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

Social and institutional learning

While an environmental crisis can prompt learning and a shift in values and action, sustainability and environmental citizenship require citizens and institutions to change in a non-crisis situation.

Environmental citizenship is a process for learning as well as a potential outcome of learning.  Experiencing something, caring about it, investigating it and discussing the issues are some of the best ingredients of learning, and are likely to inform action more than taught knowledge.

Four key aims were identified for facilitating processes of learning:

• Focus on issues and principles rather than just the problems: genuine understanding develops in the process of constructing (i.e. identifying, clarifying and naming) the issues, rather than taking these as already constructed.
• Focus on experience before knowledge: it is through experience and through attempting to act that we (as individuals and as a society) come to know what kinds of practical and interdisciplinary insight we need.
• Reveal interdependencies: explore the links in the chains between producer and purchaser, action and consequence, etc.  Explore the power of our own links in the chain, and how it feels to make small shifts from negative to positive cycles.
• Focus on priorities, needs and concerns that are shared, rather than those that benefit only some.

Learning for citizenship involves critical conceptual tools for making sense, evaluating and thinking how things might be done better.  It involves learning rights and responsibilities of governments, institutions and citizens.

However, it is wrong to assume that we fail to act as environmental citizens only out of ignorance or lack of experience.  The three other aspects listed above are equally important.