Environmental citizenship and
pro-environmental behaviour
Rapid research and evidence
review
November 2010
Professor Andrew Dobson
Keele University
The Sustainable Development Research Network
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1
Contents
Executive summary .................................................................... 6
1
2
3
Introduction ..................................................................... 12
1.1
Methodology ................................................................ 13
1.2
Structure of this report ................................................... 14
What is environmental citizenship? .......................................... 15
2.1
The origins of ‗environmental citizenship‘ ............................. 15
2.2
The motivations of the environmental citizen ........................ 17
2.3
The characteristics of the environmental citizen ..................... 18
2.3.1
Environmental citizenship and ‗the common good‘ ............. 19
2.3.2
Environmental citizenship and ‗contract‘ ......................... 22
2.3.3
Environmental citizenship and ethical knowledge ............... 23
2.3.4
Environmental citizenship - rights and duties .................... 28
2.3.5
Membership: who is an environmental citizen? .................. 29
2.3.6
Environmental citizenship: the public and private sphere ..... 33
2.4
Do we need another type of citizenship? ............................... 35
2.5
Summary .................................................................... 38
Why use environmental citizenship? ......................................... 39
3.1
The state, market and civil society ..................................... 39
3.2
Environmental citizenship and the fiscal route to sustainability ... 42
3.3
‗Crowding-out‘ theory .................................................... 46
3.4
Behavioural economics and environmental citizenship .............. 48
3.5
The ‗deficit model‘ and environmental citizenship .................. 50
2
4
3.6
Environmental citizenship within a civil and ‗big‘ society ........... 54
3.7
Summary .................................................................... 58
Challenges to environmental citizenship ................................... 59
4.1
The ‗free-rider‘ problem ................................................. 59
4.2
The efficacy of ‗smallness‘ ............................................... 60
4.3
The shortage of evenings ................................................. 61
4.4
‗It lets government off the hook‘ ....................................... 61
4.5
The broader infrastructural context .................................... 62
4.6
The importance of political culture ..................................... 63
4.7
‗We don‘t have much time‘ .............................................. 66
4.8
Summary .................................................................... 66
5
How can environmental citizenship be encouraged? ...................... 68
6
Future research ................................................................. 75
7
References ...................................................................... 76
Case Studies
Case study 1: Environmental citizenship in Swedish households ............. 21
Case study 2: Environmental citizenship and ‗tactile space‘ ................. 26
Case study 3: Environmental citizenship and ethical investment ............ 33
Case study 4: The social shaping of household consumption .................. 37
Case study 5: Environmental Citizenship and Climate Change in Canada ... 53
Case study 6: Environmental Citizenship and Hydrogen Technologies in the
UK ...................................................................................... 65
3
List of boxes
Box 1: Evidence for environmental citizenship in Sweden .................... 13
Box 2: Environment Agency environmental citizenship review ............... 17
Box 3: The main characteristics of the environmental citizen ................ 18
Box 4: Pro-environmental motivations: self-interest or other-regarding
virtues? ................................................................................ 23
Box 5: Values and pro-environment behaviour change? ........................ 25
Box 6: ‗Ecological Republicanism‘ ................................................ 29
Box 7: Cosmopolitanism ............................................................ 30
Box 8: Protest, direct action and environmental citizenship ................. 31
Box 9: The private sphere and environmental citizenship ..................... 35
Box 10: Decision-making: self-regarding and other-regarding ................ 44
Box 11: The transformative potential of (environmental) citizen initiatives 45
Box 12: ‗Crowding-out‘ theory ..................................................... 47
Box 13: Seven principles of behavioural economics and psychology ......... 48
Box 14: Key features of civil society .............................................. 54
Figures
Figure 1: State, market and civil society......................................... 39
Figure 2: Government promoting fiscal incentives ............................. 41
Figure 3: Command-and-control, nudge, environmental citizenship ........ 42
Figure 4: Contextualised ecological footprint ................................... 63
Figure 5: Government enabling environmental citizenship.................... 69
Figure 6: Government action to promote environmental citizenship ........ 70
4
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks are due to Sarah Bell, Ben Watson, Ben Shaw and Kate
McGeevor at the Sustainable Development Research Network. Members of
the SDRN‘s Advisory Committee made useful comments on drafts of the
Review and offered helpful suggestions for sources. Thanks also go to all
those who took part in an expert workshop, in February 2010, and to all
those who have commented on the first draft of the report for their insights
and suggestions for improvement. In particular: Joanne Amesbury, Annie
Austin, Andrea Collier, Robbie Craig, Andrew Darnton, Judith Hanna, Tom
Hargreaves, Louise Jordan, Barbara McLean, Hannah-Jane McNamara,
Simone Milani, Kirsten Reeves, Mark Rickinson, Sylvia Rowley, Hetan Shah,
Jonny Wentworth, and Johanna Wolf.
5
Executive summary
Introduction
This report presents the findings of the SDRN Rapid Research and Evidence
Review ‗Environmental Citizenship and Pro-Environmental Behaviour‘,
undertaken by Professor Andrew Dobson of Keele University. The review
provides an overview of research evidence for the existence of
environmental citizenship, considering the origins of the term, exploring
how it is defined and drawing on a series of case studies to identify the
characteristics of ‗environmental citizens‘. It asks whether approaches
based on environmental citizenship could be used as a means of encouraging
pro-environmental behaviour and sets out more specific policy
recommendations for how this may be done.
What is environmental citizenship?
There is a growing body of evidence from around the world that supports
the existence of a distinct form of citizenship, ‗environmental citizenship‘.
Though many varied definitions exist, ‗environmental citizenship‘ is used
broadly within this review to refer to pro-environmental behaviour, in
public and in private, driven by a belief in fairness of the distribution of
environmental goods, in participation, and in the co-creation of
sustainability policy. It is about the active participation of citizens in
moving towards sustainability.
The pro-environmental behaviour of environmental citizens is rooted in a
commitment to the principles and values underlying it, rather than to
financial or other types of external stimuli. In this way, environmental
citizenship constitutes a values-based approach for encouraging proenvironmental behaviour. It does so in a way that seeks to draw out the
latent values already harboured by an individual, rather than more
mainstream values-based approaches that aim to change existing values.
Furthermore, these latent values are not necessarily ‗pro-environmental‘ in
nature; the key ‗value‘ is justice between humans, rather than concern for
the environment for its own sake, or even for what it may provide for us.
Environmental citizens work with the idea of rights and responsibilities,
emphasising the right to a liveable amount of ecological space and the
responsibility of those who are occupying too much of that space to reduce
their ‗ecological footprint‘, through both private and public action.
The SDRN rapid research and evidence review identified in the literature six
specific characteristics of the environmental citizen, as set out below.
6
The environmental citizen …
1. Believes that environmental sustainability is a common good that
will not be achieved by the pursuit of individual self interest alone.
Lying behind this belief is an understanding of the environment as a
common-pool resource: no one can be effectively excluded from it,
but it is finite and diminishing;
2. Is moved by other-regarding motivations as well as self-interested
ones. That is, the environmental citizen will seek to maintain the
integrity of the common-pool resource because of its public benefit,
rather than some private, individual, excludable benefit. The
environmental citizen says, ‗I will even if you won‘t‘;
3. Believes that ethical and moral knowledge is as important as
techno-scientific knowledge in the context of pro-environmental
behaviour change;
4. Believes that other people’s environmental rights engender
environmental responsibilities which the environmental citizen
should redeem. In contrast to other forms of citizenship, the
relationship between rights and duties in environmental citizenship is
less about the rights and duties of citizens vis-à-vis the government,
and more about the rights and duties of citizens vis-à-vis each other;
5. Believes that these responsibilities are due not only to one’s
neighbours or fellow nationals but also to distant strangers (distant
in space and even in time). It is well known that environmental
problems transcend national boundaries, so any citizenship that
speaks only the language of the nation-state territoriality will be a
poor fit with the extra-territoriality that environmental citizenship
appears to demand;
6. Is aware that private environment-related actions can have public
environment-related impacts. This differs from traditional
understandings of citizenship in also regarding practices that take
place in the private arena - such as recycling - as ‗citizenly‘.
One way of usefully thinking about environmental citizenship is as a set of
‗substantive‘ practices, aimed at environmental sustainability. Obvious
examples of such practices include ‗private‘ activities with public
consequences, such as recycling or reducing domestic energy use, as well as
activities which occur in the ‗public‘ sphere, for example lobbying
government. Less obvious are examples which arise when people behave as
environmental citizens without being aware of it. This is often the case
where environmental ‗knowledge production‘ is concerned, as in the case of
amateur naturalists. Similarly, environmental citizenship outcomes may
7
arise from community initiatives that do not originally set out with an
environmental focus.
Why do we need environmental citizenship?
Historically, policies aimed at influencing individual behaviour have tended
to rely on either the introduction of statutory legislation and fiscal measures
(led by the state), or market-based measures like green consumerism or
carbon trading (driven by financial markets). In contrast, relatively less
attention has been given to civil society, in which actors are seen to behave
as citizens rather than as consumers, and the possibilities for promoting proenvironmental behaviour in this area. This is not to say that the citizenship
route is suggested as a replacement for existing fiscal and regulatory
approaches. Indeed, fiscal incentives have many advantages, achieving
outcomes quickly and effectively, as proven by the recycling reward scheme
recently piloted by Windsor and Maidenhead Council. However, they also
have disadvantages.
For instance, just as an environmental tax designed to change people‘s
behaviour can be imposed, so it can be rescinded or reined in. The risk of
using incentives to change behaviour is that, if the fiscal measure is
removed, people will often relapse into their previous behaviour patterns
upon removal of the incentive. In contrast, because the pro-environmental
behaviour of environmental citizens is rooted in a commitment to the
principles underlying it, it is less subject to the political and institutional
willpower required to support fiscal measures. Another problem with the
use of fiscal incentives is that they suggest ‗an ―undersocialised‖ view of
social action‘ whereby the extent to which people are motivated by reasons
beyond simply self-interest is underestimated.
As well as overcoming the limits of fiscal incentives, environmental
citizenship also supports calls for more participatory modes of local
governance. Since local people best understand the social and cultural
contexts in which they live, their active engagement in the design, delivery
and evaluation of local projects for sustainable development is fundamental
to their success. Policies based on behavioural economics, which aim to
‗nudge‘ people to change their behaviour, often rely on the provision of
expert-informed choices — largely without the knowledge or participation of
the ‗subjects‘). In contrast, environmental citizens co-create the
circumstances in which they act. Evidence suggests that willing participation
and the co-creation of both norms and practices with individuals and
communities, as advocated by the environmental citizenship approach, are
more likely to result in lasting pro-environmental behaviour change,
8
community benefits and ‗social learning‘, which can extend far beyond the
lifetime of particular projects or activities.
Challenges to environmental citizenship
Despite evidence suggesting the existence of environmental citizens,
defined by a distinct set of values and practices, the use of environmental
citizenship-based approaches to encourage pro-environmental behaviour is
not without difficulties. For example, ‗bottom-up‘ citizenship approaches to
environmental sustainability are subject to the ‗free-rider‘ problem, where
people benefit from the activities of others without contributing,
themselves, to the solution. Solutions to the free-rider problem identified in
the literature include the development of a good stock of ‗social capital‘
(where organisations, structures, relationships and trust have been built up
by people over a period of time); environmental education from an early
age; and, even a compulsory ‗sustainability service‘ along the lines of that
planned in the UK in the form of National Citizen Service. Although a
number of challenges are identified within the literature, they do not
preclude environmental citizenship as a valuable policy tool.
How can environmental citizenship be encouraged?
Though there are clear benefits in using environmental citizenship to
promote pro-environmental behaviour, citizens can only bring about change
with the support of government. The review identifies a number of potential
policy opportunities for providing such support:
Provide greater opportunities for individuals to take part in local
environmental decision-making. There is a need for local decision-making
to move beyond one-way communication and consultation towards genuinely
deliberative and participatory community engagement processes. Such
processes will only be successful if implemented with consideration of the
unique social and cultural dynamics within different community contexts.
Local government has a potentially significant role to play here.
Create more opportunities for civic engagement and volunteerism.
Citizenship-based activities are time-consuming, such that concerted efforts
are needed to support those who wish to volunteer. Opportunities for this
include: greater political effort to introduce a shorter working week and
encouraging employers to allocate time or other incentives (such as career
advancement) for employees to engage in community-based initiatives. The
piloting of the Government‘s new National Citizen Service initiative will
provide useful insight into how effectively such opportunities can be
created.
9
Rethink incentives for civic engagement. There are many interesting
examples of community currency schemes which reward specific types of
behaviour, using points-based ‗green‘ loyalty cards, time credits, and tokens
issued by local councils in return for tax reductions.
Provide greater opportunities for grassroots innovation. Government has a
key role to play in supporting and inspiring communities to develop
innovative solutions to local issues, be they environmental or wider social
issues. Principles for success include the setting of clear goals, a
presumption of community capacity to innovate, the rewarding of outcomes
rather than processes, and the provision of appropriate funding streams.
Build a good stock of social capital. Where levels of social capital are high,
people generally have a stronger sense of common purpose and are
prepared to contribute to the common good even if they are not
incentivised or coerced into doing so. Efforts to strengthen social capital
could learn important lessons from the RSA‘s Connected Communities
programme, which highlights the value in working with communities to map
local social networks.
Support new tools for community connection. The rise in internet-based
social networking sites offers valuable opportunities for encouraging such
links and events.
Reconsider local regulation. There is a need for both national and local
government to reconsider the way in which citizenship-based approaches
may be hindered by certain forms of regulation and legislation. The Big
Society Deregulation Task Force should consider existing models, like the
Community Land Trust, in their efforts to create a regulatory landscape
conducive to grassroots action.
Work through agents of social change. The Government has a unique
influence over agents of social change such as the education system and
many of the understandings that are important to environmental citizens
could be developed in schools or non-formal educational settings likes zoos
and botanical gardens.
Bring the impacts of environmental change closer to home.
Communication efforts could draw on novel approaches to increase the
tangibility of the impacts of personal behaviour choices on spatially and
temporally distant ‗others‘.
10
What do we need to know from future research?
A number of areas have been identified where further research would
improve the extent to which the encouragement of environmental
citizenship could be employed as a policy tool:
 Identify how many people are practising environmental citizens and
the degree to which they catalyse the behaviour of those around
them;
 Explore to what extent the values associated with environmental
citizenship are latent in the wider population, and pilot proenvironment policy designs aimed at bringing these values to the
fore;
 Develop a greater understanding of the importance of socio-political
culture. Further research could usefully explore the differences in
environmental citizenship within liberal-individual and more
collective, solidaristic societies;
 Explore the effectiveness of tools based on reciprocity, for example
by drawing on the experiences of pledge-based campaigns, such as
the 10:10 campaign, and local council sustainable development
pledges;
 Explore the extent to which incentive-based approaches impact on
internal motivations of individuals, and the potential risk of
incentives ‗crowding out‘ the motivation of those with existing proenvironmental attitudes, considering differences between types of
incentives — including the use of gift vouchers, tax rebates and local
alternative currencies — and different types of behaviours;
 Explore the role of environmental citizenship as an approach for
ensuring an equitable transition to decentralised low carbon
communities. How can individuals become energy citizens rather than
energy consumers? Valuable insights on this should be gained from
DECC‘s Low Carbon Communities programme and the RCUK Energy
and Communities research programme.
11
1 Introduction
Emerging evidence suggests certain people or groups of people are behaving
as ‗environmental citizens‘ (see Box 1). But what exactly is ‗environmental
citizenship‘? What values motivate environmental citizens? Can these values
be supported in the design of policy for pro-environmental behaviour
change? If so, how?
The aim of this SDRN Rapid Research and Evidence Review is to explore
these questions by reviewing existing evidence on environmental
citizenship, and its potential role in achieving pro-environmental behaviour
change.
Though many varied definitions of environmental citizenship can be found
within the literature, the term is used broadly within this review to refer to
pro-environmental behaviour, in public and in private, driven by a belief
in fairness of the distribution of environmental goods, in participation,
and in the co-creation of sustainability policy.
It is about the active participation of citizens in moving towards
sustainability. The pro-environmental behaviour of environmental citizens is
rooted in a commitment to the principles and values underlying
environmental citizenship itself, which are not purely pro-environmental in
nature. The key ‗value‘ underpinning environmental citizenship is justice
between humans. Environmental citizens work with the idea of rights and
responsibilities, emphasising the right to a liveable amount of ecological
space and the responsibility of those who are occupying too much of that
space to reduce their ‗ecological footprint‘, through both private and public
action.
Specifically, the review is intended to address the following objectives:
1) To survey the origins and meanings of environmental citizenship in
the literature and describe its principal characteristics;
2) To highlight the value in incorporating environmental citizenshipbased approaches within the government‘s existing proenvironmental behaviour change programme;
3) To survey the evidence that environmental citizenship describes the
actual behaviour of people, as well as providing a normative
framework for potential behaviour;
4) To explore how the government might promote environmental
citizenship.
12
Box 1: Evidence for environmental citizenship in Sweden
In 2004, 4000 Swedish householders were asked how they perceived
different types of environmentally-friendly household behaviours
(relating to waste and recycling, transport, and the consumption of ecolabelled products) and about their opinions on a set of policy instruments
that could encourage these activities. The report concluded that a
significant share of survey respondents displayed values consistent with
environmental citizenship, by putting an emphasis on non-territorial
altruism and social justice. Respondents were found to care about all
people, regardless of their whereabouts. This led the report‘s authors to
conclude:
‗The sometimes envisioned need to deal with individuals as rational
consumers, promoting individual environmental action through fiscal
(dis)incentives and the promise of reciprocity, should not be taken for
granted. As Swedes, according to our results, attribute a considerably
higher importance to other-regarding values, this should be taken to
reflect the likeliness for a positive formation of attitudes towards
policies promoting a greater individual environmental responsibility on
the basis of altruism and social justice.‘
(Jagers and Matti 2010: 1075-6)
1.1 Methodology
This Review was desk-based, drawing on reports, journal articles, books,
websites and personal communications. These were sourced initially via the
SDRN‘s mailing list, and via the Green Politics mailing list. These requests
produced additional responses that were taken up and used where
appropriate.
Standard electronic searches of library databases were
conducted, as were searches of research-based organisation databases, such
as that of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The Review
author drew on his own knowledge of, and contacts in, the field, developed
over a decade researching environmental citizenship. The sources consulted
and referred to in the Review may all be found in the list of references at
the end of the document.
13
1.2 Structure of this report
The report begins by considering the origins of the term ‗environmental
citizenship‘, exploring how it is defined and the characteristics of those
termed ‗environmental citizens‘. Section 2 considers whether approaches
based on environmental citizenship could be used as a means for
encouraging pro-environmental behaviour, before Section 3 compares the
concept with fiscal incentive, ‘nudge‘ and ‗deficit model‘ approaches to
behaviour change. Section 4 considers responses to some of the objections
to environmental citizenship. Section 5 then sets out more specific policy
recommendations based on the Review‘s findings while Section 6 identifies
future research priorities.
14
2 What is environmental citizenship?
The term ‗environmental citizenship‘ is increasingly being used as a way of
describing both certain types of pro-environmental behaviour and the
reasons people give for such behaviour.




