On the making of the environmental citizen

Abstract

Debates about how to foster green/environmental citizenship have been central to environmental politics research in the past few decades. While a great deal of this work draws its central tenets from liberal political theory more recently researchers have adopted broadly post-structural analytical frameworks to explore how diverse forms of (environmental) citizenship are formed and enacted. But what can and does this ‘green governmentality’ literature contribute to our understanding of environmental citizenship? In exploring such a question, some key environment and citizenship debates, including the recent post-structural turn, are examined. Research into domestic sustainable consumption and public deliberation around climate change is drawn upon to outline how both forms of intervention worked to produce incomplete and conditional expressions of intent and commitment that could be viewed as environmental citizenship. Green governmentality analysis thus highlights some conceptual and empirical blind spots in prevailing environmental citizenships frameworks whilst raising further questions about appropriate and effective public intervention mechanisms.

Keywords:

• environmental citizenship
• governmentality
• sustainable consumption
• deliberation

Acknowledgements

The CCPS research discussed in this paper was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Award DP0879092 ‘Social Adaptation to Climate Change in the Australian Public Sphere’. Thanks to all the researchers who were part of this project and also to all research participants whose thoughts and insights feature here. The interpretations of their thoughts and insights – and any remaining errors – are solely my responsibility.

Notes

1. This is referring to a presentation given on the first day of the process, which outlined how the climate has changed over centuries; and how current climate changes fit into or deviate from this pattern.