Environmental issues in official documents: Reflections on the relationship between biocoloniality of power and meanings of the environment in environmental education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21527/2179-1309.2026.123.17934Keywords:
Environmental Education, Discourse Analysis, Biocoloniality, Official Documents, BNCCAbstract
Originating from an ongoing doctoral study, this article seeks to understand the meanings attributed to the environment and Environmental Education within the discourse of official Brazilian documents: the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), the National Environmental Education Program (ProNEA), the National Environmental Education Policy (PNEA), and the National Curricular Guidelines for Environmental Education (DCNEA). The theoretical and methodological framework adopted was French-Brazilian Discourse Analysis (Orlandi), articulated with the concept of biocoloniality of power (Cajigas-Rotundo). The analysis focused on the conditions of production of the documents, the discursive formations to which they belong, the imaginary formations materialized within them, and the tension between paraphrase and polysemy in the key terms. The results reveal profound discursive contradictions: while the PNEA, DCNEA, and ProNEA are affiliated with a critical discursive formation, understanding the environment as an interconnected living space and Environmental Education as a political and transformative practice, the BNCC is inscribed in a pragmatic discursive formation that reduces nature to a resource to be managed and silences Environmental Education, replacing it with terms such as sustainability within a market logic. It is concluded that these contradictions express, in the educational field, the functioning of biocoloniality, which commodifies life and imposes fragmented views of nature, deepening the identity crisis of Brazilian Environmental Education and hindering effective transformative pedagogical practices.
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