Eco-schools as resource and instrument for municipal environmental governance development: towards communication frame for collaboration partnerships

With more than 200 educational institutions, covering all statutory levels of education system, participating in the international eco-schools program in Latvia, there is a large potential for combining joint efforts and collaborating with external stakeholders to increase scope, range, and effectiveness of the program's aims, particularly, in relation to local communities and municipalities. On the other hand, local municipalities are faced with challenges such as administrative resource scarcity and reachout to the communities, while having to reach their targets for sustainable regional and local development. As collaboration partnerships between eco-schools and municipalities have not yet been neither widely developed nor researched, this study follows a case-study-research approach to investigate what these already existent collaborations experienced and what their benefits and limitations are. There are examples of the two, so-called, municipal Eco-councils being established in Valmiera and Ropazi municipalities as environmental institutional and collaborative governance instruments for municipalities in Latvia. Initially focus group discussions in both municipalities, including members of the municipal Eco-council, were held and evaluated focusing on participant’s perception of the council as part of Eco-schools developments and a mutual collaboration instrument. The discussions were followed by in-depth semi structured stakeholder interviews later, after Covid-19 and administratively territorial reform for municipalities, depicting the current state of the both eco-councils, its recent and future developments, in order to learn and to spread gained experiences. Also other complementary study methods of the case study research framework were applied - document studies, express survey, local visits and observations. Additionally, a practice case, where both main stakeholders actually realized their partnership - pilot food waste sorting implementation bottom-up initiated by Eco-schools - being positively valued as collaboration partnership by all stakeholders involved. The results underline the potential of such collaboration partnerships between eco-schools and local municipalities to support and upkeep of eco-school activities, foster mutual learning and information exchange to reach wider audiences, increase program effectiveness and lower hindrances like financial constraints. They also stress the importance of intrinsic motivation, time and financial resource availability for the successful implementation of eco-school out-of-door activities as well as the continuation and overall effectiveness of multi-stakeholder collaboration platforms like the municipal Eco-council for (eco)schools and municipalities collaboration for local communities/municipality environmental governance. In order to further upgrade and sustainably develop such collaboration partnerships, there were stressed the need for more development and complementary employment of the whole set of communication instruments as not only information and participation, but particularly also additional education/training activities and pro-environmental behavior enhancement work – an action-oriented and collaborative environmental communication frame.