Environmental Citizenship 

Relevance for government & governance

Promoting sustainable development is a key objective for local, national and global policy-makers.  In the UK, for example, the UK Government and Devolved Administrations have adopted a set of shared principles that provide a basis for sustainable development policy.  (See Securing the Future: UK Government Sustainable Development Strategy .)

However, governments find it difficult to deliver sustainability for many reasons.  Policy-makers and politicians are reluctant to adopt ‘green' policies that have overt economic costs for consumers (such as increasing fuel taxes or waste charges) or for businesses (such as strict pollution regulation).  Imposing environmental regulations on corporations may discourage investment.  Economic 'stick' approaches to promoting sustainability may be difficult to enforce and may have negative unintended consequences.  For example, introducing a charge for collecting household waste may be as likely to result in fly-tipping as it is to reduce the amount of household waste sent to landfill sites.

Increasingly, therefore, environmental policy is taking a ‘participatory turn’ with active citizenship, green consumerism and community action being presented as key aspects of the struggle for a greener society.  This has been conceptualised as a shift from government to ‘governance’.  While government retains its role as providing infrastructure, redistributing wealth, passing and enforcing laws, and so on, environmental governance involves greater collaboration with citizens and institutions of civil society at every stage of the policy process – from initial consultation to implementation and evaluation.

In the 2004-5 seminar series, participant Bob Evans reported that he and his colleagues on the DISCUSS Project found that it is possible to have good governance and bad environmental policy, but they found no examples of bad governance and good environmental policy.  ‘Good governance’ is therefore a necessary but not a sufficient condition for sustainable development policy and practice.

The promotion of environmental citizenship, as a set of practices and a mode of thinking adopted by individuals, is also important to building and strengthening the kind of governance relationships that are necessary to reaching governments’ sustainability goals.  But at the same time as asking citizens to change their lifestyles, governments also need to lead by example, provide funding, lobby other governments and impose regulations on corporations.  A public consultation on sustainable development undertaken for Defra/COI (2005) found that participants were ‘extremely irritated by the notion that the Government [might] penalise the public before getting their own house in order or regulating big business’.* 

* Public Consultation on Sustainable Development.  Prepared on behalf of COI/Defra by Opinion Leader Research, March 2005.  (PDF 290Kb)