The promise and peril of the state in neoliberal times: implications for the critical environmental education movement in Brazil

Brazil is an example of a nation that has advanced a national environmental education (EE) program designed around the precepts of critical EE, in explicit opposition to the now dominant paradigm of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) propagated by UNESCO (Lima 2009). According to many observers, Brazil’s EE discourse reflected in official documents, including EE policy and legislation, has been less influenced by the economic and technocentric approach of the dominant ESD paradigm, generally placing greater emphasis on the social and ethical dimensions of the environment, and more explicitly calling for strengthening critical pedagogical practices (Sauvé, Brunelle, and Berryman 2005). Yet, what can also be observed in Brazil is the co-optation of environmental discourse by big business and the ways in which the governance apparatus is mobilized to benefit domestic and transnational corporate interests, often in the form of public-private partnerships. This points to the perils that lie ahead for a critical EE movement facing the

Nicolas Stahelina, Inny Acciolyb and Celso Sánchezc

headwinds of a neoliberal climate in Brazil, where the state must grapple with powerful economic actors acting under the universal banner of sustainability.