Shaped by the recent process of democratization in South Africa (1994) and the older one in Brazil (1988), environmental education in these countries tends to respond to their specific problems. Presented as an action for social change, it is assigned a specific role, on the one hand, to help resolve social conflicts and conflicts of use with the poorest populations and, on the other hand, to promote citizenship. To this end, managers of the national parks of the cities of Cape Town and Rio have made it an urban marketing tool applied to these parks and where nature is, on the one hand, in continuity of the model transmitted by apartheid in South Africa and, on the other hand, in an explicit anti-environmental and acritical discourse with the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. These two cases illustrate the transformation of a process with emancipatory potential into a social management tool.