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Citizenship Studies
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Green citizenship: a review and critique

Teena Gabrielson

Department of Political Science, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA

Version of record first published: 01 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Teena Gabrielson (2008): Green citizenship: a review and critique, Citizenship Studies, 12:4, 429-446
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Citizenship Studies
Vol. 12, No. 4, August 2008, 429446

Green citizenship: a review and critique

Teena Gabrielson*
Department of Political Science, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA

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( Received 30 May 2007; final version received 19 November 2007 )

This paper reviews the literature on green citizenship and argues that the concept of
citizenship has done much to advance green theory building internally but that in order to
deepen an already substantial area of scholarship, promote a more inclusive and emancipatory
environmental politics, and augment their contribution to the larger body of citizenship
studies, greens will need to broaden their approach to the concept. This review highlights the
tendency within green theorizing to privilege particular conceptions of the natural world and
humans relations to it, and draws attention to the work of those scholars explicitly engaged in
incorporating the social construction of nature into their theories of green citizenship. The
essay concludes by identifying three particular areas in which green theorizing has
contributed to citizenship studies.
Keywords: green citizenship; social construction of nature; emancipation

In both the citizenship and environmental literatures one need not look long to find narratives of
declension. Within the citizenship literature, this narrative begins with a once rich and robust
ancient public sphere directed towards the good life, which was privatized in modernity and
now, as evidenced in security, consumerist and green discourses, is directed towards the
maintenance of mere life alone. From the environmentalist perspective, a once thickly animated
natural world in which humans considered themselves only a part became, in modern times, the
dead matter or mere resources for the use and improvement of humans comfort; a perspective
often considered by greens to be largely responsible for the ecological crisis we currently face. In
both tales, modernity marks the turning point from our once great past to our near certain future
demise.
I begin with these parallels not because they directly inform the literature on green
citizenship, but because they act as a sort of specter haunting the literature and inhibiting the
movement towards a richer engagement with the full range of postmodern perspectives on
citizenship. Where the narrative of civic declension lionizes an ancient understanding of
citizenship that was grounded upon an homogeneous demos, the narrative of environmental
declension idealizes a fairly narrow conception of the natural world and humans appropriate
relationship to it. Together these narratives present a particular challenge for conceptions of
ecological citizenship in that any progressive green politics must move beyond both of these
barriers in order to advance an understanding of citizenship that is both inclusive and
emancipatory.
In one of the earliest articles dedicated explicitly to the concept of ecological citizenship, van
Steenbergen explains his effort to integrate questions of citizenship and the environment as

*Email: tgabrie1@uwyo.edu
ISSN 1362-1025 print/ISSN 1469-3593 online
q 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13621020802184275
http://www.informaworld.com

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follows: Current discussions seem to concern two cultures: one dealing with citizenship
problems and the other with environmental problems, and so far these two cultures have not met.
In this chapter I shall try to bring these two cultures together by raising the issue of the possible
meaning (or, better, meanings) of ecological or environmental citizenship (1994, p. 142).1 Since
this early exploratory essay, the field of green citizenship has burgeoned; it has both broadened
its reach and deepened its theoretical foundation. From the perspective of one recent reviewer,
the field has now come of age (Latta 2007, p. 377).
Despite this maturation, the body of literature on green citizenship is still unfortunately and
unnecessarily narrow. As will become clear in the body of this review, much of the literature on
green citizenship, and particularly the earliest studies, were directed, for the most part, inwardly
in order to attenuate some of the key oppositions that characterized much of early green
scholarship ecocentric/anthropocentric; statist/eco-anarchist; deep/shallow green; radical/
reformist and to construct a more attractive environmental discourse. Towards these ends,
the concept of citizenship has done much to advance theory building among green political
theorists. However, one of the consequences of harnessing the language of citizenship to the
end of sustainability has been a rather anemic conception of citizenship which is advanced
instrumentally and thereby diminishes the concepts democratic potential (Latta and Garside
2005, p. 3, Latta 2007, p. 379).
In a recent edited volume dedicated to the topic, Dobson and Bell take a position well
established in the literature as a whole when they observe that contributors to the book consider a
variety of issues as part of an inquiry into the nature, possibilities, and limits of citizenship as a
way of promoting sustainability (2006, p. 7, emphasis added). In Lattas recent review of the
literature, the author argues that the existing literature tends to treat ecological citizenship
primarily as a normative and institutional tool for promoting a greener future an emphasis that
has muted the democratic sensibility that citizenship might bring to the politics of nature
(2007, pp. 379, 381). Accepting this logic, another critique of the concept, included within
Dobson and Bells volume, favors notions of environmental justice over conceptions of
environmental citizenship as a vehicle for securing change (Agyeman and Evans 2006, p. 200).
In keeping with these critiques, this essay affirms the need for green theorists to refocus on the
democratic and egalitarian aspects of citizenship in their theorizing. However, unlike the reviews
mentioned above, this essay aims to identify those instances where conceptions of green citizenship
tend to idealize particular conceptions of the natural world and humans relations to it, and to draw
attention to the work of those scholars explicitly engaged in incorporating the social construction of
nature into their theories of green citizenship. The essay urges green political theorists to reject the
narratives of declension that lurk about the intersections of citizenship and environmentalism, and
to look outward so as to make deeper connections with other bodies of literature that inform
contemporary understandings of citizenship. In the spirit of van Steenbergens early work, I argue
that a more compelling account of citizenship and further advances in both green thinking and
citizenship studies would stem from a deeper integration of the two bodies of literature.
Much of the contemporary normative literature on citizenship is dominated by the liberal
and civic republican frameworks. If T.H. Marshalls definition of citizenship as a status
bestowed on those who are full members of a community (1950, p. 14) issues in the modern
study of citizenship, Aristotles definition as one who shares in decision and office and has the
capacity to rule and be ruled finely (1984, pp. 87, 91) is cited nearly as often. As appropriated
by scholars of green citizenship, these two frameworks offer contrasting conceptions that are
often characterized in the following way: the liberal model emphasizes citizenship as a public
status that ensures the holder of civil, political and social rights; while the civic republican
model, renewed by the communitarian challenge to liberalism, emphasizes the public duties,
virtues, and practices of citizenship.2 The following review begins with those conceptions of