The Canadian government offers a series of primers on environmental
citizenship, which seek to ‗help provide Canadians with the means to
make environmentally responsible decisions‘ (Environment Canada,
2004).
In Australia, the Department of Education and Training has a
programme of local school-community action which is explicitly
badged as ‗environmental citizenship‘ (Eddington, 2004: 25).
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) founded a Global
Environmental Citizenship Programme in 1997 (Barcena, 1998).
The USA‘s Environmental Protection Agency uses the term to describe
especially high-performing environmental companies (Fiorino, 2001:
10).
In contrast, while Defra and other UK government departments recognise
the value of employing a range of behaviour change policies (for example,
see Defra‘s ‗A Framework for Pro-Environmental Behaviours‘1), there is less
evidence specifically of the use of ‗environmental citizenship‘ in UK policymaking circles.
This section of the Review will explore the concept of environmental
citizenship in more detail, discussing its origins and key characteristics and
highlighting how it differs from and adds value to existing models of
citizenship. The next section then highlights its potential role and value in
the existing government behaviour change programme.
2.1 The origins of ‘environmental citizenship’
Though the concept of environmental citizenship has emerged relatively
recently, the study of pro-environmental activity within civil society has
been the focus of research for some time. Research conducted, for
example, in the early-to-mid 1990s by cultural geographers and
environmental sociologists, such as Eden, Macnaghten, Burgess and
Burningham, explored forms of environmentalism in the civil society sphere,
while an extensive literature on environmental activism and
1
http://www.defra.gov.uk/evidence/social/behaviour/pdf/behaviours-jan08-report.pdf
15
environmentalism as a new social movement, ‗new economics‘ and
grassroots innovation (e.g. Seyfang and Smith, 2007), consider an
environmentalism beyond the realms of the state and market.
One early synthesis of the characteristics of environmental citizens
summarised them as: being environmentally informed, having environmental
awareness and concern, and exhibiting environmentally responsible
behaviour (Hawthorne and Alabaster, 1999). While this is a useful starting
point, a shortcoming of the synthesis is that it does not pay enough
attention to the language of citizenship itself, and so does not tell us what
environmental citizenship is. The study, based on a sample of 154
environmental activists and 98 non-environmentalists in Wearside, North
East England, focused on the characteristics of the environmental citizen
rather than the existence of environmental citizenship, and concluded that,
‗participation in environmental education and training is the most
important predictor of environmental behaviour‘ (Hawthorne and
Alabaster, 1999: 40). Thereafter, ‗the other major predictors of behaviour
are, in order of significance, emotionality, religious affiliation,
parenthood, social class, internal locus of control [sense of personal
efficacy] and personal responsibility‘ (Hawthorne and Alabaster, 1999: 41).
More recently, the Environment Agency in England and Wales commissioned
a literature review of environmental citizenship, which sought to explore
the role of both citizenship and environmental citizenship, and any links
between environmental citizenship and improved environments (Barnett et
al., 2005: 4). Key results and conclusions can be found in Box 2 below.
16
Box 2: Environment Agency environmental citizenship review
Results
‗We found that some of the Environment Agency‘s work already
encourages citizenship actions. Extending this kind of approach more
systematically would help to achieve environmental outcomes.‘
The report provides evidence about both the trend toward greater
personal responsibility [at the time of writing], and about cases in which
organisations have worked with this trend to catalyse changes in patterns
of behaviour. It suggested that taking environmental citizenship seriously
could significantly benefit the Environment Agency — and the
environment. This involves taking opportunities to encourage action that
promotes sustainability, as well as engaging with complementary citizen
activity.
Conclusions
‗There is strong evidence that giving people the chance to be responsible
for and make choices about their environment produces environmental
benefits that could not be achieved through conventional regulatory
approaches.‘
(Barnett et al, 2005: 5)
2.2 The motivations of the environmental citizen
What most versions of environmental citizenship have in common is an
assumption that people are sometimes motivated to act for other-regarding
as well as self-regarding reasons. This may either be because they are
‗reciprocators‘ or because they are ‗altruists‘ (Bardsley and Moffatt, 2008).
The pro-environmental behaviour of these environmental citizens is rooted
in a commitment to the principles underlying it rather than to financial or
other externally-imposed stimuli. In this way, environmental citizenship
constitutes a values-based approach for encouraging pro-environmental
behaviour, but does so in a way that seeks to awaken ‗latent‘ values already
harboured by citizens, rather than more mainstream values-based
approaches that aim to change existing values.
These latent values are not necessarily ‗pro-environmental‘ in nature. The
key ‗value‘ underpinning environmental citizenship is in fact justice
between humans, rather than concern for the environment for its own sake,
or even for what it may provide for us. Environmental citizens work with the
17
idea of rights and responsibilities, emphasising the right to a liveable
amount of ecological space and the responsibility of those who are
occupying too much of that space to reduce their ‗ecological footprint‘,
through both private and public action. Environmental citizens tend to be
disproportionately active in communities and organisations in relation to
pro-environmental action and initiatives; often acting as ‗citizen champions‘
(Bergland and Matti, 2006).
This commitment to the underlying principles of justice and fairness makes
environmental citizenship-based approaches potentially less subject to the
vagaries of political and institutional change. Where it exists it is more
deeply-rooted and therefore more resilient than its self-interested
counterpart. The opportunities environmental citizenship therefore provides
to policy makers are discussed in greater depth in Section 5 of this report.
2.3 The characteristics of the environmental citizen
Box 3: The main characteristics of the environmental citizen
From a review of the literature, the following characteristics of the
environmental citizen emerge:
The environmental citizen …
1. believes that environmental sustainability is a common good that
will not be achieved by the pursuit of individual self-interest
alone;
2. is moved by other-regarding motivations as well as selfinterested ones;
3. believes that ethical and moral knowledge is as important as
techno-scientific knowledge in the context of pro-environmental
behaviour change;
4. believes that other people’s environmental rights engender
environmental responsibilities which the environmental citizen
should redeem;
5. believes that these responsibilities are due not only to one’s
neighbours or fellow-nationals but also to distant strangers
(distant in space and even in time);
6. has an awareness that private environment-related actions can
have public environment-related impacts.
18
While precise definitions of an ‗environmental citizen‘ vary, it is possible to
identify a series of key characteristics that emerge across the literature
reviewed here. These core characteristics – as identified in most different
interpretations of the term – are given in Box 32.
The following section considers how these individual characteristics relate
conceptually to different components of environmental citizenship.
2.3.1 Environmental citizenship and ‘the common good’
‗The environmental citizen believes that environmental sustainability is a
common good that will not be achieved by the pursuit of individual selfinterest alone‘
The environmental citizen believes that there is such a thing as the common
good for any collection of individuals. Lying behind this belief is an
understanding of the environment as a common-pool resource: no one can
be effectively excluded from using it, but it is finite and diminishing.
Common-pool resources are subject to the ‗free-rider problem‘: namely,
that people can not be excluded from benefiting from the resource, and
therefore have no self-interested reason for keeping it well-maintained (see
Section 4.1 for more on the free-rider problem). In fact their self-interest
lies in relying on other people to maintain it, while they spend their time
doing other things.
There are a number of possible solutions to the free-rider problem. Many
focus on those who do free-ride and how to get them not to do so. It is less
common to attend to those who do not free-ride – for example,
environmental citizens – and to examine their motivations and what we
might learn from them. Why would anyone work to maintain a public
resource from which they could benefit equally well without doing so? Part
of the answer lies in the commitment of environmental citizens to the idea
of a common good.
This suggests a different type of solution to problems like climate change.
2
In addition to the characteristics listed in Box 3 some would add a ‗commitment to non-human
communities‘ to this list (e.g. Carolan, 2007) but this element is not so common in the literature as to
make it an essential component. Christoff‘s idea of the citizen as ‗ecological trustee‘ (1996: 158-9,
161) is also relevant here.
19
The most familiar solutions tend to be written in the language of commerce
and contract, according to which self-interested people will only act for the
common good when it is in their interest to do so. So tradable permits
combined with a cap on emissions, for example, are proposed as a way to
guarantee lower overall emissions.
However, from the point of view of the free-rider problem, tradable permits
could be seen as part of the problem rather than part of the solution —
because they reinforce the frame of mind that leads to the problem in the
first place. It will usually be in the free-rider interests of carbon-traders to
set the cap too high and the price of carbon too low.
One country with a political culture that has traditionally stressed the idea
of the common good is Sweden. Case Study 2 examines the presence of
environmental citizenship motivations in 4000 Swedish households.
20
Case study 1: Environmental citizenship in Swedish households
Berglund, C and Matti, S (2006), ‘Citizen and Consumer: the Dual Role of
Individuals in Environmental Policy’, Environmental Politics, Vol. 15, No.4, 550571, August
What and where?
A comparison of official environmental policy discourse in Sweden with the results of
a mail-out survey to 4000 people in four counties. The focus is on the reasons people
give for pro-environmental behaviour in households.
The aim of the research is to test the assumption made in mainstream economics
that individual actions are guided mainly by external rewards. The hypothesis tested
is located in the ‗growing body of evidence indicating that for civic-orientated tasks,
such as pro-environmental behaviour, intrinsic motivation may play a comparable
role [to extrinsic motivation]‘ (Berglund and Matti, 2006: 552).
Findings


