Towards Global Citizenship: Rewriting Italian History?

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Global Citizenship Education(GCED) are jointly promoted under Objective 4.7 of Agenda 2030 (UN, 2015), witha subsequent UNESCO document (2017) highlighting their complementarity. Inte-grating these two educational frameworks is particularly key if we believe that ad-dressing the current socio-environmental crisis requires fostering a “planetary hu-manism” (Simonigh, 2012) that respects both human and non-human life. Such anapproach would promote a sense of limits, inclusion, and responsibility for ourplanet – the shared home of all forms of life.From an educational perspective, it is essential to strengthen individuals’ ecologi-cal identity – in terms of awareness of one’s connection to Earth’s rhythms and theecologically productive ecosystems upon which we depend (Thomashow, 1996;Morin, 2001). Cultivating such an identity can help foster a broad understanding ofglobal citizenship, characterized by responsible individuals who actively engagewith socio-environmental challenges rather than delegating decisions about the fu-ture of life on Earth solely to science and politics (Bertolino & Perazzone, 2018).In practice, however, these two educational areas – sustainability and citizenship –are still all too often treated as separate domains. ESD is largely framed asknowledge about environmental issues, focusing generically on the need to respectand conserved the natural environment, often seen as in competition with the hu-man environment. In contrast, GCED focuses on values such as solidarity and in-ternational cooperation, predominantly addressing cultural issues, lifestyles, andmodels for the development of human societies, although with insufficient consid-eration for local conditions, climate factors, or differential access to natural re-sources (Perazzone et al., 2024).In this paper, we examine how Italian schools legislation has interpreted and pro-vided for the integration of ESD and GCED over time.