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green citizenship that are located primarily within the liberal tradition, it then turns to those that
draw most heavily from civic republicanism, and concludes with conceptions of green
citizenship that move beyond these frameworks in significant ways.
Green citizenship and the liberal model
For many greens the liberal model is an attractive one for addressing environmental issues both
for what it avoids and for what it offers. Unlike the more radical green approaches, the liberal
model seeks to avoid the tendency to assert sustainability as the exclusive end of citizenship
because of its commitment to value pluralism. Among the advantages of a liberal approach is a
conception of rights that can be extended both in terms of the appropriate range of subjects to
whom the rights and duties of citizenship apply, and in the substantive content of social rights
historically considered critical in liberal democracies.3
As an example of the first approach, Christoff (1996) argues that the rights of both animals
and future generations must be represented by ecological citizens and formalized in culture,
law, and constitutional rights (on constitutional rights also see Hayward 1998, 2000). He argues
for a hierarchy of value in which universal ecological values or principles (like conservation
of bio-diversity, the basic needs of future generations) trump particular ecological values (such
as protection of individuals of a species) and narrow anthropocentric values a position that
he acknowledges compromises liberal democracy (1996, pp. 163 164). Christoffs ecological
citizen is motivated by the material condition of environmental degradation and depends upon
an environmental solidarity born of the revitalization of civil society and the associational
opportunities created both by it and a reformed green state (1996, p. 159). Christoffs essay
offers an excellent overview of the potential of a reformed liberalism, but does not fully
consider the thorny issues involved in negotiating an ecological hierarchy of value with
liberalisms commitment to value pluralism.
Using the second approach, environmentalists have argued for extending the content of social
rights to include, for example, substantive rights for fresh air and clean water (Dean 2001, p. 491).
Such an approach has been useful in pressing questions of intergenerational justice (Barry 1977,
1978) and has been central in the literatures on environmental racism and environmental justice;
literatures which probe the intersections of social justice and environmental degradation within a
liberal, rights-based model (Faber 1998, Bullard 2005; see also Agyeman 2005).
These examples illustrate the extent to which greens have adapted the liberal model and
its emphasis upon rights in order to address environmental concerns. However, for many,
and particularly for deep greens, the liberal model embodies the instrumental rationality,
anthropocentrism, and economic expansionism largely responsible for environmental degradation
(Naess 1973, Goodin 1992). From this vantage point, the environmental approach is entirely
insufficient to the challenge of ecological crisis.
One response to this problem has been to distinguish environmentalism from what is
conceived to be the more ecologically attractive and radical ideology of ecologism. Dobson
writes, Environmentalism argues for a managerial approach to environmental problems, secure
in the belief that they can be solved without fundamental changes in present values or patterns of
production and consumption, whereas Ecologism holds that a sustainable and fulfilling
existence presupposes radical changes in our relationship with the non-human natural world, and
in our mode of social and political life (2000a, p. 2). Dobson argues that the radical potential of
the ideological approach derives from its commitment to the limits to growth hypothesis, a
vision of sustainable society, and ecocentrism. His work has spawned a large body of literature
dedicated to specifying the commitments of ecologism, some of which will be addressed in the
following section of this essay (Hayward 1995, 1998, Dryzek 1997, Smith 1998, Dean 2001).4

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Yet, for liberals, the ideological approach violates what might be considered liberalisms most
basic premise and one of the most significant achievements of modern political thought: the priority
of the right over the good. The ecological approach requires deep attitude change among most
individuals because it asserts a teleological model that articulates a thick conception of the good. In
response to such models, several recent works have begun to set forth a theory of green liberalism
(Wissenburg 1998, Barry and Wissenburg 2001, Hailwood 2004, Wissenburg and Levy 2004).
Initiating this effort, Wissenburg (1998) seeks both to identify liberalisms compatibility
with green thinking and to assess essentially how green liberal policies might become without
violating the fundamental commitments of liberal political thought (also see Beckman 2001). To
take a brief example from a careful and well argued book, Wissenburg maintains that liberals
must reject the deeper green positions of ecocentrism and the intrinsic value of nature on the
following grounds: the first violates the most basic premise of liberal thought, the freedom to
construct ones own life plans; and the second is confused by its failure to recognize that all
value stems from a subject.5
Wissenburgs liberalism endorses an anthropocentric egalitarianism and asserts that even if
an object only has external value it may still be protected on the grounds that it is completely
insubstitutable and essential to a subjects plan of life (1998, p. 207). Wissenburgs chief end is
to maintain liberalisms distinctive commitment to value pluralism while still advancing
environmental interests. While the liberalism he advocates rightly identifies the extent to which
the ideological approach unreasonably restricts individual autonomy, it fails to acknowledge the
extent to which a particular conception of the natural world as property is entrenched in
liberal thought.
In response to those who would argue that environmental citizenship merely extends liberal
rights, Bell (2005) argues that environmental concerns appropriately integrated into liberal
thought actually strengthen liberalism by dislodging the privilege of property and expanding value
pluralism to individuals relations with the natural world. Bell urges that a more coherent
liberalism would envision the environment as a provider of basic needs and a subject about
which there is reasonable disagreement (2005, p. 190). The significance of this conception for
liberal thought and its potential then for advancing green initiatives should not be underestimated.
Bells approach reveals the illiberal tendencies of the liberal tradition when applied to our
understanding of humans appropriate relation to the natural world. But, rather than accept the
deep green alternative (which privileges a different conception), Bells contribution is to provide a
means for integrating a hierarchy of value regarding environmental concerns into liberal thought
while simultaneously advancing liberalisms commitment to value pluralism by extending it to
our understanding of humans appropriate relation to the natural world.
In keeping with this extension, at the policy level, Wissenburg argues that the only policy
strategy that is really compatible with liberal-democratic principles is ecological modernization
which he defines in the following way:
Ecological modernization conceives of the environmental problem as a matter of fact rather than
morals. It is a means-oriented approach, built around the assumption that given preferences and
desires ought to be and can be answered in a different, ecologically responsible way. It does not
neglect the processes of preference-formation in civil society but assumes preferences to be
inviolable. It presumes that it is not the task of the political system to adapt people to an ideal society
but the other way around. (1998, p. 65)

