Environmental education in places: the cases of Azerbaijan and the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

Journal article

Environmental education is increasingly seen as an important tool for addressing multiple intersecting crises. The climate and ecological crises are global crises, but multiple scales – local, regional, national, and global – connect and blur, and there are important senses in which these global crises are always produced and experienced in local places. Education similarly cuts across scales: schooling is embodied, local and highly place-specific, yet it is also bound up with global discourses, assessment exercises, geopolitics and governance regimes. This paper explores these themes and tensions by thinking across the cases of Azerbaijan and the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. Analysis of the environmental education in these quite different environments offers insights into the place-specific nature of environmental education, discussed through the themes of pedagogy, attachment and action. Across each theme we argue that place is deeply connected to environmental education, but this strong relationship manifests in some quite different ways, including at times enabling and generative, and at other times restricting. The findings prompt questions about justice, equity and the role of environmental education in producing – rather than only reproducing – young people’s engagements with and constructions of their local places.

Authors: Puttick, SP; Farber, A; Mehdiyeva, A; Childs, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Journal: International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education
• Publication date: 2025-12-19
• Acceptance date: 2025-12-02
• DOI: 10.1080/10382046.2025.2600996
• EISSN: 1747-7611
• ISSN: 1038-2046
• Language: English
• Keywords: environmental education; Ecuador; Azerbaijan; Galápagos; place