About the series
This ESRC seminar series aims to consider the possibilities
and limits of citizenship as a way of promoting sustainability.
The series brings together a range of disciplinary and practitioner
perspectives to develop an integrative understanding of the theory
and practice of 'environmental citizenship'.
Themes
Why Citizenship and the Environment?
What is Environmental Citizenship?
Email Discussions
About the Organisers
Themes include:
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Environmental Citizenship in Politics. What is 'environmental
citizenship'? What is the proper role of citizens and communities
in environmental decision-making? What are citizens' rights
and responsibilities? What are the obstacles to effective
participation? Does participation promote sustainability?
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Environmental Citizenship in Practice - in the economy, civil
society, and the private sphere. How is environmental citizenship
possible in a globalised economy? Is environmental citizenship
local or global? What is the role of environmental NGOs in
promoting environmental citizenship or representing environmental
citizens? Can economic incentives promote environmental citizenship?
Does environmental citizenship begin at home? What is 'ecological
virtue'? Can individual action promote sustainability? Why
do individuals make 'green' choices? How can environmental
citizens be 'empowered'?
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Education and Learning for Environmental Citizenship. What
are the roles of formal and informal education in promoting
environmental citizenship? Is education for environmental
citizenship required in a liberal society? How can environmental
citizenship be promoted effectively in schools? How can environmental
education and citizenship education be integrated?
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Institutions and Environmental Citizenship. What institutional
frameworks would facilitate environmental citizenship? What
role can/should institutions play in the promotion of environmental
citizenship? What kinds of environmental citizenship are important
for different institutions (e.g., EA, DEFRA, schools, government
more generally, local government, business, NGOs, etc)? What
'problems' might environmental citizens pose for institutions?
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Possibilities and Limits of Environmental Citizenship. How
can we assess the relative merits of different conceptions
of environmental citizenship? What are the normative and empirical
obstacles to environmental citizenship? How can environmental
citizenship be promoted legitimately and effectively?
Why Citizenship and the Environment?
Promoting 'sustainable development' is a key objective for national
and global policy-makers but governments find it very difficult
to deliver 'sustainability'. Increasingly, environmental policy
is taking a 'participatory turn' (e.g., Local Agenda 21, the Aarhus
Convention, Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration) with both 'active
citizenship' and 'green consumerism' presented as key aspects
of the struggle for a 'greener' society. In one respect, policy
is following theory because radical greens have long argued that
traditional representative liberal democracy was not the right
form of government for tackling environmental problems. In other
respects, policy is outstripping theory because neither the normative
nor the empirical aspects of the role that citizens can play in
promoting 'sustainability' have been subjected to detailed critical
scrutiny. What are the environmental responsibilities of a good
citizen? What are the real possibilities and limits of 'environmental
citizenship'? Has environmental citizenship already made a contribution
to the promotion of sustainability?
The UK Government, along with many others, has made a commitment
to 'sustainable development'. Unfortunately, it is not easy to
achieve 'sustainability' for many reasons. In particular, policy-makers
and politicians find it difficult to adopt 'green' policies that
have overt economic costs for consumers (e.g., fuel taxes, household
waste charges) or businesses (e.g., imposing stricter pollution
regulation). Moreover, regulation and economic 'stick' approaches
to promoting sustainability may be difficult to enforce. For example,
introducing a charge for collecting household waste may be more
likely to lead to people dumping their rubbish 'on the pavement,
in the countryside or in someone else's backyard' than it is to
reduce the amount of household waste sent to landfill sites. Without
charges, we don't get a 'greener' outcome; with charges, we don't
get a 'greener' outcome.
One way out of this apparent dilemma is to re-consider the 'self-interested
rational actor' model of human agency that is assumed by regulatory
and economic 'carrot and stick' approaches to environmental policy.
As Ludwig Beckman notes, 'The citizen that sorts her garbage or
that prefers ecological goods will often do this because she feels
committed to ecological values'. The idea of 'citizenship' has
attracted much attention recently in other contexts. The 'active
citizen' - with responsibilities as well as rights - has been
increasingly recognized as an essential element of a flourishing
democratic society. Is the 'environmental' or 'ecological' citizen
the solution to the environmental policy-makers problems? Recent
innovations in environmental policy (including the Aarhus Convention
and Local Agenda 21 among many others) certainly point in this
direction. However, the idea of 'environmental citizenship' has
rarely been subjected to critical scrutiny and there has been
little empirical research into the role of environmental citizenship
in promoting sustainability.
Environmental policy is taking a route that has not been 'mapped'.
The aim of this seminar series is to begin to draw together disparate
disciplinary perspectives on environmental citizenship to provide
a much clearer picture of the contribution that citizens could
and should be expected to make to the promotion of sustainability.
Without this kind of explicit inter-disciplinary focus on environmental
citizenship, we will continue to lack the normative and the empirical
resources for evaluating alternative policies aimed at promoting
sustainability through environmental citizenship. If sustainability
matters, understanding environmental citizenship matters.
