Introduction

Discussions about Environmental Education concepts and governance in the Brazilian Amazon are becoming more important. These two concepts—Environmental Education and governance—suggest theoretical reasoning and social and political articulations aimed at questioning aggressive nature-trading practices and their impacts on communities’ lives. We must highlight rural populations among such communities, since they depend on nature to keep their support base, as well as other urban communities that live in territories mostly affected by the impact of both climatic changes and other environmental issues (Martínez-Alier, 2007; Porto-Gonçalves, 2017a). Accordingly, the global targets to mitigate climatic changes were widely discussed in different international conferences, including the commitments made at COP21 climatic meeting in Paris, in 2015 (Brondízio & Le Tourneau, 2016). One specific matter is constant in these debates, namely the construction of environmental governance networks—since they are plural and vary depending on local and territorial needs—as community response linked to current environmental issues (Martine & Alves, 2019). The sense of governance we herein approach is that proposed by Biermann et al. (2009, p. 4), which refers to as follows:

Forms of steering that are less hierarchical than traditional governmental policy making (even though most modern governance arrangements will also include some degree of hierarchy), rather decentralized, open to self-organization, and inclusive of non-state actors that range from industry and non-governmental organizations to scientists, indigenous communities, city governments, and international organizations.

The concept of governance has been in the mainstream since the 1980s, when the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund took multi-directional actions focusing on “good governance” to guide their work and the interactions among member countries (Gonçalves & Costa, 2011). Since then, the concept of governance has been exhaustively addressed by different professionals, organizations, political subjects and social actors; it has been gaining different meanings throughout time (Martine & Alves, 2019). At first, the sense of governance was based on the liberal view of market; it was, almost exclusively, centered on the role of the State and on its power branches featuring governability (Gonçalves & Costa, 2011). Accordingly, the application of the initial governance concept, from the Western and neoliberal perspective, was problematic for the dialogue with communities in the Brazilian Amazon, since the Brazilian State intensified the exploitation policies in this territory in the 1980s. As years passed by, the concept of governance was added with other meanings that, based on Weiss (2016, p. 329), “governability is defined by rules and conditions that support the exercise of power; it depends on the dynamic balance between society’s demand levels and the ability of the public and private institutional systems to process them.”

Based on the dynamic balance agenda, the initial concept of governance embodied other meanings after the creation of the Global Governance Commission (GGC) in the early 1990s by the United Nations (UN). It included other broader and more plural perspectives about the participation of different social segments in the management of common subjects, including the environmental agenda. Nowadays, the concept of environmental governance concerns the ability “to change the act of ruling into public action; it results from the sum of different forms used by public and private people and institutions to manage their common subjects by continuous processes that match conflicting interests” (Weiss, 2016, p. 329). With respect to the Amazon, the conflicting interests are turned into different environmental issues deriving from ecological debts (Martínez-Alier, 2007) associated with lack of blunt governmental public polices focused on nature, with the environmental injustice scenario, and with lack of concrete resilience, adaptation, and environmental issue mitigation propositions.

Environmental Education in the Amazon has been playing relevant role in and outside schools at the time to report conflicting interests between the economic and the environmental agendas. It is so, because Environmental Education goes beyond the environmental agenda, destabilizes the romantic representations of the colonization process, and highlights the marks of capitalism. Environmental Education construction in Brazil, over the years, added plural meanings and specific demands of populations in such a wide and diverse territory known as Brazil. Environmental Education gained room as theoretical perspective in the Brazilian academic universe in the 1990s, with emphasis on a particular feature, namely the addition of different agendas from popular social movements. This feature still concerns the new reading of different Environmental Education perspectives, which focus on behavioral, technicist, and instrumentalist approaches. Thus, Environmental Education in Brazil adds reasoning and considerations about Ecological Policy, Complexity, Ethics, and Social Psychology, among other scientific fields. By making such a move to integrate other knowledge fields, different Environmental Education perspectives in Brazil propose the analysis of non-extractivist knowledge, as well as of plural and diversified education practices that cross social inequalities and environmental crisis.

As for the Amazonian context, the Environmental Education approach—mainly the perspectives that add critical components—aims at rescuing historical elements, according to which, local territoriality has been the stage of struggles between different forces and interests since the Europeans arrival in the Amazon, back in the fourteenth century (Loureiro, 2002; Porto-Gonçalves, 2017a). Conflicts caused by more than five centuries of invasions, appropriation, and violence left significant cultural and environmental marks (Andrade, 2019). However, Nobre (2014, p. 37) highlights that “the mythical Amazonian forest is much bigger than mankind can see.” Results in research carried out by this climatologist point out that the Amazon “goes beyond a geographic museum of endangered species stored in conservation units; it represents much more than a simple carbon deposit, which is referenced as dead mass in climatic treaties” (Nobre, 2014, p. 37).

