Environmental Education & Communication for a Sustainable World

This book is a collection of the strategies, methods, and tools developed by GreenCOM (the Environmental Education and Communication Project of USAID).

About this book:
This manual was designed for those who make policy and design programs that affect people and the environment. The staff of GreenCOM, the U.S. Agency for International Development's Environmental Education and Communication Project, have arranged the following chapters and case studies to share experiences, information, and models of working in education and communication.

Section One, Fundamental Concepts in Environmental Education and Communication (EE&C), provides an orientation to four theoretical perspectives that have shaped GreenCOM's approach to environmental education and communication projects: behavior change, participation, gender, and systems thinking. Each has its own research frame-work and following, yet each contributes an important set of ideas to environmental education and communication activities.

Section Two, Planning EE&C Programs, a variety of GreenCOM experiences illustrate the basic process of designing education and communication programs: needs assessment, formative research, pre-testing, and evaluation. Taken together they form a reliable and well-tested model for program development.

Section Three, Conducting EE&C Activities, looks at staff and participant training workshops, mass media campaigns, and how EE&C can affect public policy.

Section Four, Putting It All Together, highlights several successful countrywide strategies from GreenCOM's field experience. These cases illustrate some of the diverse approaches to building capacity and planning and implementing environmental education and communication. The projects involved training, policy initiatives, awards schemes, curriculum development, and multi-faceted communication campaigns.