Wissenburgs liberalism is not inconsistent with sustainability but demands that individuals
must be the source of change, rather than the state, and, that change may take any number of
possible forms. In Wissenburgs analysis, liberals may be obliged to act in a manner consistent
with deep green demands, but the theory does not exclude the possibility of turning the planet
into a giant steel-grey Manhattan (1998, pp. 208 209).

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Avoiding such an outcome rests on the necessity of changing citizen preferences, a challenge
Wissenburg argues deliberative democracy cannot meet and that turns to indoctrination at the
hands of communitarians. Stopping short of the critical question regarding the exact character of
green virtues and the institutions that might be responsible for cultivating them, Wissenburg
concludes, the development of sustainable preferences, of a sustainable attitude and character,
is the responsibility of each and every single individual (1998, p. 226).
This focus upon the responsible individual as the primary solution to environmental
problems is convincingly critiqued by Maniates (2001). Maniates argues that the accelerating
individualization of responsibility which recommends as solutions to environmental crisis
planting a tree, riding a bike or recycling is undermining our ability to effectively imagine and
respond to environmental threats and depoliticizing the issue (2001, p. 34). In its stead, Maniates
encourages the re-politicization of environmental issues through a reframing of those issues that
accounts for their structural and institutional features and endorses deliberative and participatory
democratic decision-making processes.
Pursuing another line of criticism, Stephens (2001) has argued it may well be that the
conception of the self at the very center of Wissenburgs liberalism limits any discussion of the
practices of virtue that can be pursued. Stephenss critique is a formidable one because it points
to the question of whether the liberal model can effectively cultivate the virtues of
environmental citizenship without placing its fundamental commitment of the prioritization of
the right over the good in jeopardy. Stephenss affirmative response advocates a different kind
of liberalism. He argues that contemporary green liberals must take a pragmatic approach and
endorse the more relational self at the center of a perfectionist, Millian liberalism in order to
inculcate virtues of care in relation to the natural (2001; see also Stephens 1996). While
Stephens chooses to turn to an alternative conception of the self from within the liberal tradition,
other greens have found the civic republican and communitarian traditions more conducive to
their effort to articulate and shore up green commitments.
Virtue, duty, the practices of citizenship, and civic republicanism
The recent revival of the civic republican tradition (Dagger 1997, Petit 1997, Oldfield 1998) has
brought to the fore an understanding of citizenship that emphasizes virtue, duty, selfgovernance, and community. Ecological concerns have enlivened this already throaty debate
regarding the appropriate virtues and responsibilities of citizenship (van Steenbergen 1994,
Smith 1998, Dean 2001, Dobson 2000b). So much so, that many greens working within this
tradition agree with Dobsons point that one of ecological citizenships most crucial
contributions to contemporary theorizing is its focus on the duties and obligations that attend
citizenship (Dobson 2000b, p. 41).
The emphasis within the republican tradition on the common or public good supports the
green effort to restrain excessive self-interest and its environmentally detrimental effects. Yet,
greens differ on how best to incorporate the natural world within the humanist conception of the
common good central to civic republicanism. For Dobson, this means that obligations are owed
primarily to strangers, distant in both space and time; and that they involve the virtues of care
and compassion, practiced in both the private and the public sphere (2000b, p. 59). While for
others, like Mark Smith, these duties are extended to the natural world by displacing the human
species from the central ethical position it has always held and adopting ecocentrism resulting
in a new politics of obligation (1998, p. 99).
In a similar vein, Curry (2000) encourages an ecological republicanism in which the
political is firmly grounded in the larger context of the natural world, yet not determined by it.
Curry outlines an understanding of community that would apply to both the natural and the