The Amazon “gives us the possibility of making a critical analysis about ways to overcome the crossroad set by the power and knowledge patterns launched by the sense of dominating nature […] which took us to the environmental collapse we are nowadays witnessing” (Porto-Gonçalves, 2017a, p. 11). Accordingly, the roots and elements potentiating the environmental collapse in the Amazon must be assessed through measures that can be taken to mostly fight the two biggest issues in the regions, namely: deforestation and climatic change. Increased economic activities that are not bond to environmental policies that, in their turn, are in compliance with the region’s biodiversity and socio-diversity, are among these elements (Lima, 2016). Such an increased activity was mainly boosted from the 1970s onward, and it was followed by the urbanization process in the Amazon; nowadays, it emerges as contradictory factor to the national environmental agenda, mainly to the climatic one (Brasil—PNMC, 2019). Among these activities, one finds the construction of the Transamazônica road (BR 230), the construction and operation of hydroelectric power plants, the construction and operation of harbors, extraction and commercial mining activities, and the expansion of the agribusiness (Brondízio, 2016; Domingues & Bermann, 2012; Fearnside, 2015; Lima, 2016; Prates & Bacha, 2011).

All these actions favor and potentiate the commercial routes when they are taken in combination to one another, due to fast and significant changes in the region. Thus, results recorded by Brondízio (2016, p. 1) point out that “few regions have changed as much and as fast as the Amazon, mainly the Brazilian Amazon. The urgency about the Amazonian cause is not an overreaction!” It is so, because these regions perpetuate the environmental injustice processes imposed to local populations, mainly in hard-to-access territories, where basic fundamental rights, such as health and education, are neglected (Lima, 2016). These Amazonian populations encompass Indigenous and Quilombola communities, artisanal fishermen, peasants and riverine residents who live on the very edge of social, economic, political, and environmental vulnerability (Fearnside, 2015). These social groups are challenged to live with the environmental impacts resulting from mega-projects implemented in the regions, on a daily basis, due to the economic activity (Brondízio, 2016; Lima, 2016).

However, such groups have a hard time setting solid environmental governance networks to cope with the economic interests dominating the region, and they cannot give concrete answers to constantly experienced issues (Andrade, 2014). The colonial view posed an appropriation condition to the Amazon, and it was substantiated by the sense of development, according to which “[…] developing means putting aside the participation (the autonomy) each culture and people have over their space, in their territory; it means subverting the way each people keeps the relationship between men and women, and their relations with nature” (Porto-Gonçalves, 2017b, p. 81). Given such a reality, it is important understanding the potential and responses articulated by the communities to cope with the main environmental issues posed to the region. Accordingly, it is paramount understanding, first of all, the contribution from Environmental Education to the construction of environmental governance within schools. In concrete terms, it is essential knowing the social representations that give meaning to the concepts of environment and Environmental Education.

Environmental Education and social representations: epistemological dimensions of the present research

The herein adopted methodology rigorously attacked the ethical procedures required for scientific research in Human Sciences, based on the national legislation.

Discussions surrounding the Environmental Education topic and social representations are quite contemporary. Debates about Environmental Education gained force in the 1960s, from initiatives by ecologist movements that fought for the environment (Reigota, 2011). Social representation, in its turn, emerged in the academic scenario as the way to understand how “representations supported by the influence of communication form the reality of our daily lives and work as the main route to set associations through which we bond to each other” (Duveen, 2010, p. 8). Actually, historical coincidences of the Post-Second World War history are determining for the consolidation of both Environmental Education topic and social representations as expanding knowledge field (Jodelet, 2011; Megid-Neto, 2009). This statement is explained by the impacts caused by the Second World War on both nature and society; it was a milestone, since it highlighted the need of new conceptual, methodological, and epistemological instruments to better understand, and intervene in, reality (Andrade, 2014).

The Theory of Social Representations (TSR) and Environmental Education emerged within the scientific paradigmatic transition of Social and Human Sciences, which was triggered by the Second World War. TSR was proposed by Serge Moscovici, back in 1961, based on his interest in assessing “how, and why, people share knowledge and, by doing so, how they set their common reality and how they turn ideas into practices” (Moscovici, 1990, p. 164). Thus, TSR—although based on the Eurocentric thinking—became an important key for the reading and analysis of social communication in Brazil by sharing this effect with other theoretical and methodological approaches of Social and Human Sciences; some of them are closer to the thoughts of Amerindian and Afro-Diasporic peoples. With respect to the Brazilian scene, Environmental Education was linked to TSR, for the first time, in the 1990s; most precisely, in the PhD thesis by Marcos Reigota, who approached the social representations of the environment and the daily teaching practices applied by a group of Sciences teachers (Andrade, 2014). Since then, several research about this topic were carried out at national and international scope, a fact that allowed acknowledging this theory in the Education field as the way to clarify “the fertility of this notion, its scientific maturity, and its pertinence to deal with psychological and social issues of our society” (Jodelet, 2001, p. 12).

