Environment and Citizenship: Integrating Justice, Responsibility and Civic Engagement
400
Environment and Citizenship: Integrating Justice, Responsibility and Civic Engagement
400eBook
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Overview
- provides a comprehensive and timely guide to the debates on environmental and ecological citizenship, expertly combining examples of practice with theory;
- examines how environmental movements have become increasingly involved in governance processes at the local, national, regional and intergovernmental levels;
- explores the increasing importance of corporations and transnational networks through examples of stakeholding processes and participatory research in environmental decision-making;
- calls on researchers, policy-makers and activists to face a new challenge: how to effectively link environmental justice with social justice.
Breaking new ground, Smith and Pangsapa address how environmental responsibility operates through politics, ethics, culture and the everyday experiences of ctivists, as well as how awareness of environmental and social injustice only leads to responsible actions and strategic change through civic engagement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136618 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Dr. Piya Pangsapa is the author of Textures of Struggle (2007) as well as articles on migration, women's rights and labour standards, ethnographic research methods and cultural inclusivity in American universities.
Read an Excerpt
Environment and Citizenship
Integrating Justice, Responsibility and Civic Engagement
By Mark J. Smith, Piya Pangsapa
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Mark J. Smith and Piya PangsapaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84277-903-3
CHAPTER 1
From environmental justice to environ mental citizenship
Citizens, exclusion and the politics of obligation
Contemporary political rhetoric in Western societies often refers to rights and responsibilities in terms of issues as diverse as crime, education, healthcare and the environment. For the most part, it attempts to establish contractual relations between state and citizens but also increasingly between citizens, supposedly to promote respect for others: respect of migrants for the host culture, of students for teachers, of the young for the old, and, as an act of remorse and rehabilitation, of former criminals for their victims, and so on. Key to this development is a greater awareness of the importance of obligations within the terms of citizenship, an understanding that the enjoyment of rights carries corresponding duties to act in a manner that contributes to one's community or at least to restrain behaviour that could inflict harm on others, including distant strangers. For over two centuries, citizenship has been fixated upon rights and entitlements, glossing over duties and obligations. While being a citizen has always involved working on the boundary between state and civil society, the distinction between public and private spheres has been an unquestionable assumption, thus neglecting the power relations that operate through each. With the limited capacities of states to make a difference, and with most problems, especially environmental problems, demanding clear transnational responses, personal decisions need to be linked to environmental responsibility in ways that are more effective than intergovernmental policies and treaties. This is not a justification for states to privatize environmental responsibility – shifting the burden on to citizens and away from political authorities. The emergent new forms of citizenship, from sexual citizenship through to ecological citizenship, over the last two decades are an explicit attempt to address these issues, and the objective of this book is to highlight how debates on environment and citizenship can not only create spaces for partnerships between institutions and citizens but also point to the more dynamic and varied conceptions of citizenship that are yet to come into being. Ecological citizenship is part of a new generation of kinds of citizenship that take the politics of obligation seriously.
The 'why' question
Why environment and citizenship, and why now? Environmental problems are certainly viewed as key issues in contemporary politics. Even environmental sceptics acknowledge their importance, if only to renounce obligations of the human species towards ecological systems, habitats, non-human animal species and strangers both in global and intergenerational terms. Citizenship, however, has often been tied to membership of a given political community, often conceived in very narrow terms of national territory and the entitlements and obligations that follow from holding a particular passport and identity card. Since the 1990s, citizenship has been fundamentally redefined as a site of contestation between competing projects on what we are entitled to, what obligations we owe and to whom and the relationship between them, especially when these have legal force in terms of rights and duties. Citizenship is now articulated with culture, technology, identity (particularly gender), science, transnationalization and cosmopolitanism, but here we remain focused on the environment.
