Green governmentalities and the formation of environmental education in post-Buen Vivir Ecuador

• In Event: The Power of Pedagogy for Sustainability Transformation

Proposal

When he was elected President of Ecuador in 2006, Rafael Correa, an economist by training, vowed to dismantle the country’s neoliberal model of development and address decades-old state failures in the social sector. Central to his campaign rhetoric was the Kichwa concept of sumak kawsay, or buen vivir in Spanish. Generally understood to be rooted in Indigenous cosmology, buen vivir encompasses an ideal where both the human and the non-human thrive in peaceful, salubrious, and spiritual coexistence (Brown & McCowan, 2018). This commitment to harmony with nature was most evident in 2008, when Ecuador made headlines around the world for being the first country to declare the rights of nature in its constitution. Despite this declaration, the question remains as to whether Ecuador’s national discourse touting harmony with nature, investment in social programs, and a rejection of neoliberal models of development can be achieved while drilling in the Amazon to pay for it all.

Within this context, how do the sectors of environment and education come together to produce and implement environmental learning, and what are the implications for student outcomes? My dissertation research explores how environmental education (EE) has developed within formal schools in coastal Ecuador in the years since buen vivir became a national political principle. In this paper, I seek to address the following question: to what extent does Ecuador’s Ministry of Education support the development of EE in formal schools? I focus on the development of EE in formal schooling at the state level, from the beginning of the Correa administration in 2006, through the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, to today.

Using a framework that draws on concepts from green governmentality (Agrawal, 2005; Rutherford, 2017), this qualitative study attempts to detail the influence of buen vivir-led policies on local EE practice and engages with international development discourse. Additionally, this study examines the ways in which the Ecuadorian government has at times outsourced or collaborated with environmental NGOs and other multilateral actors in the production of EE, and explores the pedagogical and curricular implications for these involvements.

This study is based primarily on critical discourse analysis of national education and environmental policy and informed by semi-structured interviews with school principals, environmental NGO staff, and other professionals connected to EE initiatives in the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education.

This study works to fill an important gap in scholarship on buen vivir, the environment, and education, as well as EE within post-neoliberal states in Latin America. While a number of education scholars have studied how the Correa administration and buen vivir changed the Ecuadorian schooling system (Baxter, 2019; Restrepo Echavarría & Orosz, 2021; Stromquist, 2019), few have addressed EE specifically. Meanwhile, studies on EE in Ecuador tend to focus on aspects of EE program participation and learning outcomes, but fail to consider issues exogenous to the education sector, such as the influence of global sustainability discourse and state policies on local practices. Furthermore, this study highlights the ways environmental and sustainability education policy solutions in Ecuador are shaped by the interplay of global social movements, Indigenous protests at the national scale, and local environmental conditions.

Author

• Neela Nandyal, University of Minnesota