Supporting youth to develop environmental citizenship within/against a neoliberal context

Abstract

What aspects of environmental citizenship do educators need to consider when they are teaching students about their environmental responsibilities within a neoliberal context? In this article, I respond to this question by analyzing the relationship between neoliberalism and environmental citizenship. Neoliberalism situates citizen participation as an individual concern that removes states from responsibility for public goods, such as the environment, while environmental citizenship scholarship runs the risk of promoting a diluted form of environmental engagement similar to that found within neoliberal ideology. This can result in negative consequences for the environment and for environmental participation among citizens. I conclude with a discussion of pedagogic and curricular practices that educators can use to support youth in developing forms of environmental citizenship that actively disrupt neoliberalism’s privatization of responsibility for the environmental commons.

Keywords:

• environmental education
• neoliberalism
• environmental sustainability
• citizenship
• classroom

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the co-editors of this special issue – David Hursh, Joseph Henderson, and David Greenwood – and the reviewers for their generous and helpful guidance on this article. Thanks also to Matthew Dimick for his editing and feedback.

Notes

1. My use of the concept of ‘citizen’ in this article is not without significant reservations. Citizenship has been used in problematic ways by states and for political purposes in order to deny rights to education, health care, representation, and voting, particularly among indigenous, colonized, and migrating people. Thus, it is with reservation that I use the term citizenship in this article to engage in the environmental citizenship dialogue within environmental education and environmental politics scholarship (e.g. Reid et al. 2008; Scerri 2013), who use it to signify educational outcomes for students who engage in social and political processes or to consider ways people work together to sustain and restore the environmental commons.

2. Other ideological constructs might be used to examine environmental citizenship, including individualism and consumerism. However, for my purposes such ideologies were not found as constructive as neoliberalism because they do not adequately address concerns for the common good and citizens’ rights and responsibilities.

3. All names used for participants in this article are pseudonyms.

4. The students identify as both African American and Black American. Many students in the class identify with multiple cultures and histories, including African American, Filipino, Haitian, Dominican, West Indian, and Puerto Rican to name a few.