Citizenship has a more complex history, of course, and we are obliged to remember the debates over civil, political and social citizenship – debates that assumed the entitlements and obligations (as well as the associated rights and duties) as reciprocal. Civil citizenship is a concrete expression of the idea of a bargain whereby some of the liberties of owners are sacrificed in exchange for legal protections for private property. Political citizenship involves the entitlements to vote, association and free speech combined with reciprocal obligations to comply with the legislation produced by representative democratic institutions. Social citizenship provides for a wider range of entitlements, such as social welfare provision, healthcare and educational opportunity, combined with obligations to pay taxes within the context of a progressive taxation scheme alongside mandatory national insurance in order to fund pensions as well as sickness and unemployment benefits. In each of these cases, the assumption was that rights and duties were intimately connected. Emergent conceptions of citizenship have, however, challenged certain assumptions about what citizenship means. In all of the above two characteristics are present: 1. a clear distinction between state and civil society (and their associated conceptions of public and private spheres); 2. the fact that citizens have reciprocal entitlements and obligations (with a special emphasis on rights and entitlements that often leave duties and obligations as residual categories). Discussions of environmental and ecological citizenship challenge both these assumptions. For environmentalists, change is required in both the public and private spheres based on an integrated strategy. In some ways, this is attributable to the feminist influence on green politics, demonstrating that the personal is political. In addition, while environmental movements have made significant headway using the discourse of rights (including the propositions that animals, trees and nature have rights), there has been a shift towards recognizing the obligations to future generations (especially since the Brundtland Report of 1987), habitats (conservation and preservation movements), the biotic community (Leopold 1949) and even certain mystical conceptions of the planet as a self-regulating organism (Lovelock 2000). The politics of obligation also raised the possibility of human obligations towards natural things without assuming the relationship was reciprocal, with Smith (1998a, 2005b) and Dobson (2003a), among others, highlighting how the ties that bind can be diverse and complicated, even when just considering the asymmetrical power relations of living generations.
The reinvention of 'citizenship' in so many forms over such a brief time (explored in more detail in Chapter 2) has opened up the concept to many interventions that seek to develop ways of challenging its association with membership of national political communities. Following the 'principle of proliferation', an array of different kinds of sites of citizenship have come into being, including 'citizen science' (Irwin 1995) and cultural citizenship (Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Stevenson 2001, 2003a, 2003b; Couldry 2006), technological citizenship (Couldry 2006) and ecological citizenship (Dobson 2003a; Smith 1998a, 2005b), which, according to Engin Isin (forthcoming; see also Isin and Nielsen 2008), have different scales (street, locality, city, nation-state, transnational arenas and the globe) and involve a wide range of acts beyond voting and political party membership (such as volunteering, participating in community initiatives, exchanging knowledge, blogging, protesting in innovative ways by using cultural performance as a vehicle for dissent, activist networking and organizing). The range and diversity of forms of citizenship and the kinds of civic engagement strategies that span both public and private spheres demand a different methodological approach. By drawing on both quantitative and qualitative evidence, we are better able to see the intersubjective character of citizen construction, recognizing that we need to understand as well as explain environmental ethics, policy and activism.
Challenging environmental common sense through science: the 'how' question
Understanding and explaining environmental problems have often been characterized as the task of the detached scientist generating knowledge that can be verified by other scientists through replication or identifying similar processes in other contexts. Theories and hypotheses that generate accurate predictions are regarded as having explanatory value. Sometimes this is relatively uncontested, as with the causal relationship between chloroflourocarbons (CFCs) and ozone depletion, but few environmental issues have generated a clear consensus on cause and effect. Unlike in the case of the localized effects of traditional factory pollution, as Ulrich Beck (1992, 1995) argued, causal attribution of the effects of such pollution as nuclear waste has become more difficult. One aspect of the problem can be seen with recent disputes over the anthropogenic causes of global warming and climate change – the range of variables and their interaction is so complex that scientific accounts can identify only patterns, tendencies and ranges of change (from the best to the worst scenario). There are also difficulties in measurement, for global warming has to be distinguished from urban warming while changes in hurricane intensity and glacial ice cover have been subject to variation. Nevertheless, through the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a general scientific consensus has arisen on the role of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, CFCs and HCFCs). The rhetorical character of the debate on climate change on both sides of the environmentalist/sceptic spectrum often involves references to science as the authoritative basis of each standpoint, while at the same time dismissing the opposing view as politically motivated or ideological expressions of interests. For the proponents of anthropogenically induced climate change, the sceptics are conservative defenders of national and transnational business interests; for the critics of global warming theories, the scientific consensus suppresses scientific dissent in the interests of maintaining a research funding bonanza. It should be added that environmental scepticism and neoliberal critiques of global warming theories are often informed by a view of environmentalism as a distraction from developing strategies to tackle poverty and social injustice or as a stalking horse for state regulation that impedes free market solutions. The debate has been fought out over the identification of relevant empirical regularities, for example between carbon dioxide levels and average temperature change or between sunspot activity and atmospheric change. This debate has many of the same characteristics as the debate between the Club of Rome on the 'limits to growth' in the 1970s and the advocates of technofix solutions to the problem of finite resources (that human ingenuity would find new ways of identifying carbon-based resources or new alternatives). The main difference, however, is that the focus has shifted from the depletion of 'natural resources' to the capacity of the environment to absorb the side effects of human activity (even resource depletion, such as deforestation, is often primarily assessed in terms of a loss of an important carbon sink).
