Theorising Green Political Action

This week Keele is playing host to the annual ECPR summer school on environmental politics and policy, which means I'll be taking some time off to sit in on papers covering green political theory, ecological modernisation, green parties and movements and much else besides.

Today's keynote speaker was the well-known green political theorist, Andy Dobson. Among other things, Andy is famous for pretty much writing the book on ecological citizenship, which is a major contribution to political theory and the debates around what constitutes the 'good citizen'. It is also a concept that has come of age. He argues there is an impasse in environmental politics today - practically everyone accepts climate change poses a very serious problem, but while people are rightly concerned there is a collective and individual unwillingness to act upon it. In other words, there is a disjunction between widely-held green attitudes and the take up of green behaviours. How then might this gap be bridged?

The policy front runner in the UK and Ireland at present are systems of fiscal incentives/disincentives. The two highest profile examples are the London congestion charge and the Irish plastic bag environmental levy, and there is some evidence they can work. Depending on who you believe, the implementation of congestion charging on week days has reduced traffic between one fifth to one quarter. Since the PBEL was introduced six years ago, one billion plastic bags have been removed from circulation. So they do work, but are there problems? Yes. First because they are political measures they can be rescinded by subsequent political decisions - see for example Boris Johnson's decision to scrap his predecessor's plan to institute a carbon charge on London's Chelsea tractors and high performance sports cars. So has the fiscal disincentive been in place long enough to affect habitual behavioural change? Second, and not unrelated to Andy's first point, are people responding to the fiscal prompt as opposed to the green values that underlie it? Is too much political attention being spent on managing these schemes instead of emphasising the message that needs sending out? Third, how big does a tax/break have to be to affect behavioural change? For example, Andy cited research suggesting since hitting $2/gallon in the USA, there have been an estimated 20 billion fewer car journeys. Finally, fiscal prompts have a very one-dimensional view of human behaviour - where is the room for virtue and the common good? Can other motivations produce results?

Andy believes there is an alternative and this is where ecological citizenship comes in. But before offering some practical suggestions he took us on a genealogical tour of his concept. When he first began theorising what he then call *environmental* citizenship (there is a difference, which will become apparent) the obvious place to start were the existing citizenship traditions to see if they offered anything useful. First he looked at what liberalism had to say and extended its notions of individual rights. Put simply, he suggested citizens have the right to a liveable environment. Indeed, because without it life would be impossible it is the precondition for the enjoyment of all other rights. Then looking at the civic republican tradition he was able to green its concerns. For example, the common good is served by living in a sustainable society. Therefore citizens are obligated to behave in an environmentally responsible manner, and encourage others to do so because it is a virtue in its own right.

This is all well and good as far as it goes, but these two primary traditions have a number of blind spots. The first is the relationship between the public and private spheres and the assumption that politics belongs to the former and not the latter. However, green politics calls for sustainable living, and this necessarily includes the "private" behaviours of consumption and waste disposal. Secondly liberalism and civic republicanism are state-centric and primarily address problems in that framework. The problem is environmental issues transcend borders. Therefore something stronger than environmental citizenship, which is merely a greening of the existing traditions is demanded. Hence ecological citizenship.

So what are the basics of ecological citizenship? Above all it is not a status, it is something only attained by the active pursuit of a set of values. Justice is the primary virtue and working towards it always serves the common good. The political space of action is not the nation state but the ecological footprint. This is his metaphor for the global impacts of global capitalism, of the interconnectedness between the worldwide division of labour, of grasping how some footprints are smaller than others and how it collapses any dichotomy between the public and the private. The citizen has a duty to reduce their footprint and act to influence politics and institutions. Nor do they expect anything back in return - it is the highest expression of 'post-materialist' politics. The ecological citizen is not a lifestylist - they are engaged in the struggle for environmental and social justice.

In Andy's opinion if we are to overcome the attitudes/behaviours gap we need to create more ecological citizens. But is there proof it is an effective strategy for confronting climate change? There's evidence aplenty for fiscal measures but any on values-based behavioural change? Andy believes so. Writing in Environmental Politics 15 (2), Neil Carter and Meg Huby argued behaviours among some 'ethical investors' were indicative of ecological citizenship. Surveying a 1,000-strong sample, what distinguished them from mainstream investors were (as to be expected) values and lifestyle (i.e. recognised that private decisions have public consequences). But also 80% said they were prepared to lose money for ethical reasons, which dovetails nicely with the non-reciprocal basis of ecological citizenship. Further evidence comes from Johanna Wolf's study on coastal communities in British Columbia, which found a high incidence of behaviours framed in terms of non-reciprocal (green) civic duty and obligations to generations not yet born. Finally, Christer Berglund and Simon Matti wrote a piece in EP (Vol 15, no. 4) that found fiscal prompts were effective, but the (Swedish) respondents ascribed more importance to the altruistic values undergirding them.

So what conclusions if any can be made? For Andy on first impression the way to bridging the gap is by employing both kinds of measures, the money and the virtues. But unfortunately the two don't necessarily rub along well together. Can the introduction of material incentives erode the non-marketised relations virtue depends on? As an anecdote he cited a study about a retirement home. Its management came up with the idea of offering the residents vouchers in return for making their beds in the morning. It worked a treat, but eventually the residents were demanding vouchers for everything. Therefore incentive schemes can lead to perverse behaviours. But this aside Andy felt there was enough evidence to suggest an ecological citizen sensibility was beginning to emerge - it's a value set people are responding to and therefore it is something policy makers are going to have to take account of.

A couple of pertinent questions were raised in the discussion afterwards. Clearly his discussion of the public and the private was influenced by feminist thinking, but one questioner felt this still avoided confronting the gendered (i.e. feminine) character of the private. It's almost as if ecological citizenship is asking women to save the world *on top* of looking after the home. Andy conceded he'd overlooked its structural inequalities and oppression and argued this should be the last thing ecological citizenship does. As the neoliberal state continues to peel away its social responsibilities more and more devolves on to individuals, and women in particular. He admitted he had no short answer to this issue. But if my understanding of ecological citizenship is correct, if social justice is at its heart then it should be plastic enough to accommodate feminist concerns. Rather than dumping green responsibilities on women the argument should be that the state takes its social obligations seriously and use this as a means of socialising the private sphere and liberating women from it.

The second interesting question asked where ecological citizenship as a phenomena is coming from, and how would we go about inculcating it outside the seminar room. For Andy the answer is fairly simple - it is experience that leads to environmental and social justice conclusions. Whereas ecological citizenship was theorised from 'above', it is instantiated from below by those who struggle against injustice. However if you try and educate people with ecological citizenship classes at school, one problem I can foresee is that a frame imposed from above by well-meaning educators may not chime with the experience of those below. At best it can encourage a superficial environmental sensibility but at worse it can breed hostility and resentment. If experience is the best way to become an ecological citizen, then citizenship classes should train pupils how to go about tackling injustice - an argument he has made elsewhere.

There was plenty of food for thought in this contribution. If we are going to escape a climate change catastrophe behaviours are going to have to change. Ecological citizenship as a concept is able to grasp the many fronts the struggle for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society must proceed on, but as a category too nebulous to make sense of the social structures driving us toward environmental catastrophe. It seems environmental sociology is beginning to identify groups of people who approach the ideal type of the ecological citizen, but the social distance between the groups so far identified is vast. A common politics that unites them is a utopian idea. Can working class community campaigners against dumping and David Cameron go together? This for me suggests ecological citizenship needs to be even more political and nail its colours firmly to the mast of a project dedicated to systemic and permanent socialist change.