Neoliberalism and Environmental Education

This timely book situates environmental education within and against neoliberalism, the dominant economic, political, and cultural ideology impacting both education and the environment. Proponents of neoliberalism imagine and enact a world where the primary role of the state is to promote capital markets, and where citizens are defined as autonomous entrepreneurs who are to fulfill their needs via competition with, and surveillance of, others.

These ideas interact with environmental issues in a number of ways and Neoliberalism and Environmental Education engages this interplay with chapters on how neoliberal ideas and actions shape environmental education in formal, informal and community contexts. International contributors consider these interactions in agriculture and gardening, state policy enactments, environmental science classrooms, ecoprisons, and in professional management and educational accountability programs. The collection invites readers to reexamine how economic policy and politics shape the cultural enactment of environmental education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

Preface Introduction: Environmental education in a neoliberal climate1. Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times2. Nature is a nice place to save but I wouldn’t want to live there: environmental education and the ecotourist gaze3. Entrepreneurial endeavors: (re)producing neoliberalization through urban agriculture youth programming in Brooklyn, New York4. Sustainability science and education in the neoliberal ecoprison5. Refusing to settle for pigeons and parks: urban environmental education in the age of neoliberalism6. Supporting youth to develop environmental citizenship within/against a neoliberal context7. Negotiating managerialism: professional recognition and teachers of sustainable development education8. Neoliberalism, new public management and the sustainable development agenda of higher education: history, contradictions and synergies9. The promise and peril of the state in neoliberal times: implications for the critical environmental education movement in Brazil10. Towards a political ecology of education: the educational politics of scale in southern Pará, Brazil11. Against neoliberal pedagogies of plants and people: mapping actor networks of biocapital in learning gardens12. Community organizing, schools, and the right to the city13. The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: business as usual in the end

Joseph Henderson is a Research Scientist at the University of Delaware, USA. Trained as an anthropologist of environmental and science education, his research investigates how sociocultural, political, and economic factors influence teaching and learning in emerging energy and climate systems.

David Hursh is a Professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, NY, USA. His research situates education policy and reform in the United States and globally within the context of a neoliberal social imaginary.

David Greenwood is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair of Environmental Education at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. His scholarship, teaching, and activism revolve around place-based, environmental, holistic, and sustainability education.