Education for the environmental citizenship

The concept of environmental citizenship is approached in face of its renewed use in international projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, and also of the formulation of new courses on ethics and. values basic and high school education. The controversies about the concept of citizenship in the light of several theoretical schools are discussed, and a position is assumed which favors its application in educational proposals. The concept is linked to that of daily life in order to show that the practice of citizenship should permeate the different public and private life spaces. The last part describes how the current discussion about citizen education presents certain features that are similar to the genealogy of the environmental education concept, and it is maintained that education for the environmental citizenship implies a social pedagogy, which proposes to develop abilities to live in a way that implies the deliberate capacity to know how to choose among several options, stemming from ethical considerations and community interests, that is, political ones. This sets the bases for building a public life based on social forms sustained by a critical exercise of citizenship in the framework of an environmental and cultural policy, mostly in front of the challenges faced by consumption and individualism praised by the globalizing neoliberal development style in which we are immersed.