricula. Disbursement had reached 21.80 million dollars, about 7.3 per cent, by April 2024, which the author stresses places the argument in the present tense: most money has not yet moved, so sequencing decisions remain open.

Contextual decoupling follows from what any national curriculum must be. Teaching materials must travel between classrooms, districts and cohorts, so portability becomes mandatory and abstraction from local particulars is its unavoidable price. Bangladesh’s 2021 curriculum framework required vocational subjects throughout secondary schooling, and the textbook Jibon o Jibika, or Life and Livelihood, defined livelihood through the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence, with no anchor in nearby households. The paper contrasts this with documented flood-forecasting practices in haor wetland villages, where residents read stationary dark clouds over the Meghalaya hills as a signal of inundation within seven days, cold turbid river water as evidence of upstream rainfall, and ants raising nests or frogs calling overnight as warnings of what approaches. Printed nationally, the referent vanishes. Credential foreclosure completes the sequence: recognition now demands documentation, and ESK holders, working as boatmen, fishermen, day labourers and housewives, possess none. With over two billion workers informally employed globally in 2024, some 57.8 per cent of the workforce, the mechanism bites hardest where education policy defines its own personnel as credentialed educators.

The paper treats Bangladesh as a critical case, chosen because it satisfies three boundary conditions: embedded knowledge remains functionally intact, formal provision is expanding into its domain, and public money and recognition flow through a single narrow channel. The author is careful to distinguish displacement from mere institutional underperformance, and equally careful to distinguish the modern mechanism from its colonial antecedent. Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education openly aimed to form a class of interpreters between rulers and governed, making displacement an objective rather than a byproduct. Today nobody at UNESCO intends to erode a seed network, and that absence of malice is precisely what makes budgetary displacement harder to see, since it has no author and offers nothing to oppose. The paper also identifies a timing asymmetry: in England, parliamentary enclosure dispossessed commoners before compulsory schooling arrived, so schools met a landscape already emptied of the practices they might have displaced, whereas Bangladesh runs that order backwards.

Diagnosis is followed by design. The proposed Recognition-First framework holds that recognition of a knowledge system must precede any attempt to transfer its content, drawing on Nancy Fraser’s distinction between recognition, which alters which categories exist, and redistribution, which moves resources toward existing categories. Three institutional moves follow, each using instruments Bangladesh already operates. Heritage inscription confers standing without certification: Bangladesh ratified the UNESCO intangible heritage convention in 2009 and has inscribed six elements, four in traditional craftsmanship, yet has inscribed nothing in the convention’s fourth domain, knowledge and practices concerning nature, where Sundarbans tidal reading and haor flood forecasting belong. Geographical indication registration, legislated in 2013 and now covering sixty-four products including Jamdani, hilsa and Jamalpur’s nakshi kantha, carries income directly to practitioners without requiring curricular alignment. Community organisations serve as the surviving bridge, with the NGO Nijera Kori, which declined credit delivery and resisted donor-driven expansion, standing as the natural-experiment survivor among organisations that drifted toward market-oriented service delivery.

The paper’s conclusion is deliberately narrow and, in the author’s own framing, uncomfortable. Formal education is not the enemy, no withdrawal of schooling is recommended, and only the policy sequence is contested. The trap does not close when formal sustainability education fails, since failure leaves informal systems untouched and sometimes strengthens them; it closes when formalisation succeeds institutionally, when enrolment climbs, certificates issue and budgets clear while the older system loses the money and standing it had. For funders, the EARN project offers an immediate test, since a small allocation could inscribe practices and pay holders before any classroom opens, generating sequencing evidence nobody currently possesses. For pedagogy, widening the category of educator to count a seed custodian who teaches daily costs almost nothing. And for research, the paper concedes an unresolved bind: documenting an embedded practice converts it into a record, a formalisation the paper itself performs when it quotes haor forecasting cues. The author proposes that studies report what they took, from whom, and whether the community retained any say afterwards, and states plainly what would falsify the framework: if inscribed and directly funded practices still decline in transmission, the sequencing claim is wrong and must go.

Subject of Research: The displacement of informal sustainability knowledge systems by formal education policy

Article Title: The formalization trap explains why sustainability education policy displaces informal knowledge systems

Article References: Aditta, S. B. A. R. (2026). The formalization trap explains why sustainability education policy displaces informal knowledge systems. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1145. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02216-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02216-z

Keywords: sustainability education, embedded sustainability knowledge, formalization trap, traditional ecological knowledge, Bangladesh, UNESCO ESD for 2030, informal learning, intangible cultural heritage, geographical indication, community seed banks, education policy, epistemicide