We elaborated the present research by taking into account the contributions from TSR to studies focused on educational and environmental topics; therefore, we aimed at getting to know the environment and Environmental Education’s social. These critiques give meaning to environmental governance ideas. These ideas are closely related to the social organization forms that have been established in the Amazon as the attempt to question local agendas and public policies concerning nature’s exploitation, contamination, and aggressive trading, as well as the impacts of these actions on the lives of poorer and more socioeconomically vulnerable communities. In methodological terms, we opted it in order to develop a qualitative investigation on the ethnographic cut, whose theoretical focus took as reference the procedural model of social representations advocated by Serge Moscovici and Denise Jodelet. The study was carried out in Castanhal City, located in Pará State—Brazil (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Source Adapted by IBGE (2023)

Location of Castanhal City in Pará State’s map—Brazil.

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Castanhal City is located in Northern Brazil, 68 km from the capital of Pará State—Belém. Based on IBGE (2012) Castanhal City covers an area of 1028.889 km2 and houses 205,667 inhabitants, based on estimates by IBGE (2021). The city counts on 62 elementary schools belonging to the municipal public network. The empirical work focused on data collection was concluded in 2014 and it followed three basic selection criteria that were applied to participants: (a) schools located in the urban zone (29 schools, to the detriment of 33 rural schools,Footnote 2 (b) schools that provide to the first stage of Elementary School, and (c) teachers with major degree in Pedagogy who work in elementary schools.Footnote 3

The total sample comprised 29 schools and 133 teachers after the three adopted selection criteria—location, professional action, and qualification—were applied. In total, 121 teachers and 22 schools participated in the research at this stage, because we did not get to include the total population due to operational issues. These teachers contributed to the three research stages: (a) questionnaire application to 121 teachers; (b) conduction of two focus groups, which counted on 7 and 8 participants, respectively; and (c) participatory observation in school activities applied by two teachers. The triangulation of data collection instruments “does not mean getting limited to three comprehension angles, but, most of all, working with several angles, amplifying the emergence scenario of the assessed phenomenon and enriching it with comprehension” (Macedo, 2009, p. 102).

The combination of these three data collection instruments meets the very goal of taking the research closer to the environment and Environmental Education’s social representations, since this triangulation allows building a collaborative narrative. In other words, this narrative takes place as we adopt the questionnaire to include a larger number of participants in the survey, as we make it possible using the space/time to build the collective discourse, which is enabled by two discussion groups and through experiences acquired from participatory observations, since we introduced other perceptions that oftentimes were not expressed in words, but that are found in subjective forms that echo on the way how these teachers work with Environmental Education.

In order to broaden the data understating panorama, the current research took into account the sense of “building the individual as social subject. This subject is not just the very product from social determinations, nor an independent producer, since representations are always contextualized constructions deriving from conditions the individual emerges from and is surrounded by” (Spink, 1993, p. 303). According to Moscovici (1979, p. 46), social representations “take us to the sense of image, social model, concrete, and limited content of representations concerning the precious aspect of object of representation,” in other words, description. These descriptions forced us to adopt two main variables: the environment and Environmental Education. Data gathered at this stage were grouped into seven analytical categories that gathered different concepts of Environmental Education if they are thought as research theoretical construct, the so-called (a) naturalist, (b) conservationist, (c) resolution, (d) CobéAmazônia,Footnote 4 (e) critique, (f) environmental governance, and (g) sustainable development.

The construction of these categories is based on the research’s theoretical construct; therefore, it concerns some of the most recurrent elements of the Brazilian Environmental Education according to the herein adopted theoretical framework. With respect to category environmental governance, the research points out the following meanings: emphasis on environmental awareness processes and social transformation; concern with communities’ formation as essential factor for setting better relationships with nature and community organizations; the propositions centered on education as essential element for the integration, formation, and citizenship action in managing conflicting interests (Biermann et al., 2009; Born et al., 2007; Gomides & Silva, 2010; Reigota, 2011; Weiss, 2016). We will introduce some information related to how the seven categories identified in the data set are represented in the social imaginary of research participants in order to contextualize these same categories. However, we are herein interested in initially presenting and discussing information associated with category ‘environmental governance.’