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social and then bolsters this definition with the civic republican notion that all communities
require certain practices to sustain them.6 In Currys model, the common good, which
necessarily includes the natural environment, only can be maintained through the exercise of
active citizenship, or the shared commitment to a set of practices that uphold the public good
against the corrupting influence of self-interest. To humble human interests within a larger
republic of life Curry draws upon Machiavellis conception of virtu, which he argues involves
an extended sense of embodied relationships, in lived communities and specific places a link
which recognizing and revaluing the natural dimension would strengthen (2000, p. 1069).
This emphasis upon locality or place is a prominent one, both among those greens drawing
on the civic republican tradition to strengthen conceptions of community and among those
relying on post-structuralist or post-colonial scholarship to critique the more violent abstractions
of neo-liberalism. Curtin argues that liberal imperialism and the conception of citizenship it
entails has been used to marginalize both peoples and places, especially those peoples who
understand themselves or are defined by others as being defined by their connections to
particular places (2003, p. 296).
On a similar note, Reid and Taylor argue that ecological citizenship is to speak first of
citizens embodying their particular places of ecological experience with common concerns
(and concerns grounded in the commons) potentially leading to expansive spatiotemporal
horizons of responsible action (2000, p. 440). Such positioning guards against what Reid
and Taylor refer to as body-blindness, a consequence of technocratic managerial ideologies
of industrial capitalism that contributes to environmental degradation (p. 440). However,
each of these authors also struggles to negotiate the exclusiveness that such a robust conception
of community demands and the moral necessity to respect value pluralism, a point discussed
further below.
Like Curry above, Curtin argues that the moral orbit of citizenship must be extended to
ecological communities (2003, p. 293). Curtin also emphasizes the role of civic practices in the
construction of that community. However, where Curry relies upon the civic republican tradition
primarily to broaden our understanding of community, Curtin uses the communitarian critique of
the modern liberal conception of moral identity in order to urge an ecological citizenship that
requires that we see our moral identity as partially defined by public practices that allow us to
achieve cooperative goods for the more-than-human community (2003, p. 303, emphasis
added).
John Barrys work (1996, 1999, 2002) shares with the above an emphasis on the practices of
citizenship as a means to cultivating virtue and constructing an ecological identity, but rejects
the ideal of one integrated human and ecological community.7 Barry explains the turn to
citizenship among greens as a response to the problem of convincing large numbers of people to
adopt attitudes and behaviors consistent with sustainability. Because institutional restructuring is
insufficient alone, Barry argues that such reforms must be supplemented with changes in
general behavior (weak green citizenship) and values and practices (strong green citizenship)
(2002, p. 147).8
To affect such a change of heart and mind, Barry advocates a virtue-based conception of
citizenship in which intellectual virtues, or a basic ecological literacy grounded upon scientific
knowledge, and moral virtues such as self-reliance, self-restraint (1999, pp. 67 69, 228),
prudence, foresight (1999, p. 35) and the consideration of non-citizen interests (2002, p. 148) are
gained through the practices of citizenship. Barrys ideal, like Curtins (2003) above, is one
which cuts very deep to the core of ones moral character or identity. He writes, Essentially
the greening of citizenship is an attempt to encourage and create an identity and mode of
thinking and acting, and ultimately character traits and dispositions that accord with the
standards and aims of ecological stewardship (2002, p. 145).9

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Two particular problems are worthy of mention regarding the identity approach, both related
to the depth of its claim. The first holds that such an approach would seem to urge a sort of deep
conversion that few can be expected to make. I share the grave doubts of Ball regarding
whether the entire human species, or a substantial portion thereof, can create and learn an
entirely new moral language within the ever-diminishing time available to them (2001, p. 98).10
A second problem, identified by Light (2002), is that identity models are particularly vulnerable
to charges of exclusivity. By identifying environmental concerns as appropriate to a particular
world view, identity theorists run the risk of alienating those who do not share such a view.
Instead, Light (2002) favors a citizenship model in which duties to the natural world are
articulated as interests and the participatory practices of nature restoration become a means, not
of transforming ones identity, but of working simultaneously to restore nature and to restore
the participatory and strong democratic elements of their local communities (2002, p. 159).
Light argues that the appropriate goal of ecological citizenship is to negotiate citizen interests
while moderating them with attention to the environment. Thus, Light shares Barrys interest in
democratic practices but sees nature restoration as a means to strengthening democratic practice,
where Barry sees democratic practice as a means of reattaching humans to the natural world.
First and foremost among the practices Barry emphasizes are deliberative democratic forms.
There are three primary advantages that recommend these forms: first, Barry asserts such forms
are appropriate to the consideration of environmental questions because human relations with
the natural world are marked by uncertainty, contingency, and plurality; second, Barry argues
these forms are more likely to persuade citizens to consider the interests of affected noncitizens than would a system of simple representation; and finally, these practices serve as a
substitute for the agricultural practices that once attached humans to the non-human natural
world and thereby provide the means by which citizens can reconnect with and remind
themselves of their dependence upon it (2002, p. 138).
Barrys citizenship ideal of ecological stewardship is based upon the model of agricultural
stewardship. Barry argues that the democratic procedures and institutions through which
societies debate, argue about, and ultimately organize and regulate their relations (or what I have
called elsewhere their metabolism) to the environment are the modern substitute for direct
experience of the land that characterizes agricultural stewardship (2002, p. 138, emphasis
added). Barrys understanding of what motivates the individual within agricultural stewardship
and how it translates to ecological stewardship is of particular concern because it is at the core of
his conception of green citizenship and takes up one of the most significant obstacles facing
greens today. Addressing this issue requires we ask: what kind of experience is critical to the
cultivation of virtues under the agricultural stewardship model; what motivates individuals to
engage in those practices; and how can democratic practices essentially recreate that experience?
Barrys effort to emphasize the extent to which contemporary citizens experience of the
natural world is largely mediated at times causes him to lose sight of the fact that citizens of
modern liberal democracies urban, suburban, and rural do have direct experience of the nonhuman natural world. It is impossible not to. My concern in raising this issue is that Barry
unwittingly privileges a particular conception of the natural world in his articulation of this ideal
and in doing so re-creates a kind of privilege endemic to the social world of liberal democracies
rather than the virtues that supposedly stem from contact with the natural world. Barry explains
that our normative concerns for the earth take on different epistemological frameworks at the
macro and micro levels. Concern at the global level requires an abstract understanding of
universal processes whereas at the micro level we may arrive at ethically richer and stronger
attachments to parks, gardens, allotments, forests, watersheds, mountains, particular animals and
species (1999, p. 128); a sentiment that pervades the works of Curry, Curtin, and numerous
others as well.

