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- All Subjects: environment
- Creators: Minteer, Ben
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Does school participatory budgeting (SPB) increase students’ political efficacy? SPB, which is implemented in thousands of schools around the world, is a democratic process of deliberation and decision-making in which students determine how to spend a portion of the school’s budget. We examined the impact of SPB on political efficacy in one middle school in Arizona. Our participants’ (n = 28) responses on survey items designed to measure self-perceived growth in political efficacy indicated a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.46), suggesting that SPB is an effective approach to civic pedagogy, with promising prospects for developing students’ political efficacy.
With issues such as environmental degradation, climate change, and mass extinction looming, a growing coalition of activists, policymakers, lawyers, scholars, and everyday people are calling for the Rights of Nature to be legally recognized in order to create systemic changes in environmental policy. This thesis traces the history of the Rights of Nature movement, examining key developments around the world and analyzing the historical and ethical underpinnings of these provisions, and how the Rights of Nature can be applied to the Endangered Species Act in the United States. Evoking the language of legal rights has pragmatic value in U.S. environmental policy, explicitly stating the non-anthropocentric position of intrinsic value of nature in an effort to push for a broader value shift within a predominantly anthropocentric legal system.