Amazonian fraction in Pará State based on the concepts of environment and Environmental Education

The history of Environmental Education is marked by different ideological interests; it has contributed to socialize representations of environment based on elements of nature.Footnote 5 We believe that this permanence survives due to the current contexts and needs, whose changes are related to the “history of all animal and plant species, as well as of all forms of culture and artistic expressions that reflect the complex relationships set between living beings and between societies and their natural and cultural resources” (Reigota, 2011, p. 14). This argument is based on results found in teachers’ discourses, in different research variables, which were approximated to the seven categories of analysis, according to the following educational ends: (a) adopting behaviors focused on environmental management conservation and skills; (b) developing environmental issue-solving skills; (c) forming people to reinforce community relationships; and (d) rebuilding bond to nature. All these educational ends are observed in the seven established categories of analysis, which provide us with a broader research panorama before we enter the specificities of the aims of the present article.

We used the arguments advocated by Reigota (2004), who states that the social representations of Environmental Education are formed by the understanding of each subject about the environment to explain the reproduction of ideas shown in Graph n.1. Accordingly, understanding the object can be seen as the first step to action; in other words, it sets the objectives and ends to be achieved through Environmental Education practices. Among such practices, we can highlight communication elements; therefore, the power of such elements in formulating social discourses and actions focused on environmental governance. Communication allows redefining the contextual elements, since “the way we feel and think sets the way we act, either as individuals or collectively” (Castells, 2009, p. 24). However, it is essential acknowledging that communication is surrounded by different conflicts of interest, and it turns communication into something complex that also has impact on individual and collective ways of actions. Based on research data and on the participants in the current research, these actions are supported by seven significant discursive units about the environment and Environmental Education, which mainly reflect the concepts by long-tradition schools in the Environmental Education field that have been widespread in the last decades (Born et al., 2007; Gomides & Silva, 2010; Portugal & Sorrentino, 2020; Sauvé, 2005).

Graph n.1
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Source Elaborated by the author. Research data

Environmental comprehension and its reflexes on Environmental Education meanings.

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On the one hand, data highlight that the “official” discourse about nature’s conservation observed in school discipline matrices is reinforced by teachers’ social representations. On the other hand, however, they point out daily life’s influence, since discourses and critiques are elaborated mainly from issues affecting the region. Accordingly, our analysis emphasizes that the influence of cultural context helps some discourses to embody other environment and Environmental Education’s representations in order to overcome the traditional concepts of the environmental discourse. Thus, we understand that these representations reflect the historical struggles observed in the Amazonian context, where the knowledge of traditional peoples, mainly of indigenous populations, is taken as the very basis to establish resistance trenches. These analyses resemble the conclusions in the research by Portugal and Sorrentino (2020, p. 85), who highlight that.

The Brazilian Environmental Education is built over different perspectives, conceptions, and practices, focused on the conservation of protected areas and of other perspectives associated with the preservation of species, campaigns to protect the Amazon, school Environmental Education, environmental management, programs for the selective collection, and recycling of solid waste, water resources’ management, among others.

The set of ideas found in the aforementioned concepts reflect the history and culture of Amazonian peoples, since, despite all adversities—social and environmental issues posed to the region—Amazonian men and women fight non-stopping to rebuild a new identity to themselves. This reconstruction is crossed by tensions that become more evident in processes to erase cultures and traditions, which rise from the globalization and monopolism imposed on the region. Due to such tensions, Amazonian women and men aim at rebuilding a new way of life that allows them to harmonize culture and nature’s preservation depending on demands supported by both political agendas and claims focused on reinforcing the social struggles pro nature and the lifestyles of local communities. Such a will, observed in the category we called environmental governance, will be better discussed further in this article, since such a governance gathers social representations of both the environment and the Environmental Education; these representations can help rebuilding environmental governance ideas in schools. In other words, they can project Environmental Education as essential element for “society’s ability to determine its fate based on a set of conditions (rules, access to information and participation, rules for decision-making) that provide the collectivity […] with the possibility of managing the future of the State and of society, itself” (Portugal & Sorrentino, 2020; p. 85).

Environmental Education in social representations: meanings of environmental governance

Despite the ideological tensions in the Brazilian scenario, Environmental Education as field focused on education and social construction has been aiming at new horizons in the school education field and in fields beyond that. Different Environmental Education perspectives are introduced in dialogues of daily life and their acceptance changes depending on the cultural context of each individual and on ideologies embodied by national political management bureaus (Sampaio & Guimarães, 2012; Portugal & Sorrentino, 2020). Accordingly, we think about the importance of approaching the process accounting for the Environmental Education concept embodiment as representation, since it takes place through access to information—communication means, official documents, and books, among others (Moscovici, 2010). Therefore, it is necessary rescuing the history of its institutionalization, mainly the principles set in the Letter from Belgrade and its awareness and knowledge concepts that, nowadays, are part of the pedagogical common sense (Reigota, 2011).

