Pam Puntenney RIP: A true loss for the education community
On the eve of the Heads of State UN General Assembly, I heard that Pam J. Puntenney had died in June this year. In the crazy world of international sustainable development politics, there are some individuals that you remember and who make a serious contribution. Pam was one of them There was seldom a UN meeting I went to that she wasn’t attended from 1996 to now and her focus on education. She was part of the Education Caucus that succeed in persuading governments to reject the report done by UNESCO on the implementation of the Agenda 21 chapter not once, not twice but three times. Why was this important? The old Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) particularly in the first ten years was holding UN Agencies and Programmes accountable to the broader sustainable development agenda outside their own governing bodies. The fact was that UNESCO had not done much to implement chapter 36 of Agenda 21 Promoting Education, Public Awareness and Training and the education community...