External motivations for behaviour of the sort envisaged by rational actor models
are indeed important, but respondents attach significantly more importance to
so-called self-transcendence values: ‗… people tend to ascribe far greater
importance to the motivational values included in the self-transcendence cluster
(altruism) as guiding principles in life than to the opposing values of selfenhancement (egoism), indicating that the citizen-role is also important to take
into account in policy design‘ (Berglund and Matti, 2006: 550).
The researchers point to the wider significance of this finding: that the Swedish
government is underestimating the policy traction that ‗citizenship‘ could have in
the sustainability context. The ‗mismatch‘ referred to in what follows relates to
government policy assumptions that people are only motivated extrinsically
whereas the research conducted by Berglund and Matti points to the importance
of intrinsic motivations: ‗It is concluded that there is a mismatch between the
content of Sweden‘s policy documents and the general value orientation held by
the Swedish citizenry‘ (2006: 550).
Berglund and Matti also report interesting findings on the question of whether
extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for pro-environmental behaviour can be
combined, highlighting the risk of economic incentives undermining personal intrinsic
motivation. This ‗crowding out‘ phenomenon is discussed in more detail in Section
3.3.
21
2.3.2 Environmental citizenship and ‘contract’
‗The environmental citizen is moved by other-regarding motivations as well
as self-interested ones‘
Citizenship is usually viewed as involving reciprocal relationships,
particularly in the context of the relationship between the citizen and the
state. A useful illustration of this can be found within modern debates
around unemployment benefits: the state will provide welfare payments, it
is argued, as long as the unemployed citizen is actively looking for work.
This reciprocity is central to the arguments put forward in the oftreferenced Sustainable Development Commission report ‗I will if you will‘
(SDC, 2006), which called for collective action from all sections of society to
promote more sustainable consumption.
The problem with this formula is its logical corollary: ‗I won't if you won't‘.
Even in democratic states, widespread low levels of trust in government
may mean that citizens do not feel obliged to fulfil their part of the
contract because they don't believe that government will fulfil its side.
The same is true for reciprocity between citizens. In the environmental
context, it has been suggested that individuals will continue flying or driving
because they see no reason to cut back if others are not also doing so
(Bardsley, 2009). As Bardsley states: ‘Behaviour is conditional on what
others do. There may be great swathes of the population who would be
happy to take action if they knew that everybody was obliged to do the
same. Thus the reciprocity element in … citizenship might suffice to
produce the potential for quite powerful environmental action, so far as
public acceptance is concerned‘ (Bardsley, 2009: personal communication).
If individuals doubt the efficacy of sanctions against those that renege on
their side of the bargain, reciprocity becomes an unstable foundation for
pro-environmental action.
Another approach is to adopt an
alternative frame of mind, one which
The environmental citizen says,
seeks to maintain the integrity of the
‘I will, even if you won’t’
common-pool resource because of its
public benefit, rather than some
private, individual excludable benefit, and even in the absence of
guaranteed reciprocal action from others. This is an explicitly noncontractual approach to collective social action (see Case Study 3b in
Section 3.3.3 for evidence of this disposition). The environmental citizen
says, ‗I will, even if you won‘t‘.
22
In contrast to the ‗rational actor‘ models that inform the fiscal incentive
approach to encouraging pro-environmental behaviour, environmental
citizenship works with what Kollmuss and Agyeman call, ‗models of
altruism, empathy, and prosocial behavior … Prosocial behavior is defined
… as ―voluntary intentional behavior that results in benefits for another‖‘
(Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002: 244). This idea is summarized in Box 4.
Box 4: Pro-environmental motivations: self-interest or other-regarding
virtues?
‗The question of sustainable behaviour cannot be reduced to a discussion
of balancing carrots and sticks. The citizen that sorts her garbage or that
prefers ecological goods will often do this because she is committed to
ecological values and ends. The citizen may not, that is, act in
sustainable ways solely out of economic or practical incentives: people
sometimes choose to do good for other reasons than fear (of punishment
or loss) or desire (for economic rewards and social status). People
sometimes do good because they want to be virtuous.‘
(Beckman, 2001: 179)
2.3.3 Environmental citizenship and ethical knowledge
‗The environmental citizen believes that ethical and moral knowledge is as
important as techno-scientific knowledge in the context of proenvironmental behaviour change‘
Ethics and virtue play a key role in environmental citizenship and are
often drawn upon by those who are critical of the ‗self-interested
rationality‘ approach which lies at the heart of many economic
approaches to behaviour change.
Take this extract, from Professor Michael Sandel‘s 2009 Reith Lecture, in
which he discusses an opinion piece written in the New York Times during
the 1997 Kyoto Protocol debates:
‗I worried that letting countries buy the right to pollute would be
like letting people pay to litter. We should try to strengthen, not
weaken the moral stigma attached to despoiling the environment …
[and] I continue to think that in addressing this question most
economists miss the crucial point: norms matter. In deciding how
best to get global action on climate change, we have to cultivate a
new environmental ethic, a new set of attitudes toward the planet
23
we share. We‘re unlikely to foster the global cooperation we need if
some countries are able to buy their way out of meaningful
reductions in their own energy use‘ (Sandel, 2009).
In the overall discussion regarding pro-environmental behaviour, the issue of
knowledge is often raised. It is generally accepted that while knowledge is a
necessary condition for pro-environmental behaviour, it is by no means a
sufficient condition. Indeed it is often pointed out how tenuous the link
between knowledge and action is. As Ashley says: ‗In spite of the efforts
that have been made to increase awareness and understanding of
environmental issues, there is little evidence of a general adoption of proenvironmental behaviours that might characterize environmental
citizenship‘ (Ashley, 2000: 131).
Environmental citizenship does not offer a solution to this problem, but it
adds a new dimension to the debate by suggesting that ‗knowledge‘ should
not be regarded as lying only in the techno-scientific field, but should be
broadened to include ethical, moral and even spiritual knowledge. This is
Ashley‘s point when he writes that, ‗My discussion will embrace briefly a
critique of the notion that the provision of knowledge and understanding
about the environment will lead to behaviour change. Such knowledge is
necessary, but it is not sufficient for as I shall demonstrate, behaviour is
associated principally with values as the reason for action, not knowledge‘
(Ashley, 2000: 132). Ashley‘s point is that knowledge without values is
unlikely to lead to the required behaviour change.
Ashley also points to the importance of the connection between scientific
and moral knowledge: ‗The virtuous citizen will take environmental
considerations into account when formulating a behavioural code, and will
make judgements on the basis of competency in moral reasoning and both
ethical and scientific knowledge relevant to such reasoning‘ (Ashley 2000:
133). His research is summarized in Box 5.
24
Box 5: Values and pro-environment behaviour change?
Research was conducted with a sample of 300 11 and 14 year old pupils
drawn from five schools, representative of the end of National Curriculum
Key Stage Two (11 year olds) and Key Stage Three (14 year olds) in urban
and rural locations.
Conclusion: ‗The general conclusion of this part of the research was that
it is value and not scientific knowledge that is the reason for action. The
values that are operative, furthermore, were seldom environmental ones,
even though a substantial majority of the subjects demonstrated high
awareness of pro-environmental behaviour.‘
(Ashley 2000: 137)
Michael Carolan‘s research suggests another form of knowledge as key to
environmental (or what he calls ‗ecological‘) citizenship.
If the
environmental citizen is to feel that her/his responsibilities are owed to
distant others (see point 5 in Box 3 above), then the ‗epistemic distance‘
that separates us from the consequences of our actions in a globalised world
needs to be closed.
This will not ‗come naturally‘ as it were, so for Carolan ‗it is clear that
strategies and practices must be put into place to re-embed and thus make
meaningful to individuals the otherwise distant artefacts of a global,
disembedded, modern world‘ (Carolan, 2007: 7). Thus he refers to research
that utilised smart metering and food labelling in efforts to create ‗access
points to faraway lands and practices‘. The research sought to consider the
impacts of this additional knowledge on consumer concern for ‗distant
others‘ and whether it was able to influence their personal energy and food
consumption patterns (Carolan, 2007: 12).
Even better, says Carolan, would be strategies designed to create a ‗lived
experience‘ of closeness rather than a purely cerebral one. He refers here
to the creation of ‗tactile space‘ (see Case Studies 3a and b, for details).
25
Case study 2: i) Environmental citizenship and ‘tactile space’
Carolan, M. (2007), ‘Introducing the concept of Tactile Space: Creating lasting
social and environmental commitments’ Geoforum 38: 1264-1275
What and where?
The research focuses on Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) (Decorah, Iowa, US), a nonprofit seed bank that saves and sells ‗heirloom‘ fruit and vegetables. Visitors and
participants in the Exchange come to know ‗the abstract, distant thing we call
―agricultural biodiversity‖ by walking through the gardens and visitors‘ center
(where many of the seeds are on display) and by feeling seeds and various fruits
and vegetables in their hands‘ (p.16). The research is based on 28 interviews with
visitors and participants involved in the Exchange.
Findings




The research set out to answer the question: ‗Are there indications that SSE
has the ability to instill within individuals such commitments [deep, noninstrumental commitments to the human and non-human realms]?‘ It
concluded: ‗It appears so.‘ (p.17)
There is evidence that practices as well as attitudes can be changed through
exposure to a ‗tactile space‘ of learning: ‗attitudes were not the only things
that were changed through the experiences acquired at SSE. So too were
practices.‘ (p.18)
Evidence that the changes in attitudes and practices persisted after visitors left
the ‗tactile space‘, thus contributing to the formation of a key element in
environmental citizenship: ‗In the end, it appears that SSE, in making such
abstract and often only indirectly known phenomena as ―genes‖ and
―biodiversity‖ more meaningful to individuals, deeply affected how visitors of
this space came to view these entities. And in some cases, those effects
appeared to remain with individuals even after they had left the grounds of
SSE. In those instances, then, something similar to ecological citizenship
appears to have emerged.‘ (p.19)
Evidence that visitors/participants cleave to another of the key elements of
environmental (here, ecological) citizenship, a non-reciprocity of rights and
obligations: ‗those interviewed spoke nothing of expecting something in return
for their personal seed saving and gardening endeavors. Nor did respondents
speak of reciprocal obligations. Indeed, one individual put this point clearly
when she stated, ―[Those of us in developed countries] need to step up and
preserve these seeds since we are the ones responsible for their demise.‖‘
(p.19)
26
Case study 2: ii) Environmental citizenship and ‘tactile space’
Carolan, M. (2007), ‘Introducing the concept of Tactile Space: Creating lasting
social and environmental commitments’ Geoforum 38: 1264-1275
What and where?
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a term used to refer to groups of
individuals who pledge support to a farm or group of farms, and work together to
create a local food system. CSAs ‗seek to reduce the distance - in both physical
and epistemological terms - between consumers, growers, and food‘ (p.21). Two
CSAs form the subject of this research, conducted in Iowa (USA). The research is
based on 22 interviews.
Findings




Producers and consumers were brought together: ‗at both CSAs examined,
―volunteer parties‖ were also held a few times a year, which brought nongrowers to the farm to help harvest … Such practices had the combined
effect of reconnecting consumers and producers at a level rarely experienced
in today‘s global food system.‘ (p.21)
Volunteers perhaps already had a commitment to ecological citizenship, so
are not representative of the wider public: ‗the transformational potential of
these spaces has to thus be slightly tempered by the possibility that those
most transformed by them likely had certain ecological citizenship-like
proclivities to begin with.‘ (p.23)
In summary, there is evidence here for people transforming their views and
behaviour in an ecological citizenship direction: ‗arguably the most salient
component of ecological citizenship is the importance it places on deep
commitments to issues of sustainability (however it is defined), versus a
shallow type of human motivation that hinges on dis/incentives (which tend
to cease once the dis/incentive is revoked). And such commitments appear to
have been, at least in part, an effect of the tactile spaces and experiences
that the CSAs examined helped to produce.‘ (p.24)
Becoming an ecological citizen is perhaps more about experiencing than
learning: ‗gleaning insight from the case studies … ecological citizenship
could arguably be viewed as less something one learns (in the sense of being
―schooled‖ on ecological citizenship) and more something one tacitly
experiences.‘ (p.24)
27
2.3.4 Environmental citizenship - rights and duties
‗The environmental citizen believes that other people‘s environmental
rights engender environmental responsibilities which the environmental
citizen should redeem‘
As with conceptions of citizenship more broadly, environmental citizenship
is often defined with reference to ‗rights‘ and ‗duties‘. Light (2002), for
example, defines environmental citizenship3 as ‗the description of some set
of moral and political rights and responsibilities of agents in a democratic
community, defined in terms of their obligations to other humans‘ in the
context of a desire to ‗preserve the long term sustainability of nature‘
(Light, 2002: 159).
Looking at the rights dimension more specifically, some argue that
environmental citizenship should be understood as a fourth addition to T.H.
Marshall‘s celebrated analysis of the development of citizenship through
three historical stages or rights acquisition: civil, political, and social rights
(Marshall 1950). On this account, environmental rights are the latest in a
line of citizenship rights demands, and thus environmental citizenship is a
matter of claiming these (environmental) rights against the relevant
constituted political authority. Debates then ensue about what these rights
might be – a right to clean air or clean water, for example – and how they
might be instantiated and made good, for example through their
incorporation in constitutions (Hayward, 2000; Dean 2001: 491).
As the concept of environmental citizenship has developed, a consensus has
grown that environmental citizenship places a greater emphasis on duties
than on rights, making it closer to the republican than the liberal tradition
of citizenship (Barry, 2009; Curry, 2000) and placing a greater emphasis on
‘a public morality of duty and obligation‘ (Ashley, 2000: 133). The idea of
ecological republicanism is explained in Box 6.
As with rights, there is some debate about what the nature of
environmental citizenship duties is. One way of thinking about this, in
general terms, is to gloss the republican citizen‘s injunction to act so as to
maintain and sustain the republic – the res publica. It is not too big a jump
to regard our common environment as an instance of the res publica that
requires maintaining and sustaining: ‗Citizenship, conceived along classical
republican lines, identifies a role for residents of a place by articulating a
3
Referred to in the paper as ‗ecological citizenship‘.
28
range of minimal obligations they have to each other for the sake of the
larger community in which they live‘ (Light, 2003: 51).
Box 6: ‘Ecological Republicanism’
‗It is fascinating to see the extent to which the perspective derived from
civic republicanism is amenable to an ecological interpretation and
expansion. In so far as the common good of any human community is
utterly dependent – not only ultimately but in many ways immediately –
upon ecosystemic integrity (both biotic and abiotic), that integrity must
surely assume pride of place in its definition. And it is only maintained
by practices and duties of active ―citizenship‖, whose larger goal is the
health not only of the human public sphere but of the natural world
which encloses, sustains and constitutes it.‘
(Curry, 2000: 1065)
In traditional citizenship theory there is a reciprocal relationship between
rights and duties, such that the citizen claims certain rights against the
state (or the relevant constituted political authority), which are then made
good by the state in return for the performing of various duties and
responsibilities. If these responsibilities are not met (e.g. obeying the law),
then certain rights (e.g. the right to vote) might be taken away (as is – soon
to be ‗was‘ — the case with prisoners in the UK).
In environmental citizenship, the relationship between rights and duties is
less clear cut. In part this is because of another difference between
environmental citizenship and more mainstream citizenships. In mainstream
citizenship, the principal relationship is a ‗vertical‘ one between
government and citizens. In environmental citizenship, the relationship is
that between fellow citizens – a ‗horizontal‘ relationship, if you will. Thus
the relationship between rights and duties is less about the rights and duties
of citizens vis-à-vis the government, and more about the rights and duties of
citizens vis-à-vis each other.
2.3.5 Membership: who is an environmental citizen?
‗The environmental citizen believes that environmental responsibilities are
not due only to one‘s neighbours or fellow-nationals but also to distant
strangers (distant in space and even in time)‘
Legal definitions of citizenship tend to conflate citizenship and nationality,
and nationality in turn is often related to territory. Thus jus sanguinis means
29
citizenship by birth – the inheriting of the citizenship of one‘s parents. Jus
soli, on the other hand, relates one‘s citizenship to the state one was born
in – at birth one acquires the citizenship of the land in which one is born. So
in traditional notions of citizenship, membership and territory are closely
bound together.
Environmental citizenship is not a nation-state citizenship; it is more similar
to cosmopolitan citizenship (see Box 7) than to either of the other major
traditions that have been handed down to us through the ages, such as
republican and liberal citizenship.
Box 7: Cosmopolitanism
‗The word ‗cosmopolitan‘ in general parlance means a person who feels at
home in a number of countries. The usefulness of its more specific
political connotation of trans- or supra-national has only recently come to
be again recognised by scholars. However, in origin it had neither of these
meanings. The Greek word ‗kosmopolites‘ should properly be rendered as
‗citizen of the cosmos‘ or ‗universe‘. A person thus described was
therefore someone conscious of being part of the whole universe, the
whole of life, the whole of nature, of which all human beings, let alone
just the community of the person‘s political state, were but tiny
portions.‘
(Heater, 1999: 137)
Box 7 illustrates why the cosmopolitan tradition is attractive to those who
seek to develop an environmental citizenship. It is well known that
environmental problems ‗spill over‘ national boundaries, so any citizenship
that speaks only the language of nation-state territoriality will be a poor fit
with the extra-territoriality that environmental citizenship appears to
demand.
This opens up the possibility of wider forms of identification 4 . The
cosmopolitan citizen identifies, in principle, with the whole of humanity,
4
It is assumed here, though, that membership, however it is understood, refers to human
beings only. Hilson points out that, ‗In relation to membership, environmental citizenship
inevitably confronts the kinds of debate found within environmental ethics. Could present
generations of humans be the only relevant subjects or should membership, with its
associated benefits and burdens, include corporations, future generations, animals and
even the broader biospheric community of which humans are a part?‘ (Hilson, 2001: 337).
30
rather than with fellow citizens, territorially or culturally defined. Given
the global nature of some environmental problems, such as climate change,
cosmopolitanism speaks the right kind of citizenship language. Box 8
suggests the possibility of an even closer connection between
cosmopolitanism and environmental concerns, with the use of ‗holistic‘ –
even quasi-spiritual – language to describe the relationship between the
individual and the rest of life and the universe.
Thus environmental citizenship should not be thought of in membership
terms. Although the dominant understanding of citizenship probably is in
terms of legal status (‗passport citizenship‘), there has always been another
way of thinking about it: as activity, as participation in the public life of the
collective.
It is this understanding that generates talk of the ‗good‘ citizen – an idea
that has deep roots in political theory and political experience, dating back
at least as far as Aristotle and his affirmation that ‗man is a political
animal‘. The good citizen is the one who cares about public life and seeks
to sustain it: ‗On this account, citizenship is not satisfied merely by voting,
or even less robustly, as only a legal category which one is either born into
or becomes naturalized to. It is instead an ―ethical citizenship‖ or a
concept of ―citizenship as vocation‖, where citizenship is a virtue met by
active participation at some level of public affairs‘ (Light, 2003: 51).
Then the question arises of what sort of activities count as ‗environmental
citizenship‘ activities? Obvious examples of such practices include ‗public
activities‘ such as lobbying government for more effective environmental
regulations, or campaigning for the protection of local greenspace or more
distant ecosystems under threat. Other activities could even include civil
disobedience where mainstream channels have been exhausted (see Box 8).
Box 8: Protest, direct action and environmental citizenship
‗Protest and direct action, especially when internationally coordinated,
might seem a long way from the simple citizenly duty of taking the blue
[recycling] box down to the curb. This distance points to the divergent
possibilities for the future of environmental citizenship. Will it be
limited to marginal changes in individual behaviour or will the rights and
obligations of citizens form the basis for courageous collective action that
leads us towards local and global environmental justice?‘
(Latta, 2007b: 19)
31
Activities may also occur in the ‗private‘ sphere, such as those often
exhibited by the sustainable consumer, for example: composting and
recycling waste, reducing domestic energy and water use, purchasing
‗green‘ or ‗ethical‘ goods, ethical investment and so forth.
Case Study 3 below shows how environmental citizenship can be present in
the act of ethical investment. The common thread in these activities is the
desire to reduce environmental impact – more specifically, perhaps, to
reduce the size of an individual‘s or a community‘s ecological footprint.
Less obvious are examples of hobbies or interests that produce what may be
regarded as environmental citizenship outcomes as a by-product of the
activity itself, such that some people behave as environmental citizens
without being aware of it. This is often the case where (environmental)
‗knowledge production‘ is concerned. Santaoja comments, for example,
that, ‗Amateur naturalists can be the best experts concerning the species of
their interest even internationally, and they spend considerable amounts of
time in a detailed study of local nature. As such, they are quite a
demanding group as an example of environmental citizenship. Amateur
naturalists provide even as much as 90 percent of biodiversity monitoring
data, which makes the official nature protection rather dependent on
them‘ (Santaoja, 2009: 2). Rebecca Ellis and Claire Waterton found a
comparable dynamic at work in their research on ‗volunteer naturalists‘ in
the UK (Ellis and Waterton, 2004).
Similarly, environmental citizenship outcomes may arise from community
initiatives that do not originally set out with an environmental focus. This
was true for a significant number of the groups applying to NESTA‘s Big
Green Challenge; it seems this initiative was able to capture the awareness
and enthusiasm of community groups beyond those with a pre-existing
interest in climate change (Bunt and Harris, 2010).
32
Case study 3: Environmental citizenship and ethical investment
Neil Carter and Meg Huby (2005), ‘Ecological Citizenship and Ethical
Investment’, Environmental Politics, Vol. 14, No. 2, 255 – 272, April 2005.
What and where?
An examination of data from an academic survey of ethical investors, with 1,146
respondents (a 32% response rate) recruited from ethical investors with Friends
Provident and NPI, two important UK ethical unit trusts, with the aim of
determining the extent to which individual and institutional ethical investors can
be regarded as ecological citizens.
Findings


