Inter-collge cooperation as a tool for a campus environmentalization

Abstract

For several decades, environmental variables have been introduced to universities, either in curriculum activities or campus management. Following such trend, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), in Brazil, and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), in Spain, created, throughout the 1990s, organizational structures able to coordinate environmental actions: the USP Recicla Program (at USP) and Ecocampus Office (at UAM). Since 2008, both universities have been developing a collaboration line through an international cooperation project by Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional y Desarrollo de España (AECID), which intends to strengthen the environmental action of USP and UAM, leading them to sustainability. This article presents the means used and the main opportunities and difficulties found in both universities concerning their participation, management and environmental educational processes. For so, different investigation techniques are used in the diagnosis, such as statistical surveys and interviews with institutional officers and members of each participation and environmental management organization. Diagnosis created for each university indicated differences and similarities regarding the internal issues and motivations for the administrative, political and technical characters of the environmental subject in both institutions. Therefore, this article aims at explaining the relevance of inter college cooperation as a feasible tool to strengthen institutional social environmental cases, which, on their turn, may be examples to other educational institutions.