Municipalities play an important role in promotion of environmental education in schools. However most previous studies of environmental education policy promoted by municipalities have been case studies or studies of specific policies (for example, school environmental management systems). Therefore we carried out a nationwide survey of municipality policies for environmental education in Japan using a questionnaire.
The main results were as follows.
1. Generally, the implementation rates of environmental education policies are very low.
2. Large scale municipalities have higher policy implementation rates than small scale municipalities.
3. As for boards of education, regardless of scale, the most urgent issue for attention is considered to be the excessive burden placed on schools.
4. With regard to environmental bureaus, setting of an index of policy effects is considered to be the biggest issue for the bureaus of large municipalities, whereas, for the bureaus of small municipalities, internal issues including overworking by staff are considered to be important.
5. One common issue shared by boards of education and environmental bureaus is the ambiguity of environmental education.
