Abstract

At the international and Hispanic American level, there are few academic and research exercises that allow for a synthesis of environmental education with a community approach, even though it is an increasingly valued and implemented framework. In this context, the objective of the present study is to describe the bibliometric data of research on community environmental education, written in spanish and published in specialized journals in the last 20 years. A descriptive bibliographic review was carried out, using the same search strategy in the databases Web of Science, Scopus Elsevier, SciELO, Dialnet, Redalyc and JSTOR, including a final corpus of 151 studies. A progressive but discontinuous increase in the number of studies was identified, Cuba, Mexico and Colombia were the countries with the most publications, the journal with the most papers was Avances and most of the research was supported by higher educational institutions. It was found that qualitative methodologies and techniques such as surveys, interviews, participant observation and Participatory Action Research (PAR) are mainly used, with community members, children and adolescents, teachers, and community leaders as the main participants. Finally, the relevance of research on communities and their environmental education processes is discussed, concluding on the importance of carrying out synthesis research exercises to have an overview of the challenges, strengths and lessons learned in the field of community environmental education.