Environmental Education and Conservation Organisations

Abstract

One of the key on-going debates in environmental education research and practice relates to the content and goals of programmes. Specifically, there is a long history of debate between advocates of educational perspectives that emphasise the teaching of science concepts and those that seek to more actively link environmental and social issues. In practice, educators and organisations respond to these tensions in a variety of ways, often due to the particular social and economic contexts in which they are located. This chapter explores these debates about the ‘appropriate’ content and aims of programmes by looking at the case of environmental educators working within two conservation organisations in Monteverde, Costa Rica. It reveals that environmental education (i) is an important local site of debate about understandings of the natural world and humans’ relationships to it, and (ii) is part of much wider struggles over the control of processes of local development and environmental management.