In Latin America environmental related education has developed essentially through processes of community empowerment in relation to local environmental conflicts, combining a variety of pedagogical and political traditions (González Gaudiano 2007). Far removed from these educational experiences in the local sphere in Chile since the 1960s, a National Policy Strategy for Sustainable Education, based on UNESCO´s approaches, has been implemented by the Ministry for the Environment recently (2009). The program "National System of Environmental Certification for Educational Establishments" is presented as an ESD approach, but it only considers the "environmental management" (CONAMA, 2010) of schools through an indicator-based model. In this environmental certification process, schools are monitored for their degree of compliance with a series of environmental standards, assessed, and categorized following a logic of accountability. The educational and contextual components of environmental related education are widely ignored, leaving them entirely reliant upon the inequitable resources available to each individual school. This environmental monitoring approach is perceived in the schools as an ESD standard that underlines the moral character of environmental issues, in which human beings ought to organize their life and the society in accordance with scientific knowledge of nature (Öhman, 2004). However, the school assessment seems to be disconnected from the daily practices of environmental related education in Chilean schools. The research project seeks to understand approaches of environment and education deployed in Chilean classrooms in terms of finding meaning on action and transactions. The aim is to understand the different ways in which teachers envision the purposes of environmental related education. Interviews have been conducted about the teachers’ interest in environmental issues and their motivation to offer environmental related courses. The results show different categories in which the purpose of action and the transformation of society are highlighted, which is consistent with some of the Latin American educational and environmental traditions but far away from the normative approach of ESD of the Chilean Government. Teachers are excluding the national ESD approach as a benchmark. Global Citizenship Education however, appears to be an approach that allows teachers to connect environmental issues with their purposes of subjectification (Biesta, 2004, 2011) and to develop learning experiences based on local problems in a process of meaning making strongly related to the place they inhabit. Configuration of place seems to be a base for shaping global issues and for possibilities to combine local approaches of environment and education to global ESD goals.

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