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Barry acknowledges that such attachments to landscape are important in the constitution of
collective identity and may also be a way of preserving cultural heritage (1999, p. 126). While
Barry does not expand upon this notion, recent work at the intersections of geography and
citizenship suggests that such landscapes may have democratic associations, but they are far
more likely to be landscapes of national identity and power which may also mark the power and
domination of an elite (Desforges et al. 2005, p. 441). Thus, I would argue we would do well to
adopt a more critical attitude in our understanding of such landscapes and the motives that drive
individual attachments to them (see Olwig 1995). Further, greater effort should be made to
attend to the diversity of experiences that mark humans relations with the natural world rural,
suburban, and urban.
To return to the question at hand, it seems more likely that the parallel Barry seeks to draw
rests on the particular experience of transforming the natural world for productive ends, an
experience which, he claims, instills specific kinds of knowledge as well as the virtues Barry
recommends. If democratic processes are to take the place of agricultural ones, then we must
understand both what motivates the individual to partake in such practices and the means by
which those practices instill the desired virtues. In the ideal of agricultural stewardship,
sustainable environmental practices are rewarded because they redound to the individual.
Likewise, knowledge gained through direct experience of the land further contributes to the
prosperity of the agricultural operation and lastly, the virtues of moderation and restraint in
consumption are cultivated by the experience of what production entails. Thus, attachment,
interest, agency, and knowledge all contribute to the cultivation of the particular virtues Barry
extols under agricultural stewardship.
Yet, the agricultural stewardship model that informs Barrys ideal only contributes to the
desired virtues where individuals own, control, and are tied to particular pieces of land. In the
agrarian ideal, as articulated by individuals like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the social
context was as important to this ideal as the natural. The agricultural practices and vices of
American farmers in the early nineteenth century, when land was widely available, offer one
alternative, and contemporary farming practices under agri-business offer another. What Barrys
model fails to sufficiently entertain is that individuals direct experience of the natural world
even productive and transformational experiences can be, and often are, alienating. Thus, the
larger social-political context within which ones interaction with the natural world occurs may
significantly alter the experience of the interaction. Such models need to be even more attentive
to the extent to which individual interactions with the natural world are not only socially
constructed, but conditioned by social relations a point very trenchantly made by Williams
(1980).
For the contemporary citizen, Barrys contention is that participation in democratic decisionmaking on environmental issues, or what he refers to as ecological collective management
combined with scientific instruction, can instill the virtues of sustainability. Yet, if democratic
deliberation is to act as a surrogate for agricultural practices, access alone to these processes
must be sufficient to motivate individuals to participate in decision-making on environmental
issues, and participation in the process must instill green virtues.11 This is a rather tall order.
Barry is strongest in his explanation of how deliberative democratic processes make possible
the transformation of citizen preferences. Thus, to the extent that open, transparent, deliberative
processes create opportunities for both persuasion and agency it is possible to see how these
practices might, slowly over time, lead to greater citizen involvement and green successes in
both attitude transformation and public policy. Early empirical evidence also suggests positive
results on this score (Smith 2004). But, as Barry recognizes, no such outcome is assured. People
might also be persuaded that Wissenburgs global steel grey Manhattan is the most desirable
solution.

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Finally, Barry is weakest in explaining why the opportunity to participate alone would
motivate someone to participate. A threat to ones health or employment due to a proposed
developmental project or environmental regulation might constitute such motivation.
Alternatively, Barry seems to imply that our ethically rich and nationalistic attachments to
place and the stronger moral commitments they entail will provide that motivation (1999,
pp. 127 128). Unfortunately, such a conception relies upon an unreasonably narrow conception
of the natural world; a position that is inconsistent with Barrys stated commitment to
recognizing a plurality of humans interests and relations to the physical environment.
I would argue that this commitment is better attained by the kind of position Biro advances as
a denaturalized ecological politics or a politics that retains a sense of the essentiality of ones
connection to place but does not rely on a reified naturalization of these places (2005, p. 211).
Such a politics requires the inculcation of an inherently critical attitude a disposition notably
missing from the list of virtues mentioned above. Developing such a critical attitude towards
the categories of both nature and politics is also essential to Meyers goal of establishing a
more expansive environmental politics (2001, p. 138). Meyer argues that these categories are
more usefully conceptualized in a dialectical relationship where on the one hand, the way we
shape the boundaries and realms of human life are [acknowledged to be] political decisions that
affect our understanding of what the natural world is and how we as humans interact with it, and
on the other is the fact that this natural world shapes who we are precisely the we that
construct the boundaries in the first place (2001, p. 136). Both experience and place then
come to be key categories for negotiating the nature politics relationship and articulating its
complexity and diversity.12
Space, scale, and citizenship
The liberal and civic republican models emerge from an understanding of the polity where
territory, state sovereignty, citizenship rights and duties, and, at times, a homogeneous national
culture are wed in a single ideal. The above conceptions of green citizenship challenge key
aspects of these models, but still largely work within them. Yet, as Gilbert and Phillips contend,
A framework of citizenship based on an evolution of rights (civil to political to social) within a
national context provides a categorization and typology that are too limited for contemporary
realities (2003, p. 318).
The transnational character of environmental degradation, globalization, the logic of
neo-liberalism, and widespread migration are some of the most prominent factors altering the
contexts of contemporary citizenship. Much of the more recent work on citizenship feminist,
multicultural, queer, transnational, post-colonial, and green addresses both the unbundling of
the traditional ideal of citizenship in contemporary political practices and the theoretical
attractiveness of conceptions of citizenship with alternative spatial foundations. In the last section,
I reviewed several essays that draw upon the geographic concept of place to articulate and
advance green concerns. Here, the geographic concepts of space and scale, particularly as they
interact with categories of difference, play an important role in the theorizing of green citizenship.
In contesting the notion of universal citizenship, feminists were among the first to
demonstrate the linking of public space, through the public/private opposition, with the logic of
exclusion (see, for example, Yuval-Davis 1997, Lister 1997, 2007). For these theorists and a host
of others (including queer theorists, critical race theorists, and multiculturalists, to name a few)
the traditional liberal and republican conceptions of citizenship despite the extension of formal
civil, political, and social rights fail to sufficiently include, acknowledge, or recognize the
diversity of people in modern, pluralist, liberal democracies (Young 1990, Taylor 1992,
Kymlicka 1995).

