The global 'Education for Sustainable Development' (ESD) agenda enacted through the Sustainable Development Goal 4 seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable education to all by the year 2030. Like many nation-states around the world, India has adapted the global guidelines for inclusion in its latest education policies. Attappady, a 'tribal development block' in Kerala, India, and the Indigenous/Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities living there have been targets of education and development programs for decades. The region, which has sustained members of the Irula, Muduga and Kurumba tribes for centuries, has now been impinged on by the state development apparatus that oversees most day-to-day aspects of ST peoples' lives. Comparative and International Education scholarship has shown that the core assumption of the ESD agenda is that improving schooling and existing education systems will create inclusive and equitable societies. However, despite nearly seven decades of efforts to 'develop' Attappady, this beautiful mountain valley, and its residents continue to be left behind in key indicators of development and educational achievement. This dissertation seeks to examine this conundrum by comparing global and national education policies' vision and outcomes for inclusive education with the experience of ST youth in Attappady. I do this through an ethnographic, comparative case study of 'inclusion' in ESD policy and experience. That is, I examine the processes of sense-making around inclusion across global and India's education policies through a thematic analysis of focal policy documents. By employing multiple ethnographic methods, I compare policy priorities for inclusion in relation to ST youth's experiential learning in Attappady. Ethnographic methods are supplemented by the insights of the Youth Researchers of Attappady Collective (YRAC), which was formed as part of this dissertation's Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) component. Findings of this research highlight how ST youth's understanding about education, development, and inclusion are mediated through their recognition that the persistent exclusion they experience in their everyday encounters are systemic and embedded in settler-colonial strategies adopted by the non-ST dominated development apparatus. I argue that a key aspect of policy guidelines that stand in the way of fulfilling ESD's promises of "inclusive education for all", is its framing of inclusion as removing education barriers for a wide range of groups considered 'vulnerable' or 'disadvantaged' populations. When compared with the experiences of ST youth, the depoliticized and decontextualized conceptualizations of inclusion in policy are exacerbating exclusion while reinforcing deficit-based stereotypes of the populations it seeks to 'include'. To navigate systemic exclusion, youth learn and adopt creative skills, strategies, and desires that are rarely perceived as pedagogically pertinent within policies. This dissertation offers a "restorying" of inclusive education as a step towards understanding and possibly transforming interconnected, exclusionary educational structures. Drawing on young people's nuanced and compelling insights, I argue that ST youth in general and the youth co-researchers of YRAC in particular are restorying the failure of inclusive education in Attappady by redirecting gaze towards structural "ruptures" in formal education, and offering possibilities for inclusion that goes beyond the identity-based inclusion prioritized by global and national education policy. As experts in navigating and living in a precarious and uncertain colonial-modern world, the youth participants, and co-researchers of this dissertation are offering invitations and openings for educators, policy makers, and development practitioners to imagine education 'otherwise', thereby demonstrating the urgency of the educational task of learning from youth. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]