Based on research data about the common sense agenda, the environmental governance perspective, as described in international documents and treaties, has been gaining different projections in the Amazonian fraction in Pará State. It is explained by the fact that nature exploitation processes in the Amazon are getting more aggressive overtime and also because they now are part of the population’s common sense (Lima, 2016). According to Gomides and Silva (2010, p. 184), at global sphere, “environmental degradation worldwide is clear; nowadays, there are more than 500 multi-lateral environmental agreements.” However, when it comes to environmental governance, we can “observe that governments’ ability and political will to reinforce the action and implementation of these agreements seem to be getting weaker” (Gomides & Silva, 2010, p. 184). Thus, finding elements focused on reinforcing the concept of environmental governance in research data, based on a local conception, is the way to get awareness about and to transform social organization forms heading toward forest protection.

The sense of environmental governance is rescued in the discourse of some teachers who relate Environmental Education to social awareness and participation concepts. On the one hand, we take into account that the presence of awareness and participation concepts can be associated with the ‘official’ environmental discourse in such a rescue; in other words, the most important approaches since the very beginning of its institutionalization process (Portugal & Sorrentino, 2020; Sauvé, 2005). On the other hand, the likelihood of having local historical memories, according to which the “social arrangements” of community organizations present the “growing dissatisfaction with the lack of solutions for this issue by national States is getting more complex, and demanding for more democratic and participatory practices,” if one thinks based on the environmental governance perspective (Gomides & Silva, 2010, p. 184). Regardless of factors that justify the association between Environmental Education and awareness, it is important pointing out that the concept of awareness, which is deeply discussed in the work by Paulo Freire, has been potentiating different perspectives of the Environmental Education approach. According to Freire (1979, p. 16), “awareness is clearly linked to utopia, it implies in utopia. The more aware we become, the more skilled we are to become announcers and whistleblowers, thanks to our commitment to transformation.”

Research information, gathered through participatory observation, allowed identifying teachers’ intention in committing to change the Amazonian reality. This intention is captured based on Environmental Education activities developed by teachers in the classroom, as well as on shared reports about their participation in social actions taken outside the school. Either pedagogical activities or citizen actions taken by teachers point toward Environmental Education aimed at citizen awareness and participation focused on improving the environmental conditions of the local context. Such pedagogical activities are made concrete by the concepts of environment as “the world around us, but because of lack of awareness, the human species degrades and destroys our environment; we must make people aware of [the need] of having a better world” (P11GDFootnote 6).

According to the previously presented discourse (P11GD), it is interesting observing that awareness emerges as something complex and subjective in this discourse, since it is related to factors inherent to human actions in their multiple economic, political, and social dimensions. Thus, the perception about the consequences of human actions—degradation—approached in this discourse requires participation and decision-making; it opens room for different actions, including the creation of environmental governance networks. As for the school scope, this decision-making process was identified in the observation stage, when teachers (re)structured the teaching projects to include the local demands and environmental problems. The (re)structuring process applied to the projects turned into social participation forms in Environmental Education actions that also include families that got involved in claims to improve the environmental conditions at local political spheres. The articulation between school and family in the struggle for defending the environment demystifies the argument introduced by Gomides and Silva (2010, pp. 184–185) in the environmental governance field, mainly when they state that “on the one hand, citizens hope that political leaders will be the ones to find the solutions for problems faced by our society; on the other hand, these citizens also have lesser and lesser trust in institutions and politics, or they simply are not interested”.

Due to the distrust and suspicion toward the public institutions, some teachers in the Amazon are recreating the freedom representation because of distrust in and suspicion of public institutions, such a representation “has been secularly woven; therefore, it will not be accomplished out of the blue, but through the social struggles and through the power of resistance, which, notably, feature the post-hegemonic times” (Andrade & Caride, 2016, p. 46). Accordingly, the environmental governance perspective brings social awareness and participation to the debate; in their political aspects, they translate some of the most remarkable features of Environmental Education contributions within the national scenario, mainly in the Amazon. The relevance of awareness and participation concepts for the promotion of ideas that cross the environmental governance are based on the ideas by Paulo Freire (1979, p. 15), mainly when he highlights that “awareness is a historical compromise. It is also historical awareness: it is the critical insertion in history, it implies men to play the role of subjects who make and remake the world.”

The research data indicate the influence on Paulo Freire’s thinking for the formulation of the concept of Ecopedagogy, implied in the teachers’ responses, with regard to environmental governance. In this way, Ecopedagogy can be understood as one that “seek to reveal how reproductive tendencies associated with dominant power relations help to sustain and even intensify socio- environmental oppressions” (Misiaszek, 2015, p. 280). Precisely for that reason, “the goal of Ecopedagogy is to promote transformative action by helping to reveal socio-environmental connections that oppress individuals and societies” (Misiaszek, 2015, p. 280). Consequently, the concept of Ecopedagogy evokes powerful concepts, such as awareness, participation, social struggles, and democracy, which can contribute to the agendas of community movements and local organizations.