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Attending to the spatial dimensions of citizenship more specifically, historians, political

theorists, and geographers working on these issues have shown how ideological commitments
and institutional practices create and reinforce hierarchical orderings of citizens within the polity
which correspond to differential rights, liberties, and political access at any one time (Shklar
1991, Massey 1994, Sibley 1995, Kerber 1997, Rocco 2004, Castles 2005, Ong 2006). Today, the
problems raised by differential citizenship have been exacerbated by the economic migration
prompted by globalization, the strategic and uneven embrace of neo-liberal logic by nationstates, and the nationalist response of securitization. As Yasemin Soysal explains, The same
global-level processes and institutional frameworks that foster postnational membership also
reify the nation-state and its sovereignty . . . This paradox manifests itself as a deterritorialized
expansion of rights despite the territorialized closure of polities (1998, p. 206). As rights are
universalized, fears over withering social entitlements and national security often fuel nationalist
sentiments. Thus, differential access to the rights and entitlements of citizenship has grown under
the conditions of globalization (Ong 1999, 2006, Castles and Davidson 2000, Benhabib 2004).
Translating the implications of this point more specifically for greens, Jelin (2000) argues
that environmental rights have now become a central component of human rights and in that
capacity continue to wear away at the sovereignty of the nation-state, which must in turn address
these issues in order to maintain its legitimacy. The transnational and global character of
ecological problems also clearly challenges both the legitimacy and capacity of nation-states
(van Steenbergen 1994, Christoff 1996, Dean 2001). These developments suggest the extent to
which green concerns are involved in the production, reconfiguration, or contestation of
particular differentiations, orderings and hierarchies among geographical scales or a politics of
scale (Brenner 2001, p. 600).
For Jelin, like Maniates above, this means the individualist approach of most liberal
democracies is inadequate. What is needed is a collectivist approach aimed at creating new
political spaces internationally in which environmental citizens network and advocate change.
Such spaces may also provide the opportunity for negotiating the tensions between universalist
rights and positions of difference on environmental issues. Jelin urges, For environmental
rights, the key issues are the scale of social action on one hand; the social meaning of nature on
the other (2000, p. 55). The first requires a range of institutionalized decision-making structures
in which individuals and groups might participate to advance their claims, while the second
demands sensitivity to the particularist conceptions of, and myriad relations to, the natural world
that stem from cultural difference.
Yet, it is also critical to remember that scales are socially constructed categories and
therefore liable to re-hierarchization in the process of political contestation. Jelins work is
particularly useful for her attention to questions of space, scale and diversity as analytical
categories in the theorizing of green citizenship. These considerations are also taken up in
Szerszynskis (2006) more empirically grounded essay which examines the visual practices of
citizenship in an effort to understand the potential for, what might be called, scalar crossings
of the global and local by citizens on environmental questions. Szerszynski probes the
understandings of local landscape among different social groups in the coastal plain of West
Cumbria in northern England in an effort to understand the sort of transformation of perception
necessary to foster the kind of enlarged thinking demanded by environmental citizenship
(2006, p. 85). In doing so, Szersynskis work avoids asserting a privileged conception of the
natural world, takes social difference seriously, and seeks to understand the mechanisms by
which environmental understandings intersect with practices of citizenship.
Further challenging territorially bounded conceptions of citizenship, recent work in human
geography offers a relational and topological way of conceptualizing space that Desforges argues
can be utilised in order to advocate new, normative and potentially liberating spaces of political

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practice (Desforges et al. 2005, p. 443). These conceptions emphasize the themes of networks,
connectivity, propinquity, diversity, and the translocal as a means of reconceptualizing
citizen relations (Massey 1994, Amin et al. 2003, Amin 2004). Building on this work, Gilbert and
Phillips (2003) argue for a performative conception of environmental citizenships through which
citizens act to defend and enhance democratic rights and to enlarge the spaces of democratic
struggle. In keeping with the dynamic, participatory, and emancipatory components of their
conception, the authors imagine citizenship as a continual process of creation and transformation
of both society and nature (2003, p. 319).
Gilbert and Phillipss conception effectively avoids the reification of nature and its potential
for exclusion through the notion of socio-ecological citizenships (2003, p. 328). This concept
acknowledges the differentiated and multilayered character of contemporary citizenships and in
doing so rejects any notion of an essentialist grounding for green commitments. Thus,
citizenship becomes a means of articulating and defending environmental concerns within a
context of competing claims (both among and within individuals). Persuasively, the authors
argue that the dichotomy between nature and society is ineffective in describing contemporary
realities; rather, nature and society are both integral to and irreducible to each other (2003,
p. 320). Such theorizing successfully challenges the narratives of declension, with which I began
this essay, but may not offer a sufficient response to asymmetries of power in the articulation of
competing conceptions of citizenship.
In his Citizenship and the Environment (2003), Dobson offers the most extended recent
development of the concept of green citizenship. Regarding the issue of space, one of Dobsons
most significant achievements is his reconceptualization of the political space of ecological
citizenship as the ecological footprint. Like many greens, Dobson turns to citizenship as a
means of addressing the problem of cultivating ecologically enlightened attitudes and behaviors
among citizens within liberal-democratic states. But, rather than grounding his model in a virtue
ethic or seeking to extend the political community to include the non-human natural world,
Dobson advocates a redistributive model grounded in the consummate political virtue, justice.
Dobsons post-cosmopolitan citizenship of which ecological citizenship is the pre-eminent
example rejects the contractual basis of obligation in the liberal and republican models for one
grounded in historical and material conditions. Dobson advocates a transnational and
associational conception of citizenship in which the space of political obligation is produced by
the material production and reproduction of daily life in an unequal and asymmetrically
globalizing world (2003, pp. 21, 30). By altering the traditional conception of obligation,
Dobson extends the political space of citizenship such that inhabitants of globalizing nations are
always already acting on . . . strangers to whom we have some antecedent action, undertaking,
agreement, relationship, or the like (2003, pp. 49, 67). The duty of sustainable living then
extends to the public and private spheres, is expressed through the feminine virtues of care and
compassion, and urges active participation in those networks dedicated to sustainability.13
Dobsons non-contractual conception of obligation is grounded upon a materialist conception of
harm that reaches beyond territorial boundaries and both backwards and forwards in time.
Dobsons work is admirable for its attention to the vast inequalities created and sustained by
globalization and sure to be exacerbated by climate change and the demands for justice these
necessarily make upon industrialized liberal democracies. Also commendable is the grounding
of his understanding of obligation in the historical and material practices of liberal-democratic
states and citizens. Yet, Dobsons emphasis on asymmetrical obligation unnecessarily violates
the commitment to equality associated with citizenship and portrays civic duty as a largely
individualistic and elitist exercise.
As Latta argues, The economically (and ecologically) powerful are the political agents of
Dobsons ecological citizenship, while those on the other side of unequal material relations

