Thirty-five years after Jomtien, the grammar of international cooperation in education still assumes that progress depends on alignment between states and shared global targets. What passes for cooperation follows a logic of alignment without mutual transformation, one that can no longer hold in a world whose boundaries have dissolved. The idea that states and institutions (transnational or local) can navigate the tensions between universalist promises of rising standards of living through education and localist pressures to move away from western models, is based on ontological principles of separation. International cooperation—to work together—becomes obsolete when faced with ecological breakdown that cares nothing about borders and ownership. Whether we work together or apart is no longer a real choice. Every policy and action here alters the conditions of life there, because there has never been an outside. What feels like the planet kicking back is only relation folding back through us, entanglement made undeniable. What we call the metacrisis is our noticing of entanglement. The world was never a machine of separate parts running in parallel; it is metabolic: each formation carrying its own dissolution.
In multilateral education, cooperation takes the form of colored squares: each box a promise, each target another machine part. SDG 4: Quality Education’s call for “proven methods” assumes that what once produced satisfactory results will do so again, regardless of place. There is no room for participants to shape the experience, whether it be humans, time, climate, or the more-than-human world. Education becomes a modular force that flattens the life of place. It mistakes predictability for vitality and replication for relation. Life does not scale; it metabolizes through processes that exceed replication and unsettle any stable form.
There can no longer be the notion that a supranational body orchestrates cooperation along the arc of progress. Within progress hides power: its linear architecture enforced by worldviews that dominate through extractive socio-economic structures. Progress as moralism, as idealism, as humanist residue. Progress as a chain of being whose rungs sediment hierarchy and preclude life’s metabolic reorganization.
Nor should we be entranced by narratives of pre-colonial pasts, of idealized peoples whose ways of life would have remained untouched were it not for the violence of invasion. No divide between north and south can prevent the infiltration of ideas, the spread of viruses, or the two-way flow of capital. No border sanitizes contact. Culture is a dynamic enactment, continually transformed through encounters, whether with the environment or with what it calls “other” cultures. Each exchange dissolves separateness as it happens, folding difference into new configurations of relation and form. This dissolution is the very metabolism through which life occurs.
International cooperation in education presupposes separation. It presupposes that education needs to respond to changing conditions (e.g. AI, environmental degradation, and the changing workforce), but can continue to do so only by pretending it is not one of the forces shaping those conditions. The world is not interconnected through a complicated web of cause-and-effect. The world is a process of co-constitution, of bodies in perpetual transformation. The question is not how should education confront “head-spinning technological changes?” but rather how do education and technologies become through each other, and through the innumerable other bodies that participate in the world?
The metabolic approach refuses the frame in which goals must be either universal or rooted in local sovereignty. While cooperation enacts separation through pre-set (and pre-setting) curricula and outcomes, the metabolic approach begins before learning is organized, where roles, outcomes, and bodies remain in motion. Education does not respond by organizing; it participates in an ongoing metabolic process with other bodies, through kaleidoscopic permutations, reorganizing itself through every act of learning.
A metabolic practice of education begins where cooperation ends, with contact, with the frictions through which relation takes shape. It refuses linear approaches in which centralized powers mold education on the ground. It recomposes across what we called sectors, regions, industries, and generations. Education takes shape as much as it shapes; it participates in mutual transformation without equivalence.
When we abandon cooperation as the negotiation of common goals and learning objectives, metabolic approaches let education breathe to the rhythm of place, where community includes human and more-than-human participants. Rather than marching in lockstep, the learner shapes place as much as place shapes her. Learning moves beyond achievement, fixed metrics, and pre-defined skills. These still matter, but as passages, not destinations. They are the means through which learning moves place and community, and through which community returns the gift to the learner. We witness learning through shifts in the quality of reciprocity.
Imagine learning that begins with the conditions of a place rather than a set syllabus: young people mapping how water moves through their city, tracing how their own bodies follow similar cycles of depletion and renewal. Learning opportunities emerge from the weather this day, government initiatives this year, and the histories of river travel this millennium. Through this, the learners might take on projects to understand why pollutants might be in the water, finding ways to remove them. Or they might ask how we might invite the carp to return to our river. Or perhaps they might campaign to end single use plastic bottles. Through these projects, learners develop skills as the means of enactment. Teachers become guides of attention, not deliverers of content. Learning transforms learner and place through the reciprocity it cultivates.
Cooperation no longer serves once entanglement is perceived. Ecological breakdown, artificial intelligence, and ideological polarization do not act on education from outside; they co-form it, and are co-formed by it. The time for parallel action is over; entanglement has always been how transformation occurs, the metacrisis simply makes not seeing this impossible.
The metacrisis exposes the need for humans to inhabit different literacies than those set by international cooperation. Ecological breakdown requires local participation, including relationships with place and community, and production and circulation with attention to local consequence. Artificial intelligence moves at velocity across distances, and its greatest potential is for humans to offload tasks, not so they might be more productive, but so that they might put their laptops away and tend to local relationships, with other humans and the more-than-human world. This might create more space for conversation and understanding to mitigate polarization. This is not cooperation, this is participation with and as community. Transformation has no fixed lines.
What comes after cooperation will not be built through consensus, but through knowing that we are continuously transformed by what we learn with the world, so that the world transforms with us. Cooperation can no longer operate on the world like a cosmic surgeon. Rather, we participate together to tend the quality of our relations. We move beyond the universalist–localist dichotomy toward constellated worlds, each locality participating with others as part of a larger living system that extends across the planet, porous at its edges.
Coconut Thinking 