There is evidence that individual ethical investors display attitudes and
behaviour that accord with ecological citizenship: ‗individual ethical
investment displays elements of Dobson‘s (2003) ecological citizenship. The
very nature of investment means it meets the non-territoriality condition,
except perhaps in those funds where investment is geographically localised
(although even then many companies will trade internationally). Ethical
investors clearly recognise that their private acts have public implications
both in terms of their own impact on environmental and social conditions
and in their expectations that their investment choices will affect those
conditions for other people, in other places and at other times. Their
ethical investment, at least if varying requirements that it will bring
financial shareholder benefits are left aside, reflects their commitment to
those people and places harmed by their lifestyles and behaviour, now and
in the future. And, in making investments according to ethical principles,
the investors display virtues of ecological citizenship – the care and
compassion implicit in their quest for social and environmental justice.‘
(p.269)
The evidence in the case of institutional investors is less compelling: ‗It is
harder to claim that institutional investors are acting as ecological citizens,
not least because their decisions tend to be dominated by their fiduciary
duties.‘ (p.269)
2.3.6 Environmental citizenship: the public and private sphere
‗The environmental citizen has an awareness that private environmentrelated actions can have public environment-related impacts‘
Citizenship has traditionally been associated with ‗the public sphere‘. On
this common view, citizenship takes place in the polling booth and in the
town square — it is not done at home. This traditional view of the ‗space‘
where citizenship happens is counter-intuitive from an environmental point
33
of view. This is because many ‗private‘ actions have very real public
environmental consequences – households account for 42 per cent of carbon
emissions from energy use (including private car use), 50 per cent of public
water supply and 15 per cent of controlled waste (Defra, 2008).
It is also because the habits and practices of good environmental
stewardship might be said to be learnt – in part – at home, in the private
sphere. So children can be educated into managing household energy better
through the example and instruction of their parents or guardians (or,
increasingly, the instruction might be the other way round, as children come
home from school where they have learnt about sustainability and wonder
why their parents are not doing more at the household level).
The private sphere is a very rich arena of environmental learning and
activity, and this review has thrown up some interesting examples. Phillips,
for one, writes about the practice of ‗seed-saving‘. She regards this as a
citizenly activity because, ‗the citizen here is a thinking, acting, virtuous
person participating in creating a more sustainable relationship between
humans and nature. It is reasonable to argue that seed savers fit this
description of what constitutes a green citizen‘ (Phillips, 2005: 41). But, he
complains, ‗citizenship, occur[s] only in the public sphere‘ (Phillips,
2005:46) so seed-saving can not be regarded as a citizenly thing to do
because much of it ‗happens in and through the ‗private‘ sphere – in the
activities and times of work and leisure, in spaces of farm fields,
backyards, and rooftops, and through family and friends, internet services,
etc‘ (Phillips, 2005: 46-7).
Phillips suggests that the practice of seed-saving shows how the idea of
citizenship must be taken outside the definitional confines of the public
sphere: ‗advocates of the stewardship ethic suggest that through green
citizenship there is a transgression of the boundaries between private and
public spheres, such that citizenship cannot be understood to be located
only within the public sphere‘ (Phillips, 2005: 42). Once this is done, theory
aligns better with practice: ‗With the allowance of ‗transgression‘ between
public and private realms, a fuller account of the political character of
seed saving is possible because the activities take place in both public and
private arenas‘ (Phillips, 2005: 42).
In sum, one way in which environmental citizenship differs from traditional
understandings of citizenship is in potentially regarding practices that take
place in the private arena as ‗citizenly‘. This is highlighted in Box 9.
34
Box 9: The private sphere and environmental citizenship
‗Along with the defiance of established typologies, environmental
citizenships confront traditional dichotomies between public/private and
local/global. While the (re)creation of the public sphere is a major theme
in citizenship literature, the division between private and public is more
permeable than is usually accepted. Environmental citizenships endorse
changes in consumption, disposal and character that are usually
considered part of the private realm, but that are also publicly pursued,
accountable, and have repercussions beyond the private. In this way,
environmental citizenships endorse the common feminist assertion that
―the personal is political‖.‘
(Gilbert and Phillips, 2003: 318)
Another feature of citizen-led initiatives is that their participatory nature
makes possible the accentuation or even transformation of attitudes,
beliefs and behaviour in those who participate in them. A common criticism
of environmental citizenship as a tool for sustainability is that ‗people just
aren‘t like that‘. We will look at this in more detail in Section 4, but two
things need to be remembered here. First, people are capable of many
different types of behaviour, and second, attitudes and behaviour can
change.
Citizen-led initiatives tend to draw out certain types of behaviour, and may
even change it. Such initiatives are therefore capable of setting up a
positive feedback loop in which already-existing pro-environmental
attitudes and behaviour are both ‗drawn out‘ (i.e. accentuated or ‗called
upon‘) and reinforced.
2.4 Do we need another type of citizenship?
It might be suggested that rather than thinking in terms of a ‗new‘
environmental citizenship, we should be thinking of ways in which the
idea(s) of citizenship we already have might be adapted or widened to
include the sustainability agenda.
This debate is already underway in academic circles; there are indeed those
who argue that citizenship (itself a mixed conceptual bag, of course) can be
adapted to the environmental agenda, while others argue that some aspects
of environmental citizenship cannot so easily be captured by the notions we
35
already have (e.g. the ‗private‘ dimension and sub- and trans-national focus
of environmental citizenship).
At the same time there is evidence to suggest that some people act as
environmental citizens without being aware of it; they display behaviour,
and give reasons for that behaviour which are consistent with environmental
citizenship. A key aim of this review is to tease out what these behaviours
and underlying motivations are. Some evidence for this ‗by-product‘
achievement of pro-environmental behaviour is uncovered by Susse Georg in
her examination of the effect of social norms on household consumption.
This is summarised in Case Study 4.
36
Case study 4: The social shaping of household consumption
Georg, S (1999), ‘The social shaping of household consumption’, Ecological
Economics, 28: 455-66
What and where?
Three studies focused on: 1) ‗Eco-teams‘, based on the grassroots organisation
Global Action Plan (GAP); 2) An ecological village in Denmark (200 inhabitants); 3)
An ecological village in Sweden (20 inhabitants)
Findings






Sometimes sustainability gains are a by-product of more general forms and
practices of empowerment: ‗environmental concerns are in many instances
inseparable from broader issues such as improving the quality of life and regaining some control over local development ... the environment has not only
spurred citizens into action, it has also been the ‗vent‘ through which other
concerns could be expressed.‘ (p.465)
Behaviour can be modified by the development of (new) social norms: ‗their
decision to engage in these activities [involving less environmentally-damaging
ways of living] is based on their own normative rationales, modified by the web
of social relations within which the individuals are embedded. Conventional
economic analysis would picture their reasons for doing so as pursuing selfinterest, but as McMahon (1997), argues ‗economic man has trouble with
relationships‘. Such accounts do not do justice to the shared normative
frameworks that evolve and monitor behaviour as people co-operate‘. (p.465)
Transferring knowledge and practices from one context to another may be
obstructed by cultural differences: ‗For instance, the relatively widespread use
of separating toilets in Sweden appears to be an extension of a long standing
tradition of using dry closets … The separating toilet can easily — taken out of
context — give associations to ‗going back to the old days‘ without running
water, etc. and thus likely to be met with much opposition.‘ (p.464)
Establishing new norms and practices takes time and effort: ‗not all citizens
have the time or are willing to take the time to reorganise the routines of
everyday life and to negotiate making environmental improvements
collectively.‘ (p.464)
There is evidence of the internalization and normalization of new norms in these
communities/initiatives, but less evidence of these norms having seeped
upwards and outwards from their origins: ‗Within each of three case studies,
there is some indication of the habitualisation of environmental activities —
they have become part of the basic routines of everyday life … However, these
environmentally informed modes of behaviour have not gained sufficient
legitimacy so as to receive more widespread acceptance, as evidenced by the
difficulties in persuading other citizens, financial institutions and government
authorities of the merits of ‗living ecologically‘. Norms for environmentally
sound behaviour appear to be at a stage of pre-institutionalisation.‘ (p.464)
In summary: ‗citizen initiatives like the ones described above, offer ―living
proof‖ of the possibilities for establishing other patterns of behaviour, and
undercut the more deterministic accounts of the pervasiveness and stability of
37
the existing institutions‘. (p.464)
2.5 Summary
This section has outlined the origins of environmental citizenship, and
described in detail the motivations, core characteristics and common
practices exhibited by environmental citizens.
In summary, environmental citizenship:




focuses on the common good rather than on self-interest;
takes a moral and ethical approach to environmental knowledge, as well
as a scientific one;
looks at environmental behaviour change from the point of view of rights
and responsibilities rather than fiscal incentives and disincentives;
crosses the divide between the public and private spheres: private
environment-related actions can have public environment-related
impacts.
Recognising that the pro-environmental behaviour of environmental citizens
is rooted in a commitment to the principles underlying it opens up a range
of policy options for those looking to encourage behavioural shifts, which
are not so obviously subject to the disadvantages of the self-interest model.
The review now goes on to explore why environmental citizenship may be
useful for policy.
38
3 Why use environmental citizenship?
It is clear from the preceding section that it is possible to identify a discrete
set of characteristics that define environmental citizens, both in terms of
their underlying values and the way in which these values manifest
themselves through different behaviours and practices. Given this, questions
arise about the value of environmental citizenship as a means of
encouraging pro-environmental (and indeed pro-social) behaviour. This next
section of the review considers the broader policy context within which
environmental citizenship might be utilized as a vehicle for change.
3.1 The state, market and civil society
It is widely agreed that significant behaviour change amongst both
individuals and organisations is required if we are to meet the UK‘s
sustainability objectives and climate change targets. The search is therefore
on for the ‗low cost, low pain‘ drivers (Cabinet Office, 2010a: 7) that might
facilitate such change. A schematic representation of the relationship
between the potential sites of this activity is presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1: State, market and civil society
Thus the state, via the government, might introduce statutory legislation
requiring companies to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions
(‗environmental legislation‘), such as the carbon emissions reductions target
(CERT) which obliges energy companies to ensure reductions in domestic
greenhouse gas emissions. This is where so-called command-and-control
approaches to limiting greenhouse gas emissions originate.
39
The market is where actors behave like consumers, and is thus the arena in
which sustainable consumption takes place (‗green consumption‘). Carbon
trading, as an alternative to command-and-control, is a market-orientated
approach to mitigating climate change.
In contrast, civil society is where actors behave as citizens rather than
primarily as consumers. It is here that ‗environmental citizenship‘ operates.
Mark Sagoff sums up the difference: ‗As a citizen, I am concerned with the
public interest, rather than my own interest; with the good of the
community, rather than simply the well-being of my family‘ … In my role
as a consumer … I concern myself with personal or self-regarding wants and
interests; I pursue the goals I have as an individual. I put aside the
community-regarding values I take seriously as a citizen, and I look out for
Number One instead‘ (Sagoff, 1990: 8).
Historically, policy aimed at changing behaviour has been primarily devoted
to fiscal incentives and disincentives as well as behavioural economics-based
approaches (popularised by the work of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in
their book ‗Nudge‘, 2009). The assumption that lies behind the use of fiscal
policy measures is that people are ‗self-interested rational actors‘ who will
react to stimuli that either adversely or beneficially affect their selfinterest – particularly financial. In terms of our schematic diagram, these
measures are a combination of state and market, where the state (or some
other legally constituted political authority) imposes a regime of financial
incentives and disincentives, to which people react as the self-interested
rational actors they are assumed to be in a market situation. In the context
of the promotion of pro-environmental behaviour, the direction of travel has
therefore largely been down the left-hand side of the triangle (Figure 2).
40
Figure 2: Government promoting fiscal incentives
Relatively less attention has been given to civil society and the possibilities
for promoting pro-environmental behaviour in this arena. In terms of spatial
scale, this ‗meso‘ realm contrasts with and complements the usual focus on
either the macro level (e.g. the state), or the micro level (individual
psychology) (Reid et al., 2010).
This review therefore seeks to highlight the unique and as yet underexplored potential for pro-environmental behaviour change to be fostered
within the civil society sphere, through the operation of environmental
citizenship. This route is not suggested as a replacement for existing fiscal
and regulatory approaches, but rather as a complementary means for:



