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

Participation and trust

The idea of citizens acting in citizenly and pro-environmental ways out of principle can seem attractive to policy-makers at moments when these actions coincide with government policies.

However, the appropriation of environmental citizenship as volunteer labour may backfire.  Environmental citizenship is about contributing to what society should become (including debating what government should provide) not about substituting for public services.

Equally, the simulation of participatory governance (in consultations without outcomes, in value statements that have no mechanism for changing action, and in one-way public communication guided by ‘what the public should know’) tends to erode trust, increase cynicism about democracy, undermine participation and inhibit environmental citizenship.

Seminar participants John Colvin and Helen Chalmers (Environment Agency) suggested that communities reacting to a crisis can become ‘proactively’ involved if their negative reactions are listened to, and the community energy that might be created by a crisis is guided towards proactive involvement in problem-solving.  Alison Anderson’s discussion of the West Devon Environmental Network (ref. below) suggested that some kinds of activities to promote sustainability are more likely to be successful in better off areas where people have time and resources than in poorer areas where there may be a lack of trust in institutions.  Yet Anne Haugestad (ref. below) argued that in Norway wealthy areas often lack a sense of community and thus lack potential for effective environmental action.

Questioning expert knowledge and government policy is as central to environmental citizenship as principled action and cooperation.  Confrontation and resistance are also necessary acts of citizenship.

References cited above:
Anderson, Alison (2004).  'West Devon Environmental Network and Community Environmental Action’.  Seminar presentation.
Haugestad, Anne (2004).  On the impact of culture on environmental attitudes with specific reference to Norway.  Seminar presentation