By Katrin Wagner-Gamble and Derek Elias

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UNESCO Bangkok is the Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education, co-ordinating the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) programme in keeping with its organizational role as a laboratory of ideas, a standard-setter and a promoter of international cooperation. It guides the region to a successful implementation of the UN Decade of "Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014)" (DESD). The Regional Bureau serves 46 member states via 14 national and cluster offices covering a vast geographical area: from as far west to Iran, north to Japan, east to the Cook Islands and south to New Zealand.

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With the generous support of the Japanese Funds-in-Trust, UNESCO Bangkok published a Situational Analysis of Education for Sustainable Development in the Asia-Pacific Region in 2005. Its purpose was to describe the extent to which countries in the region have integrated ESD policies, programmes and practices within both formal and non-formal educational settings at the grassroots, sub-national, national and sub-regional levels. This Analysis provided the region with a "snapshot" of the region’s current state of ESD and has assisted in guiding the regional implementation of the DESD.

Four countries, namely Thailand, Indonesia, New Zealand and Viet Nam, have been selected to illustrate the varying approaches of initiating ESD at the national level, which are both instructive and reflective of the richness of ESD in the Asia-Pacific Region.

To ensure the successful implementation of a strong ESD programme, all countries need to acknowledge the following factors:

• stakeholders need to understand the unique holistic and cross-cutting nature of ESD;
• countries need to find approaches of incorporating new ways of thinking within existing programmes and structures at a local level;
• youth, rural and indigenous communities can play a strong role in ESD;
• ESD initiatives need to take local norms, values and cultures into account;
• different stakeholder groups need to learn to work together towards a common goal.

• UNESCO – Education for Sustainable Development United Nations Decade (2005-2014)
• UNESCO-Regional Office Bangkok