Achieving longer lasting behaviour change and engaging with
individuals and communities that existing policy tools may fail to
reach;
Maximising the goods of citizen participation and individual freedom
of choice;
Drawing on local knowledge and encouraging grassroots innovation
for sustainable development, rather than relying on top-down mass
communication.
Figure 3 locates environmental citizenship amongst existing approaches for
shifting behaviours and dealing with environmental problems, in terms of
paternalism, participation, freedom and enforcement.
41
Freedom of
choice
Environmental
citizenship
‘Nudge’
Participation
Paternalism
Command and
control
Enforcement
Figure 3: Command-and-control, nudge, environmental citizenship
The remainder of this section will explore the potential role of civil society
and environmental citizenship as a complementary driver of proenvironmental change within the Government‘s existing behaviour change
programme, discussing in more detail the ideas illustrated in Figure 3.
3.2 Environmental
sustainability
citizenship
and
the
fiscal
route
to
An important benefit of fiscal incentives and disincentives is that they can
work very fast, often resulting in observable positive outcomes as soon as a
charge is put in place (e.g. a congestion charge for vehicles) (Litman, 2004:
5). In the context of the urgency with which some environmental problems
need to be dealt – the most obvious being climate change – policy tools that
secure behaviour change quickly are obviously attractive. As a policy tool
however, fiscal instruments suffer from four potential disadvantages.
Firstly, just as an environmental tax designed to change people‘s behaviour
can be imposed, so it can be rescinded or reined in, although some
environmental taxes, such as fuel duty and landfill tax are long-standing
and, because they are important sources of revenue for government,
unlikely to removed quickly. Some governments and political parties are less
42
relaxed about imposing taxes than others5, which compromises the ability to
introduce fiscal approaches to changing sustainability-related behaviour. In
contrast, the pro-environmental behaviour of environmental citizens is
rooted in a commitment to the principles underlying it, rendering it
potentially less subject to the vagaries of political and institutional change
required to create or maintain a fiscal incentive.
Secondly, since people largely respond to the fiscal prompt and not to the
principles underlying it, they will often relapse into their previous behaviour
patterns upon removal of the incentive. Car drivers, for example, drive less
in cities with a congestion charge, but they may do so because they do not
want to incur the congestion charge, not in order to reduce carbon
emissions. Their behaviour is changed by a superficial response to a carrot
or a stick, rather than through commitment to a point of principle. In this
regard, there may be benefit in combining fiscal approaches with
environmental citizenship; the former being quick-acting but perhaps less
durable, while the latter may take time to establish but with resultant
change proving more sustainable and long-lasting.
Thirdly, in relation to behaviours related to personal health, financial
incentives tend to be effective only in changing certain types of behaviours,
suggesting the most successful incentive schemes are those that target
simple one-off behaviours like keeping appointments (Jochelson 2007)
rather than more complex ingrained and habitual behaviours. Furthermore,
in some cases, additional problems arise due to the scale of the charges and
rewards that would need to be in place for behaviour change to be
effectively encouraged – and whether the political will exists to put these in
place. Surveys have been done to determine the level at which road tax
(Vehicle Excise Duty) would need to be set in order to change behaviour, for
example. Results vary but, as far back as 2003, it was found that road tax
would need to increase by up to 8-10 times before people took this issue
seriously into account when buying their next car (Department for
Transport, 2003). The £400 differential that now exists between the VED for
the most and least polluting vehicles is beginning to affect purchasing
behaviour (Green Fiscal Commission, 2010). But the protests at the price of
petrol and level of duty on it in 2000 highlight the problems inherent in
fiscal approaches. Even at existing rates, car tax is unpopular amongst the
public – as are all taxes - and the chances of a serious political party
5
One of the best-known and most-studied congestion charges is the one in the centre of London. It
was drawn up by a left-wing Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. In the last London mayoral election
Livingstone was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Boris Johnson, who pledged not to increase
the size of the congestion charge area, as Livingstone was planning to do.
43
standing for office on a platform of large increases in it seem slim. The
Coalition Government is committed to increasing the proportion of revenue
raised from environmental taxes (HM Government, 2010) although the
specific taxes that will increase to fulfil this commitment are not clear
beyond increases in aviation taxes.
Finally, the grounding of fiscal approaches in the ‗self-interested rational
actor‘ model of human motivation, according to which people do things
either for some gain or to avoid harm to themselves, can result in perverse
outcomes. A tax on waste, for example, is often expected to result in
increased frequency of fly tipping although the experience of this is mixed
(for example, see Hogg et al., 2006).
Box 10: Decision-making: self-regarding and other-regarding
‗The policy recommendations of most economists are based on the
rational actor model. The emphasis is on achieving efficient allocation by
ensuring that property rights are completely assigned and that market
failures are corrected. This paper takes the position that so-called
behavioral ―anomalies‖ are central to human decision-making and,
therefore, should be the starting point for effective economic policies.
This contention is supported by game theory experiments involving
humans and closely related primates. This research suggests that the
standard economic approach to climate change policy, with its focus on
narrowly rational, self-regarding responses to monetary incentives, is
seriously flawed.‘
(Gowdy, 2008: 632)
It has been suggested that conventional neo-classical economics has ‗an
―undersocialised‖ view of social action‘ (Georg, 1999: 461) that
underestimates the degree to which individuals are motivated to act for
pro-social reasons, something which is central to the environmental
citizenship approach (for example, see Box 10). Community-led grassroots
innovation, for example, is often driven by an ideological commitment to
alternative ways of doing things (Seyfang and Smith, 2007).
Furthermore, many researchers argue that people‘s preferences and actions
may be changed through the use of social norms-based (Goldstein et al.,
2008) or social practice-based approaches (Shove, 2010; Shove and Walker,
2010) or through the very act of participating. For example, one study
looked at two San Francisco garden projects (one in a school and one in a
prison) and suggested that the ‗organising principle‘ was to ‗change
44
individual participants, to cultivate specific kinds of citizen-subjects‘
(Pudup, 2008: 1238).
Similarly, in their study of a public engagement process on waste
management strategy in Hampshire, Bull et al., (2008) found that
deliberative processes — as opposed to mere ‗information provision‘ — led
to social learning beyond the lifetime of the project itself. Another study of
‗eco-teams‘ working to minimise household consumption concluded that it
was the participatory nature of the eco-teams‘ activities, based on
exchanging both information and experience, that allowed for reflexivity
and ‗adjustment of the participants‘ preferences‘ (Georg, 1999: 458).
In other words, preferences are neither given nor fixed, as neo-classical
economists may suggest, and are susceptible to change. The potential for
change through participation in initiatives aimed at greater sustainability is
summarised in Box 11.
Box 11: The transformative potential of (environmental) citizen
initiatives
‗Citizens‘ interaction and engagement with one another leads to reflexivity on
not only an individual but also a collective basis: For instance, being part of an
eco-team leads to self-reflection on the part of the members as to their
preferences for consumer goods. The continuous interaction associated with
running the ecological villages not only helps villagers refine and improve their
management practices and household technologies, but also helps them
reinforce or strengthen their belief that they indeed are doing the ‗right thing‘.
It is their recurrent interaction that helps shape their mutual expectations of
how to behave, which again serves to (re-) affirm the picture they have of
themselves as behaving in an environmentally correct/appropriate manner.‘
… once the citizens become involved in the initiative, environmentally informed
behaviour is also expected of them. It is the norm within the group; a norm
which begins as a loosely defined common interest in minimising household
wastes and resource use, but evolves as the citizens meet, exchange information
and opinions, and debate which line of action to take. This allows for a gradual
adjustment of differences in opinion, and gives way to new everyday practices.
It is a learning process which is carried by the consciousness-raising effect of
experimentation and the development of their own knowledge networks.‘
(Georg, 1999: 461 and 462)
45
3.3 ‘Crowding-out’ theory
This is not to say that fiscal policies do not have a critical role within the
pro-environment behaviour change policy toolbox, but rather that they may
be ‗most successful if offered as one element of a wide ranging behaviour
change programme‘ (Boyce et al.,2008: 13).
However, the combined use of these two policy tools – fiscal and
environmental citizenship – necessarily involves a consideration of whether
they can be used together, or whether in some situations, they may work
against each other: ‗Economic and moral motives tend to play important
roles in influencing household choices to perform sustainable activities and
it is important to avoid situations in which these two motives offset, rather
than strengthen, each other‘ (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency,
2008). The uncomfortable possibility that they might offset each other is
suggested by ‗crowding-out theory‘ (Frey, 2008), explained and exemplified
in Box 12.
Evidence suggests the crowding-out phenomenon may be avoided by
focusing on rewards rather than punishments, and by making the rewards
large enough to signal that the behaviour being ‗crowded-in‘ is highly valued
(Bolle and Otto, 2010). This is the strategy adopted by Windsor and
Maidenhead Council which has piloted the country‘s first-ever council-wide
recycling reward scheme. Under this voluntary scheme, points are ‗won‘ by
participants according to how much waste they recycle. Residents can earn
up to £135 per year and points can be cashed in a range of local businesses.
Whilst it is claimed that recycling rates in the pilot area went up by 35 per
cent (Pickles, 2010), critics argue that the scheme may encourage residents
to produce more recyclable waste rather than reduce the amount they
create, and the rewards are likely to be spent on consuming more goods,
recyclable or not.
There is no doubt that ‗egoists‘ can be encouraged to change their
behaviour through reward or punishment, but the price signals need to be
carefully calculated to achieve the right balance of crowding in egoists and
avoiding the crowding out of altruists. From an environmental citizenship
point of view, what needs to be avoided is the destroying of the norms that
motivate the citizen, and it must also be remembered that it seems to be
easier to undermine a norm by crowding it out than it is to rebuild it by
crowding it in (Janssen and Mendys-Kamphorst, 2004).
46
Box 12: ‘Crowding-out’ theory
‗… markets are not mere mechanisms. They embody certain norms. They
presuppose, and also promote, certain ways of valuing the goods being
exchanged. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do
not touch or taint the goods they regulate. But this is a mistake. Markets
leave their mark. Often market incentives erode or crowd out non-market
incentives.
Let‘s … [consider] … the case of cash for kids who make good test scores.
Why hesitate to pay a child for getting good marks or for reading a book?
The goal, after all, is to motivate the child to study or to read, and the
payment is an incentive to promote that end. Economics teaches that
people respond to incentives, and while some children may be motivated
to read books for the love of learning, others may not. So why not use
money to add a further incentive? Economic reasoning would suggest that
two incentives work better than one, but it could turn out that the
monetary incentive undermines the intrinsic one, leading to less reading
rather than more, or to more reading in the short-run but for the wrong
reason. On this scenario, the market is an instrument but not an innocent
instrument. What begins as a market mechanism becomes a market norm.
The obvious worry is that the payment may habituate children to think of
reading books as a way of making money, and so erode or crowd out or
corrupt the intrinsic good of reading.
A study of some Israeli childcare centres offers a good real world example
of how market incentives can crowd out non-market norms. The centres
faced a familiar problem — parents sometimes came late to pick up their
children, and so a teacher had to stay with the children until the tardy
parents arrived. To solve this problem, the childcare centres imposed a
fine for late pick-ups. What do you suppose happened? Late pick-ups
actually increased. Now if you assume that people respond to incentives,
this is puzzling. You would expect, wouldn‘t you, the fine to reduce, not
increase the incidence of late pick-ups? So what happened? Introducing
the fine changed the norms. Before, parents who came late felt guilty;
they were imposing an inconvenience on the teachers. Now parents
considered a late arrival a service for which they were willing to pay.
Rather than imposing on the teacher, they were simply paying her to stay
longer … ‗
Quoted from Prof. Michael Sandel‘ s Reith Lecture No 1,
on ‗Markets and Morals‘,1999
47
3.4 Behavioural economics and environmental citizenship
Neither does a criticism of fiscal approaches imply that critical discussion of
the self-interested rational actor model of human motivation is not entirely
absent from policy debate. Behavioural economics, for example, recognises
that while the ‗rational man‘ assumption is a useful tool for policy makers,
‗it has many shortfalls that can lead to unrealistic economic analysis and
policy-making‘ (Dawnay and Shah, 2007: 2). An alternative ‗real world‘
understanding of human behaviour is set out in Box 13, drawing on both
behavioural economics and psychology to present seven important
correctives to the self-interested rational actor model of classical
economics. Three of these principles — the third, fourth and seventh — are
particularly relevant to environmental citizenship.
Box 13: Seven principles of behavioural economics and psychology
1 Other people’s behaviour matters: people do many things by
observing others and copying; people are encouraged to continue to do
things when they feel other people approve of their behaviour.
2 Habits are important: people do many things without consciously
thinking about them. These habits are hard to change – even though
people might want to change their behaviour, it is not easy for them.
3 People are motivated to ‘do the right thing’: there are cases where
money is de-motivating as it undermines people‘s intrinsic motivation,
for example, you would quickly stop inviting friends to dinner if they
insisted on paying you.
4 People’s self-expectations influence how they behave: they want
their actions to be in line with their values and their commitments.
5 People are loss-averse and hang on to what they consider ‘theirs’.
6 People are bad at computation when making decisions: they put
undue weight on recent events and too little on far-off ones; they
cannot calculate probabilities well and worry too much about unlikely
events; and they are strongly influenced by how the
problem/information is presented to them.
7 People need to feel involved and effective to make a change: just
giving people the incentives and information is not necessarily enough.
(Dawnay and Shah, 2007: 2)
Thanks to the work of economists like Thaler and Sunstein (2009), policies
inspired by behavioural economics which aim to ‗nudge‘ individuals to
behave in certain ways, have become an increasingly important part of the
Government‘s approach to behaviour change (Cabinet Office, 2010a).
48
Behavioural economists recognise that rather than preferences being
consistent, the context in which people make decisions can powerfully
affect what decisions they take: the location of food in a supermarket, for
example, influences shoppers‘ buying decisions, while the size of the plate
influences how much is actually eaten.
In turn, Thaler and Sunstein call the manipulation of the contexts and
environments in which choices are made ‗choice architecture‘, and they
refer to their theory as ‗libertarian paternalism‘ (2009: 5-6).
It is
libertarian because no one is explicitly being told what to do, and it is
paternalistic because policy makers work on the assumption that they know
what is in our best interests.
While environmental citizenship draws on the psychological insights of
behavioural economics, three key differences separate them:



Environmental citizenship is largely about both personal and social
norms. Thus environmental citizens will consider how one ought to
behave, and their behaviour will be informed by normative principles
as well as by psychological ones. Environmental citizens will be able
to give autonomously developed reasons for what they do, while
those whose behaviour is being nudged tend to react to stimuli
provided for them.
Environmental citizenship is democratic and participatory.
Environmental citizens co-create the circumstances in which they
act. This is rarely an option considered by those in favour of choice
architecture, where the choices made available to people are
determined by experts, largely without the knowledge or
participation of the ‗subjects‘ (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009: 1-3).
Environmental citizenship allows for the possibility of ‗social
learning‘. Environmental citizens give reasons both to themselves
and to others for acting the way they do. In this sense environmental
citizens provide their own choice architecture rather than have it
provided for them. This is more cost effective than the nudge
approach which requires the appropriate architecture to be
constantly provided and renovated. A favourite nudge example is the
painting of a series of white stripes across the road that are initially
evenly spaced but get closer together as drivers reach a dangerous
curve (Cabinet Office, 2010: 16), which works by creating the illusion
of increased speed. However, not every dangerous curve has white
lines preceding it, and it would be very costly indeed to provide
them. The ‗citizen driver‘ has learned that fast driving round tight
corners is dangerous; the ‗nudged driver‘ has done no learning and
49
needs continual ‗reminding‘ in the form of the relevant choice
architecture.
Thus, whilst the nudge approach may be beneficial so long as the
appropriate stimuli are in place, evidence suggests that willing participation
and the co-creation of both norms and practices with individuals and
communities, as advocated by the environmental citizenship approach, are
more likely to result in lasting pro-environmental behaviour change and
community benefit.
For example, work carried out with EcoTeams in Nottingham and East Sussex
confirmed the benefits of working ‗collectively or deliberatively‘ as
including: ‗creating shared commitment, encouraging creativity and
innovation, building confidence, fostering a sense of shared responsibility,
and providing a forum where participants can challenge received ways of
doing things‘ (Nye and Hargreaves, 2009: 146).
3.5 The ‘deficit model’ and environmental citizenship
Environmental citizenship is a challenge to the ‗deficit model‘ of promoting
sustainable development, which suggests that the motivation of proenvironmental behaviour is dependent on filling ‗a deficit in public
knowledge and understanding of environmental issues‘ with expert
knowledge (Burgess et al., 1998: 1446). Some have suggested that this is the
dominant model within government, especially when it comes to scienceorientated issues: Trench (2008), for example, has argued that claims for a
shift from the deficit model to a ‗dialogue model‘ have been overstated, a
claim supported by some recent evidence suggesting that the provision of
information by government departments is still the preferred method of
inducing behaviour change in citizens (Perri 6 et al., 2010).
Critics of the deficit model argue that the top-down approach of providing
‗more‘ or ‗better‘ information and mass communication to the public is not
sufficient for achieving significant behavioural shifts, and that efforts could
more fruitfully be focused on cultivating dialogue between individuals and
communities and different levels of government, and supporting grassroots
action to find tailored local solutions to local problems. Local people best
understand the social and cultural contexts in which they live; ‗lay publics
are expert in their own lifeworlds, making rational judgments based on an
authority acquired through tacit or local knowledge‘ (Burgess, Harrison and
Filius, 1998: 1447). This suggests the need to embrace citizenship energies
and to find ways of ensuring active citizen engagement in the design,
delivery and evaluation of local projects for sustainable development.
50
A study undertaken in Nottingham (UK) and Eindhoven (Netherlands) showed
that citizens in both places, ‗rejected reliance on the ‗exhortation model‘
of top-down, mass communication as the main way forward towards
creating more sustainable societies, acknowledging instead the need for
public, private, and voluntary sector organisations to match their own
practices to their environmental rhetoric‘ (Burgess, Harrison and Filius,
1998: 1457). Environmental citizenship-based approaches offer an
opportunity to cultivate dialogue and mutual support between such public,
private and voluntary organisations.
Lessons for doing this may be learnt from the initiatives such as NESTA‘s Big
Green Challenge, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) Low
Carbon Communities initiative, and the recently commissioned Research
Council UK (RCUK) Energy and Communities research programme, many of
which reflect the existence of what Patrick Devine-Wright (2006) terms
‗energy citizenship‘. Devine-Wright identifies two ways of representing the
evolution of energy systems: centralised and decentralised pathways. Each
of these suggests different user models: the ‗consumer/deficit‘ model and
the ‗energy citizen‘. The centralised system ‗produces‘ an energy public
that is, ‗overwhelmingly characterised by deficits: of interest, knowledge,
rationality and environmental and social responsibility‘ (2006: 69). This
produces a vicious circle in which a disengaged public remains disengaged
because decision-makers feel they (the public) lack the resources required
for effective engagement.
Operating alongside this deficit model, Devine-Wright identifies an
alternative view of public engagement with energy issues. In this
alternative, which he describes as ‗energy citizenship‘: ‗the public are
conceived as active rather than passive stakeholders in energy system
evolution and where the potential for action is framed by notions of
equitable rights and responsibilities across society for dealing with the
consequences of energy consumption, notably climate change‘ (2006: 71).
According to Devine-Wright, the psychological and social advantages of this
way of going about things are considerable for the individuals and groups
involved, including, for example, increased self-efficacy (both individually
and collectively); financial benefit (self-interest), positive emotional
responses and enhanced self-esteem (satisfaction).
Devine-Wright refers to energy social enterprises and cooperatives such as
Sherwood Energy Village in Nottinghamshire (an industrial and provident
society), Moel Moelogan and Bro Dyfi in Wales, Baywind in Cumbria and
Westmill Windfarm, Oxfordshire where energy citizenship is on display. He
concludes that within these communities, the way in which people engage
with energy use, ‗is not fully captured by concepts such as ‗consumer‘,
51
‗energy user‘ or ‗deficit‘. The energy citizenship representation suggests
that, while members of the public frequently act out of self-interest, they
can also behave as social and political actors concerned about the perceived
legitimacy or fairness of decision-making, and sometimes feeling
responsible for the welfare of their local community, their children and
future generations, and the environment, both locally and globally‘ (2006:
77). The one major obstacle to energy citizenship identified by Devine
Wright - that ‗it is by no means clear that the public are willing to take up
the enhanced, active role presumed for them‘ (2006: 80) — is discussed in
case studies throughout this review.
Underlying this critique of the consumer/deficit model lies a broader
critique of one-dimensional understandings of human motivation;
‗psychologists have been critical of the dominant ‗model‘ or representation
of the public held by policy makers and political scientists that views the
person solely as a personal utility maximiser, focusing upon short-term,
material gains or benefits … Instead, psychological literature on citizenship
suggests a range of values, beliefs and norms determining citizenship
behaviours such as signing petitions or supporting particular energy
policies‘ (Devine-Wright, 2006: 72). These dispositions are on display not
only in the context of energy citizenship, but in environmental citizenship
more generally. An example of these dispositions at work, in the context of
climate change, can be found in Case study 5.
52
Case study 5: Environmental Citizenship and Climate Change in Canada
Johanna Wolf, Katrina Brown, and Declan Conway, ‘Ecological citizenship and
climate change: perceptions and practice’, Environmental Politics, Vol. 18, No. 4,
July 2009, 503–521
What and where?
A case study in Canada to scrutinise how individuals respond to climate change:
‗Fieldwork for this research was undertaken from July 2004 to May 2005 in Victoria,
British Columbia (BC) and on Salt Spring Island, BC, both located on the southern tip
of Canada‘s Pacific coast … Participants were recruited selectively, representing key
actors on climate and other environmental or local issues, and purposely representing
a spectrum of the population at large.‘ (p.508)
Findings





The researchers found few attempts to explore empirically the normative claims
of ecological citizenship: ‗With rising environmental concerns over recent
decades, and politically contested approaches to remedy them, a largely
theoretical debate explores the possible linkages between citizenship and the
environment. One such theory is ecological citizenship … Theories of green
citizenship, however, remain normative concepts, and very few studies extend
the theoretical literature with practical application or empirical results.‘ (p. 503)
Evidence for a sense of collective, transboundary, responsibility: ‗First, the
collective consequences of individuals‘ activities are recognised as important
despite the fact that they occur outside of the individual‘s immediate reality,
and in spite of the incremental nature of individual contributions. Second,
participants feel they owe the responsibility non-reciprocally to future
generations and current generations living elsewhere. Third, the responsibility is
rooted in a sense of interconnectedness that describes the linkages and relations
between individuals.‘ (p.513)
Evidence found for intergenerational and international ‗solidarity‘, and nonreciprocal responsibilities: in interviews, participants draw a link to future
generations by referring to children. Participants also consider the impacts of
climate change on people in other, predominantly developing countries, removed
from their own immediate reality, as a group to which action to reduce emissions
is owed.‘ (p.514)
Respondents were willing to move beyond the ‗I will if you will‘ contract: ‗While
part of the responsibility is held by government, participants express specifically
that should the government not recognise or honour its responsibility, individuals
are still obliged to their own responsibility, and vice versa.‘ (p.515)
The researchers feel that there is evidence in their study for already existing
ecological citizenship, and that this has policy implications: ‗This analysis presents
strong evidence that practising ecological citizenship motivates individuals‘
responses to climate change ... The participants in this research recognise and
enact their individual responsibility and thus take a necessary first step toward
changing the way in which civic responsibilities for global problems like climate
change are structured.‘ (p.519)
53
3.6 Environmental citizenship within a civil and ‘big’ society
Recognition of the importance of citizenship-based approaches has not been
confined to studies of energy engagement. There is increasing recognition
that many of today‘s intractable political challenges cannot be solved solely
by state and market approaches, but will require significant engagement
with the civil society vertex of the State-Market-Civil Society schematic set
out earlier in the report, in Figure 1.
The key features of activity within civil society were recently identified in a
major report by the Carnegie Trust on the future of civil society (see Box
14), alongside examples of the types of organisations active within civil
society.
Box 14: Key features of civil society
‗Civil society activity meets fundamental human wants and needs, and
provides an expression for hopes and aspirations. It reaches parts of our
lives and souls that are beyond state and business.‘
Activity within civil society:








Aims at the ‗good society‘
Focuses on associational life
Concerned with universal principles, claims, accountabilities
Devolution of power
Equality of voice
Looking out for others
Mutuality, interdependence, solidarity
Arena of public deliberation
Examples include: NGOs, trade unions, faith-based organisations,
mutuals, cooperatives, foundations, registered charities, community
groups, women‘s organisations, professional associations, self-help groups,
advocacy and campaign groups, and volunteer groups of all kinds.
Source: Carnegie, 2010: 16-17
Bunt and Harris (2010) argue that where social and environmental solutions
depend on people changing the way they lead their lives, as with climate
change, the best people to organise this are often the communities
54
themselves; local civil society groups are in a better position to identify the
needs, motivations and values of people within their community, to access
local pools of social capital, distribute responsibilities appropriately and
align the right incentives to get people involved. Similarly, the Carnegie
Trust‘s report (2010) concluded that:
‗Neither state nor market action will be adequate to meet the scale
of the challenges [presented by climate change], nor will they
necessarily ensure that the costs of climate change and resource
scarcity are fairly distributed.
Climate change and resource
depletion bring with them important questions of social justice — of
who pays and who benefits — and questions of guardianship and
responsibility to future generations … Civil society therefore has a
critical role to play in making the necessary transition to a low
carbon economy both effective and fair‘ (Carnegie 2010: 69).
The role of civil society and of citizenship has been increasingly
marginalised in the environment behaviour debate over the past 30 years,
with attention almost exclusively focused on the spheres of the state or the
market. As the Carnegie Commission Chair Geoff Mulgan writes in his
Foreword to the report, while civil society is ‗thriving‘, it ‗has been paid lipservice, but generally neglected. And it has lost ground in areas where it
was once strong …‘ (Carnegie, 2010: 1). Mulgan points to three
contemporary crises – financial, environmental, and the crisis of trust in
politics – and writes that while each poses unique questions, ‗it is now
impossible to imagine plausible answers to these questions which do not
involve a widened role for civil society associations‘. Mulgan argues that
civil society contains associational repertoires that are vital to dealing with
the ‗common yet differentiated‘ responsibilities that so often characterise
environmental problems:
‗This makes now a remarkable time of opportunity. We need to set
our sights far beyond the narrow arguments about contracts or fiscal
treatment for the voluntary sector, and look instead at how civil
society activity can shape our world, and how we can make the
transition from an age of ‗me‘ to an age of ‗we‘. Civil society was
born out of the idea that we do best when we work with others, and
when we understand our interests as shared with others. That idea
is more relevant than ever in an intimately connected world‘.
(Carnegie 2010: 1)
55
‗We build trust and understanding. We organise people to tackle problems at the
level at which they are best tackled – hence, for example, the CitySafe campaign,
which creates safe streets by building relationships between local institutions and
shops.
But we do ask the state to act where Government must take responsibility — capping
interest rates, expanding mutual lending, ending child detention, etc. And we call
on the market to take responsibility by, for example, paying a living wage, capping
interest rates or enabling a pathway into citizenship for long-term undocumented
migrants. In this way we hold both state and market to account, in the belief that a
stronger civil society helps both to function better.
We are the antidote to political apathy.‘
Citizens UK General Election Assembly, 2010
A sign of the renewed importance and vibrancy of civil society in the UK
today is that the best attended and most lively public meeting in the 2010
General Election campaign, engaging all three of the main party leaders,
was that organised by the largest coalition of civil society organisations in
the country, Citizens UK. Citizens UK locates itself carefully in the marketstate-civil society triangle, aware that while it cannot solve all of society‘s
problems, it has a key role to play in mending the ‗broken society‘.
This is akin to the ‗culture change‘ that has been identified as lying at the heart of
the Coalition Government‘s ‗Big Society‘ vision: ‗… where people, in their
everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace …
don‘t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers
to the problems they face … but instead feel both free and powerful enough to
help themselves and their own communities‘ (Cameron, 2010).
Though as the Prime Minister also says, the Big Society needs government: ‗we
shouldn‘t be naïve enough to think that if the government rolls back and does
less, then miraculously society will spring up and do more. The truth is that we
need a government that actually helps to build up the Big Society‘ (Cameron,
2010). This reciprocity is vital.
Perhaps the greatest potential for government to engage civil society in
transformative environmental behaviour change lies in recognising that
citizenship is often regarded as the condition of being in civil society and
that the underlying motivations of civil society are very similar to those
found in environmental citizenship.
56
The mores and ways of working of civil society groups and organisations are
unlike those found in the market arena, and there is potentially a better
‗fit‘ between these mores and those found in environmental citizenship,
then with those found in the market. Typically, civil society organisations
tend to be involved in collective action around shared interests, purposes
and values, informed by a high level of moral commitment to justice and to
the common good; values which are also found in environmental citizenship.
Policy efforts to promote environmental citizenship therefore have the
potential to engage members of, and workers in, these organisations in a
way that other policy tools may not. Such policy efforts would not need to
change people‘s values, but rather to reach out to those people for whom
those values are already a reality, and to ‗awaken‘ such values by designing
policy that speaks to them.
It has been suggested that environmental
citizenship can be seen as an alternative form
of action when other more official channels
have been exhausted or have become blocked.
Thus
John
DeWitt
refers
to
‗civic
environmentalism‘ as ‗a decidedly bottom-up
response to bureaucratic failure or gridlock,
rather than an agency-led response to
bureaucratic failure‘.
‘We are citizens, not just
consumers. Our environment
requires citizen preferences,
not just consumer
preferences’
Sagoff (2001)
However, echoing those who identify environmental citizenship as one of a
variety of tools on offer to policy makers, he suggests that civic
environmentalism should be seen as a supplement, rather than a
replacement, to traditional modes of governance, such as regulation (De
Witt, 2004: 221). Similarly, Parisi et al., (2004), highlight the value of
mobilising environmental citizenship when sustainability objectives are to
be achieved. In their study of 208 non-metropolitan areas in Mississippi, it
was found that, ‗investment in social capital 6 is a viable strategy to
promote civically based environmental initiatives‘ and that such initiatives
are ‗an effective way to complement existing environmental laws and
regulations‘ (2004: 108 - 109).
Yet it is important to understand the contextual factors that make such
initiatives more or less successful. For example, smaller places with low
6
Social capital has been defined by Robert Putnam as ‗features of social life – networks,
norms and trust – that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue
shared objectives‘ (1995: 1).
57
educational attainment (linked to a low sense of personal efficacy), in
economically disadvantaged areas, tend to harbour lower levels of civic
activity (Parisi et al., 2004). Nonetheless, Parisi and colleagues emphasise
that poverty and disadvantage may not in themselves be barriers to proenvironmental mobilisation. Indeed, the environmental justice movement
demonstrates that these factors can in some cases generate mobilisation.
Instead, the lack of activity in these areas within Parisi‘s study was
attributed to ‗the presence of a social and political leadership that fails to
embrace the notion of civic responsibility as a mechanism for promoting
environmental quality‘ (2004: 109).
3.7 Summary