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remain passive counterparts, objects of an imperative for ecological distribution instead of active
citizens in the reconfiguration of global futures (Latta 2007, p. 384).14
Also problematic are Dobsons recommendations for implementing his ideal notion of
citizenship. Dobson endorses the public school system, as does Barry (1999), as an appropriate
means for cultivating ecological citizenship. But, more than that, as a way of ensuring its
centrality to the curriculum, Dobson writes: A case could be made that the entire curriculum be
taught through these citizenships [ecological and environmental], because practically every
theme in the curriculum is importantly present in them (2003, p. 194). Such an ambitious
position assumes agreement on the ends of education and uses citizenship as the vehicle by
which environmental concerns would come to trump all others.
As Carlsson and Jensen (2006) have shown, the effectiveness of environmental education in
motivating student action and attitude change in public schools depends, in large part, on the
pedagogical approach taken. Genuine participatory processes, in which environmental ends and
values can be seriously debated and student decisions implemented, result in greater success.
Clearly, such programs require initiative, dedication, flexibility, imagination, and coordination
among numerous individuals. Where possible, the adoption of such programs should be
encouraged. Nonetheless, the schools remain only one venue for gaining environmental literacy
and engaging in environmental decision-making, one which, in many nations, is fraught with
public contestation over the value of such programs and the appropriate relation of
environmental to nationalist ends.
In offering a model of sustainable citizenship, Bullen and Whitehead (2005) provide one
example of this tension. Taking much from Dobsons work, and the newer topographical and
relational studies in geography, Bullen and Whitehead define sustainable citizenship as:
a trans-human community of being which crosses time, space and substance . . . a form of unbounded
and relational citizenship unbounded to the extent that it challenges the traditional spatial,
temporal and subjective boundaries of citizenship, and relational in the sense that it requires a keen
awareness of the connections which exist between social actions, economic practices, and
environmental process. (2005, p. 504)

However, the authors part ways with Dobson on two particular points. First, they argue that
sustainable citizenship must be extended to the non-human (2005, p. 504) because failing to do
so assumes that the citizen predates the various bio-ecological processes which enable
citizenship to even be conceived of in the first place (2005, p. 507). The authors argue that such
a restrictive view of citizenship reinforces the opposition between humans and animals, society
and nature.
Second, they argue that despite the theoretical innovativeness of the concept, there is
significant evidence to suggest wariness regarding the capacity of the public schools as an
effective vehicle for policy implementation. Based on empirical evidence drawn from a case study
on the institutionalization of a curriculum for global citizenship and sustainable development in
Welsh schools, the authors found that the homogenizing tendencies of school-based learning tend
to result in the standardization of teaching around nationally conceived boundaries and
educational institutions thereby negating much of what makes notions of sustainable citizenship
compelling (2005, p. 512).
Bullen and Whiteheads recognition of the contingent character of citizenship and their
emphasis upon agency offer a welcome new direction to the primary concentration upon duty
and obligation within the citizenship literature. While the recognition of industrialized countries
obligation to developing nations is an absolute necessity, a conception of citizenship must also
be attractive it must encourage participation, deliberation, and collective action in a manner
that Dobsons theory largely leaves unaddressed.

