Environmental Citizenship 

Promoting environmental citizenship:
addressing the 'values-action gap'

Environmental citizenship is about adopting values and actions that are consistent with sustainability.  Four aspects of promoting environmental citizenship are explored here:

1. Social and institutional learning
2. Access and infrastructure
3. Participation and trust
4. Inspiration and leadership

Inspiration and leadership

Many people argue that the values and actions conducive to sustainability need to be inspired by positive media coverage and by leadership from governments, role models and civic entrepreneurs.  Leaders can play an important role in initiating projects, engaging others in discussions about principles and in demonstrating what citizenly action can achieve.

An image of self as citizen (like any self-image) is developed both from, and in opposition to, those images which are culturally available.  People are selective about the images they draw upon.  But as a society we can still look critically at the images made available and promoted, both explicitly and implicitly.  For example, we can ask whether is it regarded as cool and clever to behave in non-citizenly ways.  If it is made cool or clever not to care, not to know, and to act in anti-social, unsustainable and environmentally damaging ways, then it may be as important to contribute to a social critique of those images as it is to offer alternatives.

Values and actions can also be inspired by understanding – from local ecology to global trade, from agriculture to industrial history, from water to oil.  Such under-standing makes the things around us meaningful, interesting and often controversial, rather than taken-for-granted.

At the same time, reflective environmental citizenship is evidently catalysed by direct and/or shared experience of environmental or societal loss, by empathy when witnessing injustice or suffering, by fear for the future from unknown risks and by being given information that proves to be misleading.

The linking of values, understanding and action is what makes environmental citizenship important as a mechanism for change.  It is also what makes it less than simple to guide or promote.