There are three main sites for drivers of pro-environmental behaviour
change: the state (legislation), the market (fiscal incentives and
disincentives), and civil society (environmental citizenship). The bulk
of policy attention has been focused on the first two.
There is potential value in incorporating civil society and
environmental citizenship within a more diverse behaviour change
policy programme in order to overcome the limitations of existing
policy tools for behaviour change.
However, it should be noted that fiscal incentives can ‗crowd in‘
egoists, whilst ‗crowding out‘ environmental citizens. Incentives
therefore need to be carefully calibrated to achieve the former and
avoid the latter.
In contrast to command-and-control approaches and to ‗nudge‘
economics, environmental citizenship can maximize the goods of both
citizen participation and individual freedom of choice.
Environmental citizenship can release local and lay knowledge. It
challenges the centralized ‗deficit model‘ of sustainable development
in which targets and knowledge are driven down from the centre.
Environmental citizenship is not about changing people‘s values, but
by using intelligent policy design to ‗call up‘ values that are already
there.
58
4 Challenges to environmental citizenship
Despite evidence suggesting the existence of environmental citizens,
defined by a distinct set of values and practices, the use of environmentalcitizenship based approaches to encourage pro-environmental behaviour is
not without difficulties. Having already touched on some of the conceptual
and policy-related problems with environmental citizenship, the report now
considers each of these in more depth. What follow therefore are the main
criticisms that may be levelled at future citizenship-based approaches,
together with evidence which, it is hoped, counters these claims.
4.1 The ‘free-rider’ problem
It has been pointed out that ‗bottom-up‘ citizenship approaches to
environmental sustainability are subject to the ‗free-rider‘ problem, where
people benefit from the activities of others without contributing,
themselves, to the solution (Georg, 1999).
One antidote to the free-rider problem is a good stock of ‗social capital‘,
where organisations, structures, relationships and trust have been built up
by people over a period of time. Under such conditions people generally
have a stronger sense of common purpose and are prepared to contribute to
the common good even if they are not incentivised or coerced into doing so:
‗Where stocks of social capital are buoyant and high levels of trust exist
between individuals, favourable conditions exist for co-operation and
participation in the pursuit of local sustainability‘ (Selman, 2001: 13).
Models suggest that social capital can be built up in the environmental
context through government action. Martínez, Tazdaït and Tovar play a
coalitional game in which the role of public authorities is not to use taxation
or other regulatory instruments to deter free-rider action, but to establish
neighbourhood committees with the responsibility (in this case) of ‗defining
the total amount of polluting emission by private and public transportation
means in their neighbourhood‘ (Martínez et al, 2008: 69). They find that:
‗the mediation of the neighbourhood committees brings out a lower total
of pollution than in the case where each individual citizen acts on his own
interest‘ (Martínez et al, 2008: 69).
A second response to the free-rider issue comes in the form of proposals for
environmental education from an early age. Minna Santaoja from Finland
writes that, ‗In the Finnish research, environmental citizenship goes hand in
hand with environmental education‘. She explains, ‗The emphasis on
environmental education here is based on the idea that childhood
59
experiences in nature lay the base for environmental citizenship … In
addition to knowledge, positive experiences and an attachment to nature
need to be created‘ (Santaoja, 2009:1).
The link between environmental education and environmental citizenship is
by no means confined to Finland, and there is a flourishing international
environmental education research community. One of the common
conclusions drawn in this context is also pointed to by Santaoja: ‗The
relationship is not one of simple cause and effect or input and outcome;
environmental education and increase in awareness and knowledge do not
automatically lead to environmentally responsible behaviour, as has been
seen many times over‘ (Santaoja, 2009: 1).
A third response to the free-rider problem has been suggested by John Barry
in the guise of compulsory ‗sustainability service‘ (Barry, 2009). As Barry
says, this kind of idea comes from the republican tradition of citizenship in
which the inculcation of citizenship virtues and behaviours by the state –
aimed at achieving the common good – is a perfectly acceptable way of
proceeding. Barry writes: ‗Given that appeals to voluntary action and
behavioural changes on behalf of democratic citizens do not seem to have
worked, the appeal of compulsory alterations in behaviour and action is
understandable (though of course controversial). Since the provision of
knowledge and information about the ‗ecological crisis‘ has failed to
encourage sufficient numbers of individuals to become ‗environmental‘
(never mind sustainability) citizens and alter their behaviour accordingly, a
republican view would be that what is needed is the authoritative
‗creation‘ or ‗cultivation‘ of such citizens and behavioural changes. The
state needs to step in and create the conditions for ‗green citizenship‘‘
(Barry, 2009: 6). As discussed in the report‘s final section, this suggests an
important potential role for the UK‘s National Citizen Service pilots which
have recently been commissioned by the Cabinet Office.
4.2 The efficacy of ‘smallness’
Citizenship-based approaches have also been criticised on the basis of their
small scale. Georg (1999), among others, has highlighted the difficulty in
scaling up from small-scale examples of environmental citizenship to larger
contexts. Georg suggests that though some technologies could be quite
easily upscaled, the upscaling of social practices is subject to a paradox:
what makes local solutions so effective in many cases is their local
specificity, the ability of groups to tailor solutions to local contexts and the
sense of ownership gained through developing the solution from the bottom
up (Bunt and Harris, 2010). There is a danger that the spontaneity that
prompted the original initiative, and the benefits gained from its local
60
innovation and ownership, will be lost as it becomes subject to government
design.
Similarly, the Young Foundation also recognises that it is often the small
scale nature of social ventures that makes them successful: ‗successful
social ventures are, on the whole, rooted in a locality, personalities,
relationships. Often it is their very smallness that makes them effective‘
(Young Foundation, 2010: 14). Given this, the Foundation recommends
‗intelligent scaling‘: choosing between those ventures that can and should
grow, and those which should remain small. Either way, these ventures can
be educative and prefigurative, as catalysts of sustainable activity and
behaviour.
4.3 The shortage of evenings
Like democracy itself, and as George Bernard Shaw pointed out in the
context of socialism, environmental citizenship can ‗take up too many
evenings‘. John DeWitt‘s study of civic environmentalism in the USA found
that, ‗These processes take a great deal of time, usually more time than
anyone except the professional mediator imagines … many meetings often
take place outside work hours. The transaction costs of collaboration can
be very high‘ (DeWitt, 2004: 236). This can be taken as an obstacle to the
widespread adoption of environmental citizenship, though it must be
balanced against the evidence described elsewhere in this report that
people do seem prepared to put in the hours under certain circumstances.
These include entrepreneurial leaders (‗environmental champions‘), and
those who will receive some form of ‗payback‘ for their time, such as the
possibility of career advancement through the action, or for the ‗meaning
through belonging‘ that local environmental action can give to participants
(DeWitt, 2004: 237).
4.4 ‘It lets government off the hook’
Another criticism of environmental citizenship, though not one that
necessarily questions its efficacy as a means of change, is that it potentially
lets governments and other agencies ‗off the hook‘ when it comes to
delivering sustainability. Sherilyn MacGregor articulates this criticism when
she asks: ‗by resting responsibility on the shoulders of individual citizens,
does a cosmopolitan approach to environmentalism in effect privatize
ecological duty thereby taking the focus away from larger political
relationships and power struggles? If so, does this not limit its ability to
challenge the root causes of the environmental crisis?‘ (MacGregor, 2004:
93).
61
By the same token, though, environmental citizens might make demands of
government. They might demand, for example, that if government wants
individuals to do their bit then government should fulfill its side of the
bargain too by reducing the environmental impact of its own operations; ‗I
will if you will‘. They might also demand government action in terms of
providing an infrastructure within which environmental citizenship can be
more effectively practised, through the provision of better recycling
facilities, for example. In this sense, environmental citizenship depends on
government action and support.
4.5 The broader infrastructural context
Numerous authors question the effectiveness of individual actions, and the
factors that enable environmental citizenship to be enacted, given the
broader infrastructural context in which individual activity is situated (for
example, see Bell 2005, Carter and Huby 2005, Drevensek 2005 and
Hailwood 2005). As Saı´z puts it, an insistence on the efficacy of individual
political agency ‗ignores that individuals act within a social, economic,
cultural and institutional context that shapes and constrains citizens‘
ability to act in particular ways‘ (2005: 176). Likewise, Luque (2005: 216)
points out that ‗unless ‗doing one‘s share‘ focuses most of all on bringing
about structural change, little if any institutional change can be expected
as a result of citizens‘ activities‘ (in Wolf et al., 2009: 507-8).
As a way of acknowledging this, Middlemiss (2010) proposes a
‗contextualised ecological footprint‘ whereby external structures
(organisational, cultural, infrastructural) profoundly affect the capacity that
individuals have to affect their impact on the environment (see Figure 4).
62
CULTURAL CAPACITY
Culture, norms and values with which a
person identifies, and their relation to
sustainability
ORGANISATIONAL CAPACITY
Resources for sustainability offered by
the organisations that a person is
connected with
ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT
Responsibilities of the individual
INFRASTRUCTURAL CAPACITY
Facilities for sustainable living which a
person can access (provided by
government, business and community)
PERSONAL CAPACITY
The person’s resources for
sustainability (e.g. understanding,
finances, mobility)
(Based on Middlemiss, 2010: 160)
Figure 4: Contextualised ecological footprint
The idea that individual environmental citizenship must be accompanied by
infrastructural change is supported by evidence from the Swedish
‗Sustainable Households: environmental policy and everyday sustainability‘
project which concludes that, ‗Social and personal norms play a key role in
explaining the prevalence of sustainable activities … but at the same time
individual responsibility has its limits. Collective measures, such as
investment in infrastructure and physical planning measures, are often
needed to promote sustainable activities for which otherwise the personal
sacrifices become too burdensome‘ (Swedish Environmental Protection
Agency, 2008).
4.6 The importance of political culture
Related to the importance of the broader infrastructural context in which
individual action is situated is a more specific point on the importance of
political culture. Political scientists talk of ‗political culture‘ shaping the
opportunities for change in societies, culture which can be identified at a
range of scalar levels.
Evidence for environmental citizenship has largely been found in countries
such as Canada (Victoria and on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia) and
Sweden, where the political cultures are more likely to incubate solidaristic
63
sensibilities aimed at the common good (see Case Studies 3 and 5) than the
liberal-individual political culture that has tended to dominate in the UK.
The question of whether these are representative examples of
environmental citizenship beliefs and practice is a moot and important one
which can only be resolved by more research across a wider range of
political-cultural contexts. Would the results obtained for British Columbia
and Sweden be replicated in liberal-capitalist contexts where individualism
is more part of the political culture, and where communitarianism is more
attenuated?
The evidence in Case Study 6 is rather at odds with the findings of the other
case studies. Might this be explained in part by its UK, liberal-individualist,
context? This is an important question to answer, since if a precondition for
environmental citizenship is already existing citizenship sensibilities of a
solidaristic type, then it clearly cannot be uncomplicatedly implanted in any
context at any time. In some cases, a ‗long run-up‘ to establish the
required preconditions might be required.
This is where policies aimed at developing social capital, a sense of the
common good, volunteering, and a sense of the importance of the public
sphere, may all have the beneficial side-effect of enhancing the context
within which environmental citizenship can be nurtured and built on (as
discussed in Section 5).
64
Case study 6: Environmental Citizenship and Hydrogen Technologies in
the UK
Rob Flynn, Paul Bellaby and Miriam Ricci, ‘Environmental citizenship and public
attitudes to hydrogen energy technologies’, Environmental Politics, Vol. 17, No.5,
November 2008, 766-783
What and where? A qualitative analysis of three focus groups from different areas of
the UK, on public attitudes towards hydrogen energy technologies and their perceived
risks and benefits. Nine focus groups were held during October-December 2005: four
in Teesside, three in London and two in Wales.
Findings:






