This article explores the potential of adult learning and education, its pivotal role in addressing social transformation and promoting global-local partnerships, and its relationship to the issue of sustainability. The authors' conceptual setting helps to reveal the closely connected yet contested and always power-related perspectives of adult learners, adult education practitioners, academic researchers and intergovernmental organisations under the auspices of a required "great transformation". The article provides a critique of indicators, monitoring exercises and needs-assessment procedures while exploring accountability and the mandate of adult learning and education in not only "raising," but also "hearing," voices as part of a partnership dialogue on equal terms. The authors suggest a framework for systematising and connecting conceptual approaches to sustainability. They then propose transferring this framework to the domain of education policy tools (e.g. the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) and applying it to adult learning and education (ALE) as a contributing factor to sustainability. Two examples, one from Finland and one from Ghana, serve to illustrate the components of the suggested framework.