Contribuição crítica sobre o GreenComp e sua constelação política: Análise de um caboclo sobre discursos europeus em torno da sustentabilidade

Abstract

With the unfolding of the climate mutation process and the deterioration of living conditions brought about by rising global temperatures, the European Commission published the GreenComp, a guiding document for developing "sustainability competences" for the European Union's population. Given this scenario, the question arises: What conception of education and nature does GreenComp and its policy bring, and how has the Portuguese educational context appropriated its discourses? To uncover the underlying rationales of GreenComp, a critical approach to education was adopted, anchored in Bowe, Ball, and Gold's (1992) Policy Cycle, which analyzes the trajectory of a policy from its formulation to implementation, alongside Loureiro's (2022) political ecology, which problematizes power relations in environmental issues. By applying Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022) to multilateral environmental policy documents that permeate GreenComp (2022) - such as the European Green Deal (2019), the European Skills Agenda for sustainable competitiveness, social fairness and resilience (2020), Sustainability competences: A systematic literature review (2020), and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 (2020) - it became evident that the policy's ideas and framework uphold educational rationales aligned with the neoproductivism discussed by Saviani (2013) and a banking education in the Freirean sense (Freire, 2017). Concurrently, interviews were conducted with one of GreenComp's authors, a climate ambassador, and four teachers (one from higher education and others from technical education). These interviews revealed that the policy's ideals about Nature align with classical colonialist notions by marginalizing human and non-human knowledge that does not conform to the hegemonic logic of the global market. This analysis also indicates that the "envisioning sustainable futures" competence in GreenComp operates as a mechanism to maintain the status quo, corroborating what Krenak (2020) denounced as the tendency to "colonize subjectivities". By promoting an ahistorical and operationalized vision of sustainability, the policy sabotages alternative perspectives on the future and reinforces an instrumental rationality that serves the interests of the hegemonic Anthropocene-ensuring the continuation of the ongoing environmental devastation.