By acknowledging the power of the concept of awareness advocated by Paulo Freire (1979), it is important highlighting that, in practical terms, the environmental awareness process is extremely complex. Therefore, awareness is closely related to political and ideological perspectives found in education. In some cases, these perspectives remove and erase the history of politically minority groups through a bank education aimed at reinforcing the interests and narratives of globalization and neo-colonialism. Thus, concepts, such as those of participation, social movements, and community organizations, are outspread and remain in the social imaginaries of teachers participating in the present study. These participants understand that “environmental education aims to trigger the awareness that human beings are part of the environment, in all of us. It tries to ‘break’ the anthropocentric view that made men feel like they were the core [of the world], and forget the importance of nature” (P30Q). The statements in the presented discourse show some elements that highlight the lack of acceptance of the environment as a given and objective reality, but as something collectively built. According to the teachers, “the environment is the medium we are inserted in, therefore, we must be aware of it, and respect the way we relate to it due to lack of awareness, nowadays, we have been facing several environmental issues, such as rain shortage in our region” (P17Q).

When teachers put environmental issues in the mainstream, it does not mean that Environmental Education aims at solving problems as its ultimate end. On the contrary, Environmental Education can provide critical analysis tools focused on “using the relationship with the environment as way to personal development, to the foundation of significant and accountable actions” (Sauvé, 2005, p. 35). Environmental issues in discourses’ meaning units work as structured field through which subjects promote the specific insertion of knowledge in daily life (Jodelet, 2011). Therefore, they understand Environmental Education as “the means to educate people about our responsibility and to make them aware of our lives’ dependence on how we relate to the world, to people, and to nature” (P55Q). These meanings represent the possibility of personal growth and, thus, of transforming the social structures.

Research data have shown that teachers are aware of education’s importance; in other words, it is essential for local citizenship to embody its responsibility within a broader environmental governance panorama in the Brazilian Amazon. Their answers clearly express the idea that, within the Amazonian context, building environmental knowledge mainly includes nature and the established historical relationships. However, based on the way teachers introduce their propositions, we cannot group them in the set of naturalists, because the structures remain in their discourse and emphasize other elements. Among such elements one finds the environmental topic, due to the interrelations that evidence the environmental governance perspective, since, according to the teachers, the environment “is the place where we live, only by educating and making society aware that we will understand its real value” (P19Q). By mentioning the ‘space’ they open room for multiple interpretations, such as the geographic, historical, and identity ones, among others that can help building a representation closer to reality.

All interpretation possibilities reflect the marks of the colonial view imposed to the Amazon since the very beginning of its colonization (Porto-Gonçalves, 2017a). However, environmental governance representations that mainly emerge as the outcomes of popular movements in Environmental Education, can contribute to change the future of this region when they are put in place with the participation of local communities. Accordingly, despite all the dilemma, the Amazon concentrates “the biggest reserve of living species on the planet; therefore, it has the richest biodiversity; its applicability and relevance is little known” (Reigota, 2011, p. 70). Hence, assumingly, its symbolic value is related to such a richness, since nature becomes the field set over teachers’ social representations. Therefore, it is interesting observing that the word ‘awareness,’ somehow, is related to the daily reality, which is expected to change. A likely explanation [to it] lies on the very epistemological construction of the concept, according to which “awareness means: taking possession of reality” (Freire, 1979, p. 16).

Teachers conceive Environmental Education as “educating to have a better world, conscious people take care of the place they live in, the Amazon cries for help, we hold hand in hand and work together to accomplish it” (P115Q), as they wish to play the main role in such a reality. Besides the will and intention to change the experienced reality, the environmental governance perspective is perceived in the way participants also associate awareness with education. Nevertheless, there is a shared meaning that education leads to awareness and it also takes to other forms of relating to the world and of changing social structures. Thus, environmental governance propositions point out the way teachers see Environmental Education as essential for citizenship formation and action. It is so, because they understand that Environmental Education is “extremely important, and it must be constantly debated and socialized, mainly in schools, where we form the citizens of the future, so they can be aware of the need of changing their thinking and behavior toward the environment” (P9GD).

