ABSTRACT
The answer to the question in the chapter title is basically “No”. This is the first of four ethnographic chapters, and the first of two chapters on the Central Javanese city of Yogyakarta. The chapter describes the governmental context of Yogyakarta and argues that it is inimical to the fostering of good EE: the Sultan and Mayor are committed to rampant, unsustainable development; there is a lack of government commitment to the environment, poor coordination between agencies, and government officials ostensibly responsible for the environment lack expertise and interest. The chapter describes the fieldwork and selection of schools. The second half of the chapter describes the Adiwiyata Programme, the government’s flagship national environmental education project: the dubious reasons that schools sign up for it; the forced participation of schools and teachers; and the way the programme is run. Its obsession with documentation and numerical KPIs turns accountability into cheating; and its emphasis on prize-winning hijacks environmental aims, turning the programme into a mechanism for school marketing and status performance.