Nevertheless, this still focuses on the role of natural science, including climatology, oceanography, botany and conservation science, which (unlike the experimental method) study open rather than closed systems (Smith 1998b). Sciences such as meteorology and seismology always faced problems in developing predictive accuracy in much the same way as social science. As the debate on climate change illustrates, a practically adequate understanding of contemporary environmental problems also has to take account of the social dimension. The way we see environmental problems, like all social representations, is also subject to the mechanisms of social construction. Pollution has been characterized as 'matter out of place' (Smith 1998a), as a natural symbol, and all environmental issues are articulated through media representations. It is arguable that the speed of the formation of the international regime on CFCs in the Montreal Protocol (1987, in force from 1989) was culturally facilitated by media coverage of the dangers of skin cancer and the use of dramatic representations such as the imaging of the ozone hole over Antarctica. The relationship between the recorded rise in average temperature and climate change is much harder to represent in such a direct way, for the visual representations of storm activity, flooding, oceanic dead zones and extreme drought are often viewed as more context dependent. Anecdotal accounts of severe weather conditions or sudden unseasonal cold spells are easily capitalized on in the context of political debates. During the cross-examination of Al Gore by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (2007), Republican senator James Inhofe, reflecting on unusual snowfalls in the USA, commented, 'where is global warming when we need it'.
Rather than treating science as an authoritative basis for action or an unquestionable 'resource', it needs to be supplemented with authentic knowledge that accurately represents the lives of those affected by environmental problems, and scientific knowledge should be seen as much as a 'topic' of research and open to deconstruction and problematization as a resource. Science is not immune from the politics of knowledge production (such as the willingness of political bodies and research councils to address certain research questions and methodologies rather than others). Also, the internal dynamics of scientific communities make it difficult to justify research projects that are contrary to the received wisdom of an established scientific consensus. One of the purposes of this book is to open up a dialogic space for environmental activists and sceptics to treat each other less as enemies (for example, in the labelling of sceptics as 'deniers', which carries the connotation of 'holocaust denial') and more as adversaries who respect each other's standpoints. This is especially important in creating the ground for bridging the divide between social and natural science.
Integrating social and natural science: the 'where' and 'when' questions
The key question, however, is how to integrate social and natural scientific accounts of environmental issues. While cultural and media interpretation plays a part, other social dimensions also need to be addressed. The institutional dimension is especially important. The characterizations of environmental movements as new social movements, post-materialist responses to the growth mania of the Western state-industrial complex, bottom-up responses to conventional party politics or cultural lifestyle laboratories tend to reinforce the liberal distinction between state and civil society. Similarly, in North America during the 1980s and 1990s, environmental movements and NGOs became increasingly concerned with environmental injustice, the fact that certain groups of people have experienced a disproportionate impact of environmental 'bads' while others enjoyed a surplus of environmental 'goods', such as access to green spaces.
As the debate on environmental racism and injustice has developed, the connections between environmental and social justice have become more apparent, with outsider groups moving into the inside track, especially in the context of urban sustainability. Nevertheless, the experience of being outsiders has generated a new legacy in seeking ways to develop broad-focus civic approaches that encourage the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders. In addition, there has been increased concern with how bottom-up and top-down environmental policy formation has become increasingly interconnected with environmental NGOs becoming more incorporated in policy formation and decision-making processes. In some contexts, such as the EU, this has developed into eco-corporatism (explored further in Chapter 4).
The institutional opportunities for effective intervention and political responsiveness to resource mobilization by environmental campaigns vary according to issue, context and the political articulation of interests. This last factor may refer to how some interests may arise on the agenda and not others, why a particular issue is couched in a particular way (the interests of a polluter may be persuasively expressed as in the public interest while those of the affected community are presented as sectional), how some interests are seen as requiring special concessions (demonstrated at the intergovernmental level by the concessions acquired by China on phasing out CFCs), or how some interests are regarded as key security matters (such as in the case of the US federal government's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol). To explore how all the questions considered above are relevant to a particular situation, the next section considers one environmental event that has come to epitomize the struggles of the environmental movement in both a symbolic and practical way.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Environment and Citizenship by Mark J. Smith, Piya Pangsapa. Copyright © 2008 Mark J. Smith and Piya Pangsapa. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
List of Tables and FiguresAcknowledgments
Introduction: Environment, obligation and citizenship
Part I: Theory informed by practice
1. From environmental justice to environmental citizenship
2. Citizens, citizenship and citizenization
3. Rethinking environment and citizenship
Part II: Practice informed by theory
4. Environmental governance, social movements and citizenship in a global context
5. Corporate responsibility and environmental sustainability
6. Environmental borderlands
7. Insiders and outsiders in environmental mobilizations in Southeast Asia
8. The new vocabulary of ecological citizenship
Bibliography
Index