Is Education for Sustainable Development the means to bring about inclusive development? Between idealist and alternative positions

‘Adjectival educations’, include a great diversity of proposals within which Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) features prominently. ESD has enjoyed privileged attention from international organizations, in order to move political agendas from a narrow and instrumental understanding to a more holistic conceptualisation of development. However, the project of ESD cannot be easily understood as the means to bring about inclusive development. On the basis of a literature review, this paper inquiries into the tension between idealistic and critical approaches of ESD to highlight how close or how far ESD is from a critical and comprehensive understanding of inclusive development.