The institutional formation topic is also observed in the discourses of protagonists in the present research, since they point out the need of consolidating the Environmental Education in academic discipline matrices, it must be substantiated by a pedagogical perspective truly committed to changing reality as it is. Similarly, part of the investigated teachers are aware of “environmental education as priority that should be inserted in the school discipline matrix. Schools have the duty to provide environmental education to the whole education community” (P32Q). However, it does not mean only reproducing a discourse, it is essential providing autonomy and self-management, therefore social protagonism, in other words, broadening the environmental governance networks. As highlighted by Weiss (2016, p. 343), “governance capacity depends, on the one hand, on the likelihood of creating institutionalized, legitimate, and efficient channels and, on the other hand, on communities’ mobilization and involvement in the elaboration and implementation of policies.” The National Environmental Education Policy, also known as “PNEA,” is among such policies; it was enacted through law n. 9.795, from April 27, 1999, in its Art. 7, which provides on the participation of different social segments as the possibility to fulfill society’s demands, since:

The National Environmental Education Policy involves in its action sphere, besides the organs and entities integrated to the National Environment System (Sisnama), public and private education institutions; public bureaus of the Federal, State and Federal District, and municipal spheres; and non-governmental organizations that act in environmental education (Brasil, 1999).

The environmental governance perspectives presented by teachers advocate that “education must work for environmental awareness. It must provide the perception about the environment and how we relate to it, about the proper use of natural resources and about avoiding its degradation and [the degradation] of biodiversity” (P46Q). Accordingly, awareness is focused on education as integration, formation, and citizen action element. Thus, the environment is perceived as “the place where we live and, therefore, we must be responsible and conscious, act as real citizens” (P33Q). Based on this discourse, teachers add different plural meanings to environment and one of them is focused on personal development, they presented textual elements, according to which, education is associated with awareness as essential factor for environmental governance. They also evidence other symbolic elements that allow materializing the addressed concept in their social imaginaries, since they constantly address awareness in order to pinpoint that such a concept is part of the common sense; therefore, it is natural in the social imaginaries of subjects in the present study.

Teachers’ answers have evidenced some of the several meanings given to environmental governance, one of them is related to how concept materialization “concerns political-institutional matters regarding decision-making and the interlocution forms set between the State and organized groups in society about the process to define, follow-up and implement public policies” (Weiss, 2016, p. 343). Thus, there is the possibility that teachers’ Degree in Pedagogy, mainly the texts they read about the Environmental Education topic, have contributed to the understanding and naturalization of the awareness concept, which is associated with citizen participation. Thus, the contact with didactic books and with the National Discipline Matrix Base, also known as BNCC, can help naturalizing the concepts of awareness and participation. Accordingly, both concepts are observed in several answers about Environmental Education; one of the participants advocated for the thesis that “as educators, we must make our students aware of [the need] of taking care of the environment, of having a responsible relationship with it, but it is clear that only theory is not enough, experiencing is essential, as well as having an example to be followed” (P91Q).

The concrete argument that academic formation and professional action have helped the process of making the citizen awareness and participation concept natural, in association with the environmental discourse, would result in the fourth view influencing the elaboration of social representations; i.e., “the social practice of the subject which is taken into consideration” (Jodelet, 1985, p. 479). However, is it important acknowledging the existence of different oppressing mechanisms that cross academic training and professional actions when it comes to the exercise of citizenship and the denied access of politically minority groups to knowledge/power spaces. This is not different in the Brazilian Amazon region, where the arms of globalization and neo-colonialism act to articulate and impose a submission condition to local populations and to nature, itself. Thus, it is crucial highlighting that the citizen awareness and action in this elaboration, as Environmental Education principles, have been discussed since the first articles about this topic and in documents published in Brazil and abroad (Reigota, 2011). Assumingly, these articles and documents have helped to naturalize Environmental Education in association with awareness, by turning it into a concept that is easy to be used in daily life, but it does not disrupts, in an ultimate way, the aggressive capitalist actions in the region. Although teachers point out the function of “environmental education applied to make people aware of the need of being careful in the relationship with the medium, because environmental issues bring losses to ourselves” (P82Q), the political scenario of nature trading that has to be stressed, remains.

Furthermore, the teachers’ answers have pointed out their concern with the environment; education and participation were the elements to solve the problems. Hence, one of the participants highlighted that “it is necessary working out the awareness process in schools and in the community. Man must understand that the environment is its way of surviving; therefore, we must know how to deal with man. We do not have enough to deal with the severity of this issue” (P31Q). It is clear that teachers acknowledge the importance of Environmental Education as element for awareness, given the emphasis they give on the matter centered on the need of forming citizenship as essential aspect to change reality. Within the Amazonian context, citizenship formation is crucial to amplify the political power of popular social movements that fight to defend the environment and against environmental injustice.” With respect to governance, broadening this political power of organized society would represent “a broader ability to pressure decision-makers. In order to achieve balance in the fulfillment of economic, social, and environmental satisfaction, which is of interest of different segments, it is necessary coping with the current asymmetry of power” (Weiss, 2016, p. 330).

