An Unorthodox Account of Failure and Success in Environmental Education.

Abstract

By offering a positive account of the specific conditions of modern liberal modes of rule, this study undertakes to revise an established view of the empowerment of environmentally active and informed citizens through environmental education. As its distinctive contribution to the debate regarding the effectiveness of environmental education in transforming environmental conduct, this study examines whether the failure proclaimed in environmental education circles is an accurate reflection of the circumstances and outcomes of environmental education. The aim is to examine whether a sense of failure exists because environmental education has indeed failed or whether it exists because the field has set itself over-idealised and utopian goals that are both unnecessarily moral and – in an important sense – designed or pre-destined to entail failure.
In order to examine these issues, this study redescribes two central aspects of contemporary environmental education: first, the orthodoxy that the role of environmental education is to transform society through empowering individuals so that they are able to take action for the environment, that is, be active and informed environmental citizens and, second, the mechanisms, strategies and techniques used in environmental education to bring such personas into being. These aspects are examined – for the first time in a discussion of environmental education – through a lens provided by the notion of “governmentality”. The study concludes by arguing that it is the goal of transformation that leads to a sense of failure in the field of environmental education. Conversely, some successes can be seen when empowerment is understood not as a means to transformation but as a governmental technique through which self-governing “environmental” citizens can be fashioned.
The aim of this study is not to identify a truth about the “best” way to produce “good” environmental behaviour. Neither is it to draw out propositions about environmental education that can then be “applied” to similar issues. Nor does this study seek to develop a general theory of “government”, “power”, “governmentality”, “identity”, or “behaviour change”. The aim is instead to pay closer attention to the mundane, the humble, the everyday. It is to open to examination the ways in which certain dispositions or “mental habits” about environmental education have come to hold positions of unquestioned truth and, therefore, power within the field. Through this examination it becomes possible to offer a more positive account of environmental education by describing the governmental mechanisms, strategies and techniques – the “technologies of citizenship” – that environmental educators employ to fashion active and informed environmental citizens. The actual ways in which new personas are fashioned – in which a range of “environmentally friendly” capacities and attributes are successfully acquired – are described. In doing so, this study demonstrates that there are some grounds – albeit definite and limited – for claiming success in environmental education. Such a claim entails, however, a rethinking of the notion of “success”. The contention, then, is that success can be seen for environmental education in the fashioning of self-governing beings who are not necessarily morally transformed but who are nevertheless equipped with concerns, interests and capacities that enable them to live in an environmentally sustainable fashion.