Designing an Environmental Health Educational Strategy at The Local Level: The Case of The Town of Turrialba, Costa Rica

Abstract

In view of the diversity of socio-environmental contexts in which people live their lives every day and in which various pollution processes affecting human health have been started, it is necessary to address the relationship between human beings and the environment. To this end, the role of local governments and the educational processes that may be developed at that level are a pillar in the promotion of healthy environments. The aim of this article is to socialize the results of the implementation of a methodological proposal in the Turrialba canton, Cartago Province, Costa Rica, in 2019 for designing an Environmental Health Educational Strategy. The approach was qualitative from a methodological point of view, and the process was divided into three stages: characterization, issue prioritization, and strategy design. The main results were the role of and the challenges faced by local governments in the fostering of healthy environments, the role of participatory planning in the field of environmental health education, and the importance of tackling local environmental health problems with different methodological techniques. In general, this process permitted to show that environmental health goes beyond the diagnosis of environmental conditions and determinants, up to the level of the social response to health—in this case, in an instance such as municipalities.