Environmental citizenship and disability equality: the need for an inclusive approach

ABSTRACT

There is ongoing debate about the relevance and usefulness of environmental citizenship theory. Questions about embodiment and accusations of false universalism are developing in response to dominant conceptualisations that often appear to ignore social difference. Still largely absent from these considerations, however, is any in-depth exploration of disability issues. While citizenship has always been a concern of disability studies, disabled people remain underrepresented in mainstream citizenship theorising. Although disabled people’s relationships to the natural environment and environmentalism are receiving increasing attention, disability is seldom considered explicitly in environmental citizenship debates. Environmental citizenship theories are relevant to disabled people, however, and drawing on theory as well as empirical work in the UK a more inclusive concept of environmental citizenship is proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental citizenship
• ecological citizenship
• embodiment
• disability
• ableism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is not to suggest that the underlying argument is incorrect, or to single out MacGregor’s work, but simply to indicate how embedded ableist language can be.

2. I use this term to refer to the materiality of bodies and how society acts towards different kinds of bodies (see Beckett 2006, Goodley 2014): ‘people do not exist independently of their physical body, but the integration and interaction of social, biological and environmental factors combine to affect their status regarding both disability and disadvantage’ (Fenney and Snell 2011, p. 259).

3. There need not, however, be inherent tensions between disability equality and the goal of sustainability. While at first glance some issues appear to create tensions between environmental and disability equality aims (Fenney and Snell 2011), disabled people are only disadvantaged by conceptualisations of sustainability that neglect a social element. I have argued elsewhere that ‘definitions of sustainability … that do not include the social may not be truly sustainable’ (Fenney Salkeld 2016, p. 8).

4. In the UK, a 13-year Labour government was replaced in 2010 by a coalition of Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, Conservatives making up the majority of the coalition. This government pursued an austerity agenda from 2010 to 2015 that both extended and radically altered the previous administration’s welfare policies, particularly for disabled people (see Taylor-Gooby 2012, Grover and Piggott 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ESRC Postgraduate Studentship Award Ref No ES/I01778X/1.