Educating and Empowering Children for Governing in the Anthropocene: A Case Study of Children's Homes in Sri Lanka

Eshantha Ariyadasa

Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2016, vol. 33, issue 5, 691-700

Abstract: Educating children and young people on how to care for the environment is the focus of this paper. Today's children will encounter the adverse effects of global population growth and subsequent pollution by adults at the expense of the environment. Thus, it is important to draw children's attention to carbon footprints and climatic changes. Through participation, they will have opportunities to learn more about the implications of the way we choose to live our lives in the short, medium, and long terms. Children learn about their rights and responsibilities by being given the opportunity to express their ideas and to translate policy into practice through small‐scale interventions that make a difference to this generation and succeeding ones. Such interventions can include lessons on recycling, use, and reuse of resources, composting, organic and ethical farming, water and energy conservation techniques, and much more. The essence of this paper has been extracted from my Participatory Action Research (PAR) on the life chances of young children in voluntary children's homes in Sri Lanka. This PAR largely employs qualitative investigations to manipulate the information collected during the study in order to assess and evaluate the findings. During the PAR, it was identified that some children's homes have initiated a few enhanced ecosystem governance practices that redress problems associated with the worst aspects of industrialization. These practices promote the harmonious coexistence of humanity and nature and have adopted the concerns of critical systemic thinking with consequent improvement of human well‐being and ecosystem health. The potential of these homes to provide education for these vulnerable children by improving their ability to deliver stewardship responsibilities towards the environment should never be underestimated. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2426

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:srbeha:v:33:y:2016:i:5:p:691-700

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1092-7026

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Systems Research and Behavioral Science from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().