Seventeenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Community environmental education focuses on environmental issues and how a community could work together to address existing challenges or to prevent new ones. This paper focuses on a co-construction process with local communities, which is one of the approaches in developing community environmental education programmes. Engaging communities through the process of co-construction has the capacity to respond to local environmental issues. In the context of this paper, discussion is based on studies of four communities in Sabah, Malaysia conducted in 2018 and 2019. The studies were based on a model of community environmental education developed in a PhD research from 2012 to 2015. Data were collected through questionnaires and interviews. During the studies, community champions were also identified. Delivery of environmental education could be improved when a programme is developed through a co-construction process together with the community champions by responding to local environmental issues. Several challenges in a co-construction process are time required for the processes and gaining support from community members. However, these can be addressed through modification of approach and creating rapport with the community leaders in the preliminary stage of the process.