Ecomodernist citizenship: rethinking political obligations in a climate-changed world

ABSTRACT

Green accounts of environmental citizenship typically seek to promote environmental sustainability and justice. However, some green theorists have argued that liberal freedoms are incompatible with preserving a planetary environment capable of meeting basic human needs and must be wound back. More recently, ‘ecomodernists’ have proposed that liberalism might be reconciled with environmental challenges through state-directed innovation focused on the provision of global public goods. Yet, they have not articulated an account of ecomodernist citizenship. This article seeks to advance the normative theory of ecomodernism by specifying an account of ecomodernist citizenship and subjecting the theory’s core claims to sympathetic critique. We argue that state-directed innovation has the potential to reconcile ambitious mitigation with liberal freedoms. However, full implementation of ecomodernist ideals would require widespread embrace of ecophilic values, high-trust societies and acceptance of thick political obligations within both national and global communities. Ecomodernism’s wider commitments to cosmopolitan egalitarianism and separation from nature thus amount to a non-liberal comprehensive public conception of the good. Furthermore, ecomodernism currently lacks an adequate account of how a society that successfully ‘separates’ from nature can nurture green values, or how vulnerable people’s substantive freedoms will be protected during an era of worsening climate harms.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship innovation
• social democracy
• ecomodernism
• anthropocene
• climate policy

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and advice, and the Lars Hierta Memorial Foundation for a travel grant (number FO20160273) that helped facilitate author collaboration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. UNFCCC. 2015. Synthesis report on the aggregate effect of the intended nationally determined contributions. FCCC/CP/2015/7 (30 October, 2015), http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/07.pdf.

2. Andrew Dobson (116) argues that space of ecological citizenship refers to the ‘political community’ created by the ‘ecological footprint’; while an ‘ecological footprint’ represents an estimate of ‘the resource consumption and waste assimilation requirements of a defined human population or economy in terms of a corresponding productive land area’. See Wackernagel and Rees (1998).

3. Rybski et al. (2017) find scale and density of cities only achieves significant carbon efficiencies in the developed world.

4. Although President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal defunded ARPA-E, it received a modest increase in the spending bill that passed Congress.

5. Some ecomodernists also see a significant role for advanced solar technologies, despite their spatial requirements; see Sivaram (2018).

6. In 2016, Sweden (population 9.8 million) consumed 52 million tonnes oil equivalent of primary energy (= 2.217 exajoules; see British Petroleum, 2017. BP Statistical Review of World Energy, p. 7).

7. Dobson’s work echoes Marcel Wissenburg’s (1998, 123) ‘restraint principle’ which focuses on the distribution of scarce environmental goods through time.

8. This debate echoes those between ‘accelerationists’ and ‘localists’ in critical theory (Noys 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Lars Hierta Memorial Foundation [Grant number FO20160273].