The municipality of Maracanã (PA), located in the Amazon Coastal Zone, houses within its
limits four conservation units (UCs), three of which are for sustainable use and one for full
protection, where those for sustainable use are managed by its own deliberative council,
constituted for representation and equal conditions of participation of different sectors of civil
society and public institutions. There are also other regular councils in the municipality that
deal with public environmental management issues. Public policies and academic-scientific
productions recommend that environmental education (EA) induce civil society to actively
participate in political life in the defense - in protected areas, or not - of natural resources
involved in their social reproduction, where this participation, as long as is emancipated, it
constitutes a structuring element of public environmental management, contributing to it,
depending on the intentionality of the approach given to EA in its practice. On the other hand,
studies indicate that there is weakness in society's participation in public environmental
management. From this fragility of population participation and the instrumentality for public
environmental management that EA makes possible through the emancipated participation of
the population, we arrived at the formulation of the problem of this research, which aims to
investigate the Social Representations of EA expressed by groups of actors who practice EA in
Maracanã. The theoretical basis for carrying out this investigation included, in addition to the
Theory of Social Representations, discussions by Brazilian researchers on EA and contributions
from Social Management as an analytical field of organizational sciences. This is a qualitative,
exploratory and descriptive research in terms of its objective, which used content analysis and
the descending hierarchical classification of the iramuteq software to analyze the data, which
were collected through interviews with semi-structured questions. The results showed that the
approach to the conception of EA manifested by the social representations of the interviewed
actors does not include the emancipated participation of the population as an intention of EA.
From these conclusions, two products were prepared - an improvement course (aimed at the
various actors who practice EA in the municipality) and a technical note (directed at the
Municipal Public Power of Maracanã) - with a view to intervening to improve the conception
of EA in the municipality of Maracanã in order for it to be understood and treated as a
structuring element of environmental policies and as an inducer of the emancipated
participation of the population in public environmental management.
|