What is Environmental Citizenship?
The idea of 'environmental citizenship' (and of 'ecological
citizenship') has emerged in recent political theory from two
distinct but related discussions. First, there has been a long-running
debate over the role of democracy in promoting sustainability.
In its early stages, the debate was marked by extremism - authoritarianism
versus anarchism - but for some time it has been between advocates
of different forms of democracy (e.g., liberal, communitarian,
representative, participatory, deliberative, local, global). Any
form of democracy comes with an implicit conception of citizenship
but it is only in recent years that political theory has returned
to the idea of citizenship, recognizing the importance of focusing
on the roles that individuals need to play to make democracies
work. The idea of 'active citizens' - with responsibilities as
well as rights - has become a feature of much political theory
(and policy discourses). Recently, leading 'green' political theorists
have explicitly begun to formulate the connections between democracy,
sustainability and individual rights and responsibilities in terms
of 'environmental citizenship'.
The second 'road' leading to environmental citizenship has been
from the discussions of 'environmental justice'. The U.S. Environmental
Justice Movement has argued for over 20 years that poor and minority
communities suffer a disproportionate - and unjust - burden of
environmental hazards. More recently, the same arguments have
been made in other countries (including the UK) and globally.
Increasingly, it has been recognized that environmental rights
should be added to the traditional (political, civil and social)
rights of citizens. Moreover, advocates of environmental justice
have been very aware of the political and cultural inequalities
that underpin distributive injustice. Their response has been
to insist that public participation in environmental decision-making
is an essential dimension of environmental justice. On this 'road',
the environmental citizen emerges as a response to intragenerational
injustice rather than the concern for intergenerational justice
implicit in the idea of sustainability.
Work on 'environmental citizenship' is in its very early stages
and many questions need to be addressed: Is the idea of environmental
citizenship consistent with liberal democracy? What are the rights
and responsibilities of an environmental citizen? Is environmental
citizenship public (e.g., participating in decision-making, involvement
in community projects) or private (e.g., recycling, reducing car
use) or both? What are the virtues of an environmental citizen?
What are the implications of environmental citizenship for the
very idea of citizenship? In short, political theorists have much
work to do on the normative dimensions of environmental citizenship
and its place in citizenship theory. Moreover, the normative aspects
of environmental citizenship cannot be addressed in isolation
from empirical studies of the role that 'the public' do and can
play in the promotion of sustainability. Indeed, the idea of environmental
citizenship provides a common focus to bring together a wide range
of disciplinary perspectives to consider the possibilities and
limits of the citizen's role in promoting sustainability.
This seminar series will bring together political theorists,
philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists,
geographers, planners and educationalists with policy-makers,
representatives of non-governmental organisations and practitioners
to develop an integrative understanding of environmental citizenship.
Individual disciplines can bring depth to particular aspects of
the problem but it is only through integrative research that draws
on case studies and practical experiences as well as broader theory-building
that we can hope to develop a sophisticated understanding of the
role of citizens in promoting sustainability. A series of seminars
is essential to bring together a diverse group of participants
at regular intervals over a period of time with additional speakers
invited for their expertise in particular fields. A single seminar
could not hope to generate genuine and progressive interdisciplinary
engagement but a series of seminars makes the development of original
perspectives and ideas a real possibility. The seminar series
will encourage participants to begin to relate existing ideas
to a common focus, 'environmental citizenship'. As the series
progresses, the participants will attempt to develop a shared
interdisciplinary understanding of the complex nature of citizens'
role in promoting sustainability. In the process, we expect that
new interdisciplinary research agendas will be revealed.
Email Discussions
Participants in the workshops are members of an email discussion
list. Contributions to the discussions are archived, and
can be accessed at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cit-and-env.html
To enquire about joining the discussion list, please email Derek
Bell.
About the Organisers
Dr. Derek Bell
is Lecturer in Political Thought at Newcastle University. His
research interests are in contemporary liberal political philosophy
and environmental political thought, with a particular focus on
the place of the environment in political liberalism. He is currently
leading ESRC-funded projects on 'Deliberating the Environment:
Scientists and the Socially Excluded in Dialogue' and 'Citizenship
and the Environment'.
Andrew Dobson
is Professor of Politics at the Open University, UK. He
works in the field of environmental political theory, and among
his publications in this area are: Green Political Thought (3rd
edition) (London: Routledge 2000), Justice and the Environment
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), and Citizenship and the
Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003). He has
also edited The Green Reader (London: André Deutsch, 1990),
The Politics of Nature (with Paul Lucardie) (London: Routledge
1993), and the forthcoming Political Theory and the Ecological
Challenge (with Robyn Eckersley) (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 2005), and Environmental Citizenship: getting from here
to there? (edited with Derek Bell) ( MIT Press, 2005).
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