The article compares how the UN-initiated education for sustainable development (ESD) has fared in three seemingly dissimilar countries: Norway, a wealthy, 'post-materialist' liberal democracy, Ghana, a developing democratic country, and China, a fast catching-up, centrallysteered economy. The studybased on an analysis of national ESD programmes, schoolbooks and qualitative interviews with teachers and studentsdiscusses some of the pivotal reasons for the decline in ESD schooling in all three countries. It also explores surprising 'archipelagos of pedagogical innovation', as shown by one of the high schools in Ghana. Our conclusions are that, apart from specific, cultural and political contexts which influence ESD, students' socio-environmental literacy in the examined countries has been affected by an ever more pervasive competitive and neoliberal mindset. Further, in all three cases, the agenda of 'sustainable development' suffers from a 'narrative and mythical deficit': a lack of a mobilizing story, the absence of which reduces the attractiveness of sustainability ideals and inhibits their empowering potential. Sustainability on trial In the 2012 follow-up to the international classic in global pessimism, The Limits to Growth (1976), Jørgen Randers argues that the world today has all the necessary resources to meet the challenges connected to climate shift, food scarcity, poverty, and energy crises (2052: A Global Forecast, 2012). We can do so with negligible short-term costs and massive long-term benefits, he says. The paradox is that 'people can tackle the crisis but they will not do it. And they will not do it because what is at stake is a socio-cultural transformation which is either too sluggish or too unimaginative, arrested by public inertia, and opposed by vested interests' (Randers 2014).

Seshat: Global History Databank, established in 2011, was initiated by an ever-growing team of social scientists and humanities scholars to test theories about the evolution of complex societies (Francois et al. 2016; Turchin et al. 2015). Seshat reflects both what is known about global history (within certain practical constraints, discussed below) and also what is unknown, or poorly known. Seshat is a continuously growing dataset incorporating evolving interpretations, highlighting persisting controversies, and contextualizing enduring ambiguities. The quantitative data, suitable for statistical analysis, is buttressed by qualitative nuance embedded in descriptive paragraphs along with references to pertinent scholarship.

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Recent years have seen major political crises throughout the world, and foreign policy analysts nearly universally expect to see rising tensions within (and between) countries in the next 5-20 years. Being able to predict future crises and to assess the resilience of different countries to various shocks is of foremost importance in averting the potentially huge human costs of state collapse and civil war. The premise of this paper is that a transdisciplinary approach to forecasting social breakdown, recovery, and resilience is entirely feasible, as a result of recent breakthroughs in statistical analysis of large-scale historical data, the qualitative insights of historical and semiotic investigations, and agent-based models that translate between micro-dynamics of interacting individuals and the collective macro-level events emerging from these interactions. Our goal is to construct a series of probabilistic scenarios of social breakdown and recovery, based on historical crises and outcomes, which can aid the analysis of potential outcomes of future crises. We call this approach-similar in spirit to ensemble forecasting in weather prediction-multipath forecasting (MPF). This paper aims to set out the methodological premises and basic stages envisaged to realize this goal within a transdisciplinary research collaboration: first, the statistical analysis of a massive database of past instances of crisis to determine how actual outcomes (the severity of disruption and violence, the speed of resolution) depend on inputs (economic, political, and cultural factors); second, the encoding of these analytical insights into probabilistic, empirically informed computational models of societal breakdown and recovery-the MPF engine; third, testing the MPF engine to "predict" the trajectories and outcomes of another set of past social upheavals, which were not used in building the model. This "historical retrodiction" is an innovation that will allow us to further refine the MPF technology. Ultimately our vision is to use MPF to help write what we call "a history of possible futures," in which the near-and medium-term paths of societies are probabilistically forecast.

Nordic high-trust societies are underpinned by prosociality, a term denoting cooperation and working for the good of others. State-funded voluntarism provides opportunities for altruism that appears to contribute to the Nordics’ exceptional level of well-being. Altruists are rewarded by a warm, lasting affect that enhances personal well-being, thus motivating further prosociality. Humanity’s evolutionary past coded into us a desire to strengthen our community by helping those in need—a biocultural drive that is corrupted when authoritarian regimes enforce unselfish behavior on disempowered populations. Such coercive altruism has a line of adverse long-term consequences for communal functionality and individual flourishing. Our study examines how sociocultural context influences people’s prosocial strategies, and how sharing insights and practices from democratic and authoritarian traditions can lead to new, revitalized forms of altruism. Our in-depth interviews (n = 32) of Nordic and Slavonic helpers of Ukrainian refugees in Norway (1) illuminate the impact of culture and memory on altruistic practices, (2) define points of tension between systemic and anti-systemic modes of prosociality, and (3) identify cross-cultural interactions that generate trust, well-being, and social innovation. The post-communist experience of the Slavonic informants motivated anti-systemic altruism, which highlights spontaneity, improvisation, and occasional rule breaking. Norwegian systemic altruism is based on trust, efficacy, and rule-following. Our evolutionary approach to cultural psychology substantiates how important it is for development and immigration policies to align our knowledge of human nature with insights into the workings of cultural legacies. A better understanding of the biocultural mainsprings of altruism could be of crucial importance in our era of reemerging authoritarianism and increasing migration.