People had high levels of awareness of problems associated with climate change
and global warming; they were aware of greenhouse gases and the effects of
pollution. People were also very aware of a crisis over the supply of fossil fuels,
and were especially knowledgeable about (and concerned by) recent increases in
fuel (gas, electricity, petrol/diesel) prices. These concerns were frequently linked
with anxiety about and criticism of the international political situation, and their
recognition of dependency on foreign states for future supplies.
In general, while most people could describe some of the properties of hydrogen
(e.g. a gas, abundant, potentially explosive, etc.) knowledge about hydrogen as
an energy carrier was limited, and public perceptions of hydrogen were neither
entirely positive nor completely negative. People expressed opinions and asked
questions about hydrogen within a broad framework of concern about the natural
environment.
It was evident that they were willing and able to discuss energy issues in the
context of their personal beliefs and values. Many participants shared a distrust of
government (and also to some extent, business and industry) in relation to their
willingness to genuinely accommodate citizen or consumer views about energy.
Financial incentives/disincentives were regarded as the best way to change
energy-related behaviour: ‗Costs and taxation were seen as the most likely
instruments to induce change in energy use, and several members referred to the
impact of the London congestion charges and higher taxation on polluting
vehicles.‘ (p.775)
Little evidence found of ‗solidaristic‘ reasons for behaviour change: ‗changes in
behaviour were mainly seen as resulting from self-interest, linked with direct
threats caused by large increases in fuel prices, for example, and/or financial
incentives to move to new technologies. For a significant minority in each of the
focus groups, there was skepticism about whether people would make changes
voluntarily, and doubts about whether people would be motivated by wider
solidaristic goals.‘ (p.776)
Little evidence found for environmental citizenship: ‗while there may be a
conditional or provisional recognition of environmental rights and
responsibilities, this cannot be characterized as a fully-fledged ‗environmental
citizenship‘. Sustainability may have been identified as a worthwhile goal, and as
having resonance with the notion of a ‗common good‘, but there were few signs in
focus group discussion that people‘s collective welfare was the primary objective.
Instead, attitudes seemed to converge on instrumental and privatized outlooks,
with an improved environment or greater energy efficiency being seen as
65
desirable for individuals and households.‘ (p.781)
4.7 ‘We don’t have much time’
As discussed in Section 3.2, one of the big advantages of fiscal incentives
and disincentives as a route to pro-environmental behaviour is that they
can, as in the case of congestion charging, work very fast. In the context of
the urgency with which some environmental problems, particularly climate
change, need to be dealt, policy tools that secure quick behaviour change
may seem more attractive than those based on environmental citizenship
(which, where it does not already exist, may take some time to establish
and nurture).
On the other hand, Jochelson (2007) highlights that financial incentives are
more effective only in changing certain types of behaviours, suggesting the
most successful incentive schemes are those that target simple one-off
behaviours like keeping appointments, and emphasizing that ‗incentives
help individuals achieve their goals, but once the incentive is removed,
they tend to relapse into previous behaviour patterns‘ (Jochelson, 2007: 8).
In this regard there may be benefit in combining fiscal dis/incentives and
environmental citizenship, with the former being quick-acting but perhaps
less durable, while the latter may take time to establish, yet be more robust
in behaviour-change terms in the medium- to long-term.
4.8 Summary
Whilst drawing attention to the many challenges associated with the
concept of environmental citizenship, this section has highlighted that these
need not preclude environmental citizenship as a valuable policy tool. Such
challenges may be addressed in a number of ways, largely through efforts
to:






build a good stock of social capital within and between communities;
improve access to environmental education initiatives – both formal
and informal - from an early age;
facilitate genuine community participation and deliberative decisionmaking in initiatives aimed at greater sustainability;
demonstrate tangible benefits arising as a result of the time and
effort invested by citizens;
understand and alleviate contextual barriers constraining citizens‘
ability to act, from infrastructural barriers through to the issue of
political culture;
seek an effective balance between fiscal and civil society based
routes to achieving lasting pro-environmental behaviour change.
66
Environmental citizenship may not be a quick fix for sustainability but
it is a potentially durable one.
Such measures will not only facilitate the effective operation of
environmental citizenship, but will also contribute to the achievement of
wider policy goals relating to community cohesion, and learning and action
for sustainable living. The next section will discuss the policy opportunities
presented by environmental citizenship in greater detail.
67
5 How can environmental citizenship be encouraged?
Environmental citizenship is about the active participation of citizens in
moving towards sustainability. It challenges conventional notions of
citizenship to reflect the nature of environmental problems, and is an
important part of the shift towards governance (rather than just
government) in environmental policy and politics. In acknowledging that
citizens have wider social and environmental interests and concerns, it
provides a counter to the model of the ‗self-interested rational actor‘ which
currently pervades policy, government thinking and economic modelling
(Public Space, 2005).
This review has highlighted the potential role for environmental citizenship
within the Government‘s existing pro-environmental behaviour change
programme. This section will explore this further and highlight the
opportunities for policy makers to nurture the conditions in civil society that
give rise to environmental citizenship.
The key question here is what is the role for different actors – including
central and local government, civil society organisations, businesses, and
communities – in creating and maintaining the conditions under which
environmental citizenship could be better nurtured and practised?
With environmental citizenship located at the civil society vertex of Figure
5, it follows that government efforts to promote environmental citizenship
may be most effective through working with civil society, an approach
closely aligned with the Coalition Government‘s vision for a ‗Big Society‘.
68
Figure 5: Government enabling environmental citizenship
In contrast to criticisms suggesting that environmental citizenship ‗lets
government off the hook‘, in reality, its success is heavily reliant on
government support. The trade-off between state and society is not a zerosum game; less state will not automatically mean more society. In fact as
the Young Foundation recently reported, ‗when government cut back
sharply in places as varied as US inner cities, and countries like Russia, the
promised revival of civil society didn‘t happen. Often the spaces left by
government were filled by organised crime or gangs. Ordinary citizens
became more afraid, not more trusting, and the evidence from around the
world shows that, surprisingly perhaps, the countries where civil society is
often strongest are also ones with active government, even in such diverse
countries as Brazil, Denmark and Canada‘ (Young Foundation, 2010: 6).
The challenge for government then, given the need for policy makers and
decision-makers to be doing ‗more with less‘, is to mobilize civil society and
to nurture environmental citizenship. This section highlights a range of
policy opportunities for promoting environmental citizenship. Whilst the
opportunities suggested are not all specifically environmental, they provide
the context in which the habits, values and practices associated with
environmental citizenship could be developed. This dynamic is captured in
Figure 6.
69
SITES OF
ENVIRONMENTAL
CITIZENSHIP
PRACTICE OF
ENVIRONMENTAL
CITIZENSHIP
GOVERNMENT
ACTION
VALUES/BELIEFS OF
ENVIRONMENTAL
CITIZENSHIP
Figure 6: Government action to promote environmental citizenship
Provide greater opportunities for individuals to take part in local
environmental decision-making. The Young Foundation (2010) has
proposed a number of measures intended to enhance public engagement
with environmental decisions at a community level, including: (a) powers to
act on very local issues relating to, for example, open spaces, graffiti and
grime that are often seen by councils as ‗too small‘ to deal with; (2) powers
to influence decisions about other local services (like street cleaning and
waste disposal), as well as more strategic decisions relating to health and
education; and (3) powers to call to account and publicly challenge public
agencies and decision-makers. There is a need to move beyond one-way
communication and consultation towards genuinely deliberative and
participatory community engagement processes, building on the experience
of citizens‘ panels, summits and juries. Such processes will only be
successful if implemented with consideration of the unique social and
cultural dynamics within different community contexts. Local government
has a potentially significant role to play here: ‗through its statutory duties,
the myriad of public services it provides and funds and because of its key
local strategic role as an influencer of other agencies‘ (Young Foundation,
2009: 6).
Create more opportunities for civic engagement and volunteerism.
Citizenship-based activities are time-consuming which means concerted
efforts are needed to support those who wish to volunteer. Opportunities
for this include: greater political effort to commit employers to
implementing a shorter working week, improving access to affordable
70
childcare services; and encouraging employers to allocate time or other
incentives (such as career advancement) for employees to engage in
community-based initiatives. Opportunities for different levels of
participation need to be created, including light touch commitment options
intended to encourage initial involvement (McCarthy, in draft). The
Government‘s new National Citizen Service pilots, which will see thousands
of young people given the opportunity to take part in structured community
action, will be an important means of trialling such opportunities.
Rethink incentives for civic engagement. The social innovation literature
highlights interesting examples of community currency schemes designed to
serve social, economic or environmental purposes, thereby rewarding
specific types of behaviour. Seyfang and Smith (2007), for example,
highlight the NU Spaarpas green loyalty card piloted in the Netherlands,
which awards points for purchasing local, organic or fair-trade products, or
for recycled household waste. These points may be redeemed for public
transport tickets or discounts off green services. This is similar to the
principle of time-banking where people give and receive services in
exchange for time credits (Young Foundation, 2010) and to the Wörgel
Principle advocated by Murray (2009). This principle entails the issuing of
quasi monies (such as green tokens) to volunteers
on environmental projects, which are then
accepted by the town council as a percentage
‘It is not enough to assume
repayment of debts or taxes owed to it.
that scaling back government
Provide greater opportunities for grassroots
innovation. Government has a key role to play in
supporting and inspiring communities to develop
innovative solutions to local issues, be they
environmental or wider social issues. Based on
the experiences of NESTA‘s Big Green Challenge
competition, Bunt and Harris (2010) set out five
principles for success:
i.
ii.
iii.
bureaucracy and control will
allow local innovation to
flourish. Success depends on a
different kind of support from
government and a different
approach to scale’
Bunt and Harris (2010: 5)
Provide a clear goal for communities to work towards, ensuring
clarity and consistency of priorities across national and local
government, which are not subject to frequent revision and addition;
Presume community capacity to innovate, undertaking significant
outreach work and adopting an open approach which does not assume
where or who the best solutions will come from;
Instigate a structured development process. Since there will be
limits to the resources that communities are able to commit to the
local problem-solving, there are clear benefits to be gained from a
staged process, providing initial advisory support and capacity
71
building to aid the development of ideas, and rewarding well-thought
through proposals with incremental funding for further development;
Remove barriers to participation - such as inappropriate regulatory
regimes and unfeasible time frames - in order to generate a culture
of experimentation, evaluation, and learning;
Rewarding outcomes rather than processes - though clear on the
desired outcome, the Big Green Challenge was deemed a success
because its funders did not try to impose pre-existing codified
solutions.
iv.
v.
Provide appropriate funding streams. Existing funding programmes tend to
be short-term and linked to constraining targets, bureaucracy and
requirements, which risks premature stifling of potentially successful
community innovation efforts (Seyfang and Smith, 2007). Murray (2009)
highlights the potential to use the Grameen principle in community funding
schemes; small grants and loans could be advanced to community groups,
along with expert advice and support, to facilitate proposal development,
with subsequent funds provided on the basis of performance. This could
usefully be considered by those involved in administering the proposed
Community First neighbourhood grants.
Build a good stock of social capital. Where levels of social capital are high,
people generally have a stronger sense of common purpose and are
prepared to contribute to the common good even if they are not
incentivised or coerced into doing so. Lessons can be learnt from the work
underway by the RSA‘s Connected Communities programme (Rowson et al.,
2010), which highlights the value in working with communities (moving
beyond just the ‗geographical‘ community) to map local social networks,
and thereby identify:



Horizontal relationships within the community i.e. between friends
and neighbours, between people and public spaces (public order and
civility) and relations across people from different backgrounds
(community cohesion).
Vertical relationships i.e. between service providers and users (coproduction), participation in voluntary activities, and participation in
civic and political activity. Such ‗bridging‘ relationships are often
found to be lacking in deprived neighbourhoods.
Community members and hubs which are particularly well-connected
and therefore potentially best placed to provide an overview of
existing community skills and needs, co-ordinate activity and spread
useful information, opportunities and practices. In this way, it may
also be possible to identify ‗catalytic individuals‘ within the
72


community, defined by Fell et al., (2009) as individuals who are
particularly influential in driving community change.
Who and where isolated or disengaged individuals, with limited
connections, sit within the community. Steps may then be taken
either to access these individuals through the limited connections
they have, however loose, or to help them make local connections to
individuals and groups (using befriending schemes, or personal
introductions to and by local people).
Tensions across the community. It is important to recognise that a
geographically-defined community comprises a diverse range of ties
and interests that vary in strength and are sometimes in tension.
Understanding social networks at a micro-level can shed light on
where such tensions exist and why they may have originated.
Engaging communities in this mapping process may in itself increase the
strength of connections in local communities. A key recommendation from
the RSA‘s work is to ensure that the Community Organisers recruited by the
Coalition Government as part of the Big Society vision are trained in
participatory social network mapping and weaving techniques.
Support new tools for community connection. For example, the Project
Dirt initiative 7 , operating across south London, aims to forge new links
between active environmental citizens. Similarly, the annual Big Lunch 8
makes it easier for people to meet with their neighbours and organise street
parties, and appears to be a key driver of the proposed Big Society Day. This
is an initiative proposed by the Coalition Government for encouraging
people to get to know each other, celebrate the work of local groups and
encourage greater involvement throughout the community. The rise in
internet-based social networking sites offers valuable opportunities for
encouraging such links and events, and for the development of
neighbourhood web media or local moderated issue-related web platforms
(Young Foundation, 2010).
Reconsider local regulation. There is a need for both national and local
government to reconsider the way in which citizenship-based approaches
may be hindered by certain forms of regulation and legislation. For
example, calls have been made to ensure benefit allowances are not
compromised by engaging in volunteering schemes, and for changes to
7
See: http://www.projectdirt.com
8
See: http://www.thebiglunch.com
73
existing planning regulations such that unused or derelict land could be
leased to groups offering to use it for the common good. The rapidly
growing movement of guerrilla gardeners in the UK, for example, is
replanting railway embankments, wasteland and expanding allotments. The
community land trust model, in which local communities invest time or
money in improving an area, could be more widely adopted to give
communities collective ownership over these
assets and to ensure that the appreciation of
property value returns in part to those
‘Those who have experienced
communities (Young Foundation, 2010). The
global learning in school are keen
Big Society Deregulation Task Force should
to understand more about the
consider ideas like these in their efforts to
problems in the world, as well as
create a better environment within which
being more likely than average to
small grassroots groups can flourish (Bowles,
believe that what they do in their
2010).
daily lives can affect those in
other countries’
Work through agents of social change. The
government has a unique influence over
DEA / Ipsos-MORI survey (2008)
agents of social change such as the education
system. Since September 2002, citizenship has been a key part of the
national curriculum for 11-16 year olds in the UK, and there are
opportunities to interpret the citizenship brief in environmental terms
(Dobson, 2003).
Furthermore, many of the understandings that are important to
environmental citizens could be developed in schools. This may be through
changes in the national curriculum or other initiatives such as school
gardening projects, many of which have successfully encouraged civic
interaction with those beyond the immediate relatives of the school
children (Passy et al., 2010). Environmental education may also be
encouraged beyond the formal school setting, for example, providing
financial assistance to reduce the cost of entry to exhibitions, zoos,
botanical gardens and other sites of informal lifelong learning.
Bring the impacts of environmental change closer to home.
Communication efforts could draw on novel approaches to increase the
tangibility of the impacts of personal behaviour choices on spatially and
temporally distant ‗others‘. For example, the Open University‘s Creative
Climate diaries 9 seek to make links around the world to those already
affected by climate change.
9
See: http://www.open2.net/creativeclimate/
74
6 Future research
A number of areas have been identified where further research would
improve the extent to which the encouragement of environmental
citizenship could be employed as a policy tool:
 Conduct research aimed at finding out how many people are
practising environmental citizens and the degree to which they
catalyse the behaviour of those around them.
 Find out to what extent the values associated with environmental
citizenship are latent in the wider population, and pilot proenvironment policy designs aimed at bringing these values to the
fore.
 Develop a greater understanding of the importance of socio-political
culture. The efficacy of citizenship-based approaches within
countries of different political cultures remains unclear. Further
research could usefully explore the differences in environmental
citizenship within liberal-individual and more collective, solidaristic
societies. Have efforts to nurture environmental citizenship been
more successful in other countries? If so, what have these countries
done to foster this? Can such efforts be replicated in the UK and how?
 Explore the effectiveness of tools based on reciprocity, perhaps
drawing on the experiences of recent high profile pledge-based
campaigns, such as the 10:10 campaign, the Young Foundation‘s
(2010b) pledge banks, and local council Sustainable Development
pledges, such as Sutton Council‘s ‗Planet Pledge‘.
 Explore the extent to which incentive-based approaches impact on
internal motivations of individuals, and the potential risk of
incentives ‗crowding out‘ the motivation of those with existing proenvironmental attitudes. Research in this area should consider
differences between types of incentives – including the use of gift
vouchers, tax rebates and local alternative currencies – and different
types of behaviours.
 Explore the role of environmental citizenship as an approach for
ensuring an equitable transition to decentralised low carbon
communities. How can individuals become energy citizens rather than
energy consumers? Valuable insights on this will hopefully be gained
from DECC‘s Low Carbon Communities programme and the RCUK
Energy and Communities research programmes.
75
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