Summary

The Dominican Republic (DR) is home to a wide variety of ecosystems and environmental assets, from flourishing tropical rainforests to arid deserts, and from the highest mountain in the Caribbean to a lake that lies 42 meters below sea level. This has caused tourism development to be of national interest. The fact that the DR has a unique combination of ecosystems combined with the unstructured growth of the tourism industry makes local inhabitants worry about ecological decline of the DR. Especially since there is also a low level of general education in the country. In 2005 the independent non-profit ecological organization SOMONCA Inc. was established with the goal to preserve and protect the ecology on the north coast of the DR. SOMONCA Inc. sees education as the key to achieving this, which was the reason for the formation of its educational program. As a part of this education program, SOMONCA Inc. has executed multiple efforts to educate different target groups, but these efforts have been carried out unstructured and withoutworking towards a bigger picture. In order for SOMONCA Inc. to structure its high school educational program together with its stakeholders, and effectively integrate the needs and capacity of the target group of high school children (grade 1-2-3), by applying participatory management, this qualitative research with an exploratory nature was conducted.