Educação ambiental e gestão do meio ambiente em Maracanã, Pará.

Abstract

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.