Abstract
Since the 1990s, international educational cooperation has become an emphasis in basic education and has been stressed as a basis for solving various issues such as population and poverty. In 2002, Japan announced the “BEGIN: Basic Education for Growth Initiative” as international educational cooperation towards basic education development and launched the Cooperation Bases System by MEXT as a concrete measure aiming to strengthen primary and secondary educational cooperation. The system used Japan's universities as hubs to systematically organize, store, share and make use of educational experiences for future cooperation projects. As part of the System Construction Project, this research analyzes the activity reports of the official Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers Program, which is carried out as environmental education, and aims to (1) analyze in order to grasp the overall trends in JOCV environmental education activities, and (2) extract the barriers and contributing factors to JOCV environmental education activities in the Asia region. As a result, this research found that success in environmental education does not only rely on volunteers' communication skills, developed environmental education materials and the quality of environmental education programs. The following factors were also found to have influence: (1) Host agency staff's knowledge, skills and awareness, (2) Local citizens' knowledge and awareness, (3) Ability to build networks and partnerships, (4) Intra-organizational awareness and recognition of environmental problems and environmental education, (5) Availability of teaching materials and appealing environmental education programs, (6) Availability of human resources to cooperate in environmental education and environmental conservation activities (7) Availability of funds, and (8) Political priorities.
