This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for the South African National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship between human rights, social justice and a healthy environment. This politically framed and socially critical normative framework has developed in response to socio-political and socio-ecological histories in post-apartheid curriculum transformation processes. The article critically considers the process of working with a normative framework in the defining of environmental education teaching and learning interactions, and seeks not only to explore the policy discourse critically, but also to explore what it is about the world that makes it work in different ways. Drawing on Sayer's perspectives on the possibilities of enabling "situated universalism" as a form of normative theory, and case-based data from a teacher professional development programme in the Makana District (where the authors live and work), the article probes the relationship between the establishment of a "universalising" normative framework to guide national curriculum, and situated engagements with this framework in/as democratic process. In this process it questions whether educators should adopt the "norms" as presented by society and simply universalize and implement them as prescribed by curriculum statements, or whether educators should adopt the strategies of postmodernists and reduce normative frameworks to relations of power situated in particular contexts. (Contains 7 notes.)