Popular and Informal environmental education - The need for more research in an 'emerging' field of practice

Environmental education that fosters meaningful community participation and learning has been considered a requisite to sustaining our human and natural environments in many of the global conferences, agreements, declarations and charters since the 1972 UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm. Similarly in Australia, the National Action Plan 2000 explicitly recognises that environmental education ¿is not confined to formal schooling but occurs in a wide range of nonformal education settings, while at a state level, the NSW EE Plan 2002-2005 explicitly advocates, ¿energising the community to act responsibly.¿ Despite this growing consensus there is a small amount of published research in Australia in this field of practice we have decided to call popular and informal environmental education - education that often involves adults in social action, workplace and community settings. The authors argue, however that there is no shortage of educational practice that can be described as popular and informal environmental education. Using these examples of educational practice the authors propose a typology that will assist in defining this field of practice, and which helped in establishing theoretical links with the emerging field of environmental adult education. Finally, the authors identify examples of how research and evaluation efforts have contributed to a number of successful popular and informal environmental education programs, and recommend that more dialogue between `educators¿ and `activists¿ may help to address this lack of research.