Title: The politics of federal environmental education policy
Description: Both environmental governance 1 and education governance 2 occupy contested territory in contemporary US political discourse. Environmental education (EE) policy has emerged at this intersection and taken on aspects of both controversies. Central to debates surrounding environmental education are still unresolved issues concerning the role of the federal government in education, the role of education in citizen-making, and the role of the public in environmental governance. As a case study of the politics of environmental education policy, I explore these issues as they relate to the National Environmental Education Act of 1990, 3 attempts at its reauthorization, its continued appropriations, and its current state of policy stasis. The political controversy over the federal role in environmental education is an appropriate case study of environmental education politics insofar as it reflects the different positions held by actor groups with regard to the definition, efficacy, and legitimacy of environmental education. At the core of these debates, as we will see, is a definitional crisis--that is, there is no common understanding across the relevant actor groups as to what environmental education is, or should be. I suggest here that this definitional issue can be best understood as having technical, ideological, and structural components 4 --all of which are mutually reinforcing and thus perpetuate the stasis in federal environmental education policy.

1 I rely on Durant, Fiorino and O'leary's definition of environmental governance in Environmental Governance Reconsidered ; "In the term environmental governance, we refer to the increasingly collaborative nature of [environmental and natural resource] policy formulation and implementation. In this vein, a wide array of third parties (for example, actors in the profit sector, the nonprofit sector, and civic society), in addition to government agencies, comprise non hierarchical networks of actors wielding a variety of policy tools (for example, rules and regulations, subsidies, and information) to address diverse, complex and evolving [environmental and natural resource] problems." p. 22-23. 2 In this case, I adapt Durant, Fiorino and O'leary's definition of environmental governance to education leadership. 3 See Appendix 1 for text of the Environmental Education Act of 1990. 4 I am indebted to David Rejeski of the Woodrow Wilson Institute for helping me think through environmental education politics from a definitional perspective.
Subjects: Environmental education, Environmental protection, Study and teaching
Places: United States