Based on how research information were introduced, we could think of the power of education built over popular social movements in defense of nature, as awareness element focused on citizenship participation and as its struggle to access political decisions spaces. This idea implies understanding that education is not just a matter of knowledge and acknowledgment, but also a matter of option, decision, and commitment (Freire, 1996). However, decisions and commitment are the outcomes of social justice processes that approximate—or of social injustice that separate—subjects from social struggle movements that aim at other possibilities of change. These features form the teachers’ discourses, because they “deal with environmental matters is an urgent subject; however, it must not be limited to theories and ideas, but expand to practices informing practices that guide the collective toward the protection of the environment” (P6GD). On the other hand, teachers’ contributions evidence a figurative field formed by critical theories that are substantiated by mostly Freirean libertarian and emancipatory ideas. On the other hand, teachers highlight the power of historical memories about the social struggles taking place in the Amazon to protect the forest. Both contributions open room for teacher’s commitment to the Environmental Education; therefore, they allow building environmental governance networks that go beyond the schools’ walls.

Based on the current results, despite the ‘attacks’ suffered by the Brazilian Environmental Education in the last few years, it has been outspreading the social participation message as pathway to define other projects of society. Among such attacks, Andrade (2019, p. 4) highlights Provisional Measure 870, from January 1st, 2019, “which reinforces the ideological concepts of the current federal administration (Jair Bolsonaro). Based on this Measure […], governability has set discontinuity and disarticulation processes applied to the most important indigenous and environmental agendas.” This provision allows recognizing the disarticulation of the Environmental Education in mechanism adopted by the power, mainly in the Amazon; as well as the strategies adopted to disarticulate the environmental governance processes in and outside the schools.

Some research reflections on the environmental governance perspective

The present research has shown a set of Environmental Education’s representations that are shared in the Amazonian fraction in Pará State, on a daily basis. The most relevant representations project the purposes of Environmental Education regarding social empowerment in and outside education institutions, since it provides research protagonists with the sense and feeling of being subjects of their own history, of being capable of creating and recreating it, based on the position taken, and commitment made, by each citizen. This commitment is also related to the possibilities of accessing spaces of collective construction that fight for social justice and for more equitable forms of participation in decision-making spaces. Thus, the will for changing the current scenario in the region starts from the perception, understanding, and interpretation of reality based on individual perspectives that reflect collective social representations. This interpretation gains visibility due to the need of changes and to the social articulations that get stronger overtime, given the adverse political and economic scenario we are witnessing.

According to the aforementioned statement, the present research has pointed out that the Environmental Education gathers powerful elements that could help the population redefining its history and to build participatory governance in defense of the Amazon and of local communities’ lives. Although we acknowledge the whole symbolic Eurocentric load observed in the concept of environmental governance, it also provides some analysis and practice tools that can help forming networks to claim for the rights of Amazonian populations and nature. It is so, because social representations based on the sense of environmental governance can be taken as significant among teachers working in the Amazonian fraction in Pará State, mainly when they suggest awareness as social cohesion element in favor of nature’s protection in schools and communities. The marks of colonization evidence their faces to limit the potential to build representations closer to indigenous’ knowledge and ancestry, to put pressure over women, men, and Amazonian nature historical submission relationships. Teachers build representative environment and Environmental Education networks in the very core of this tension, which are bond to the meanings of environmental governance. Thus, they give to Environmental Education the task—among other agendas—of implementing and amplifying political awareness networks and, consequently, the tasks of help building other forms of community organization to cope with the environmental challenges in the Amazon.

Articulated environmental governance networks in the Amazon nowadays get messages sent by different social segments, but their purposes remain the same, namely disarticulate the agendas and actions focused on protecting the forest and life diversity. On the one hand, these messages come from institutional pathways, such as the case of Provisional Measure 870, from January 1st, 2019, which has disarticulated two decades of national Environmental Education Policy’s articulation history and, consequently, all that it represented. On the other hand, they come as aggressive, violent, and crimson messages, like the murder of indigenous leaders Paulo Paulino GuajajaraFootnote 7 and Zezico Rodrigues GuajajaraFootnote 8 or yet, like intentional burns that took place in the Amazon from August to September, 2019—which happened in 2020 and in 2021—that have devastated the forest and everything living in it.Footnote 9 However, these messages come in silence through the broadening of illegal mining in indigenous territories and through the fast outbreak of the new coronavirus. Both illegal miners and the new coronavirus have been causing barbarism as the outcome of intentional absence of the State and of little effectiveness of the government sphere in stopping the high levels of violence, contagion, and death cases including in small cities and villages in the Amazon that lay far from the big cities. This tragic reality emerged as the summons for further research to associate educations to environmental governance in this region.