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Conclusion
I have argued in this essay that the body of literature on green citizenship, as a whole, is
unnecessarily and unfortunately narrow; a problem that stems primarily from the tendency to
make citizenship instrumental to the attainment of green ends. Where others have demonstrated
the extent to which this approach diminishes the discursive breadth of the concept of citizenship
and thereby blunts its democratic potential, this review alerts readers to a second and related
problem associated with the instrumental approach. Namely, that it tends to delimit political
contest regarding the appropriate relation of humans to the natural world.
The above pages illustrate how a wide variety of green conceptions of citizenship tend, either
explicitly or implicitly, to entrench or privilege particular constructions of the natural world and
human relations to it. This tendency is exacerbated by the instrumental approach to citizenship
and results in conceptions which are unattractive for their exclusionary and elitist leanings.
Despite this shortcoming, this review also demonstrates that greens are particularly well situated
to attend to this problem and thereby contribute to the larger body of citizenship studies. Among
green theorists, there is an increasing effort to recognize and theorize the significance of
culturally diverse valuations of the natural world and the variety of humans relations to it for the
practices of citizenship.
While this work is still at an early stage, I want to emphasize the importance of it both for
advancing a more inclusive and emancipatory environmental politics and for deepening our
understanding of the historic embeddedness of the concept of citizenship within the
nature/culture dualism such that we might theorize these relations in new and more compelling
ways. Further work is necessary in specifying the ways in which cultural contestation regarding
understandings of and attachments to nature are played out in political arenas. Scholarship
directed toward theorizing the logics of such contestation and the strategic imperatives that
inform the conceptualization of citizenship by those in positions of power would contribute
much to the literature on green citizenship.15
Such work would also deepen what I consider to be another significant contribution of green
theorists to the larger body of citizenship studies, which is attention to the scalar dimensions of
environmental problems, and relatedly, citizenship practices. While the popular bumper sticker
argues we ought to think globally and act locally, Szerszynskis (2006) work demonstrates that
the processes that might allow us to do so are varied and fairly opaque, therefore requiring
significant empirical study. Thus, thinking in terms of a politics of scale provides insight into our
conceptualizations of environmental problems, environmental thinking, citizenship practices and
the relations among these.
A final contribution of green theorists to the larger body of citizenship studies is the
increased attention to and enlarged scope of citizen obligation in most conceptions of green
citizenship. While this emphasis has provided an important correction to the earlier focus on
rights, I would suggest that, today, greens ought to leaven the focus on guilt, responsibility, and
burden with larger measures of critical reflectiveness, agency, hope, and opportunity. On this, we
might do well to remember Thoreaus opening lines to Walden: I do not propose to write an ode
to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to
wake my neighbors up (1992, p. 1).
The last decade has shown significant and promising growth in the literature on green
citizenship. Where the concept of citizenship has proven useful in bridging the oppositions that
characterized the first wave of green political thought, the character of environmental issues
has challenged many of the oppositions that constituted traditionally modern conceptions of
citizenship thereby deepening our understanding of both environmental issues and contemporary
citizenship (Dobson 2006). As the evidence of anthropogenic climate change mounts and the

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T. Gabrielson

window of opportunity for democratic action narrows, the call to study the questions that
animate the literature on green citizenship becomes an imperative.

Acknowledgements

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A previous version of this essay was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science
Association, Las Vegas, March 2007. The author would like to thank the participants at this event and
especially R. McGreggor Cawley, Piers H.G. Stephens, Peter Nyers, and the anonymous reviewers for their
valuable suggestions on previous drafts of this article.

Notes
1.

2.

3.
4.

5.
6.
7.

8.
9.
10.
11.

12.

I have chosen the term green citizenship for this review because of its level of generality; I use this
term to encompass the more developed conceptions of citizenship advocated by particular authors
such as environmental citizenship, ecological citizenship, ecological stewardship, sustainable
citizenship, and so forth. Throughout, I make an effort to use the terms chosen by the authors, in large
part because there is no shared understanding of the distinction between say ecological and
environmental citizenship.
Such an abbreviated delineation obviously reduces the complexity and richness of each of these
political traditions (and ignores much of the most interesting and nuanced work by scholars of both
traditions). Not surprisingly, the strongest advocates of each tradition have made the most of the
oppositions outlined above.
This review does not cover the extensive literature on animal rights and the attendant theoretical and
moral questions that arise in seeking to extend either the notion of rights or of subject status in this way.
The primary contribution of Deans essay is a pair of typologies that map the moral discourses
grounding traditional conceptions of citizenship and those of green thinking. His typology offers four
models of traditional citizenship: entrepreneurism, survivalism, conformism, and reformism. While
the companion green typology includes: ecological modernization, deep ecology, green
communitarianism, and eco-socialism. Dean favors eco-socialist citizenship which is founded upon
two ethical premises: a principle of co-responsibility and an ethic of care which he argues result in a
system of human rights founded on the ideal of the independent citizen and a system [of care]
founded on the recognition of human interdependency (2001, p. 501). For other ideological
approaches see Ball and Dagger (1991) and Vincent (1992).
Wissenburg (1998) also rejects what he calls radical individualist methods or eco-terrorism as
inconsistent with liberalism; a point that might be refined given the tradition of civil disobedience
within the liberal paradigm.
His criteria for community include: a material and social connection among members and some kind
and degree of awareness of other members.
The morality that informs Barrys ethic of use is relational: it distinguishes between two distinct
moral spheres, that which defines humans obligations to one another and that which defines humans
obligations to the non-human world. Ideally such an ethic stresses the rather obvious idea that
the participants are not an undifferentiated humanity facing an equally undifferentiated nature
(1999, p. 61).
Barrys position here also signals the rejection of deep green eco-anarchism in favor of democracy
and the acceptance of a meaningful role for the state in addressing environmental problems (1999);
yet his more recent work steps perilously close to justifying authoritarian techniques (2006).
See also Thomashow (1995). For a more radical conception of environmentalism as identity politics
see Sandilands (1999). For a conception of environmental virtues that does not run nearly as deep see
Connelly (2006).
While Barry, in particular, seems to be moving away from such a position, relying on identity as the
grounding for his civic model opens the door to such charges.
On this point, Barry writes, citizenship within the context of collective ecological management
becomes a way of transforming urban dwellers into ecological stewards, giving those who may
have no direct experience of nature some responsibility for, and democratic input into, managing the
metabolism between society and the environment (1999, p. 259).
See Chaloupka and Cawley (1993) for another take on this kind of project.

Citizenship Studies
13.
14.

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15.

443

Dobsons integration of feminist contributions to the literature on citizenship is fairly shallow. For an
excellent critique of the literature from a feminist perspective see MacGregor (2006).
A similar point is made by Hayward who seeks to illuminate the extent to which more traditional
conceptions of citizenship can secure the same ends with greater coherence and attractiveness
(Hayward 2006).
For example, new biotechnologies of the state and issues of security have altered mainstream
understandings of citizenship in ways that greens must consider (Isin 2004, Muller 2004, Walters
2004). The concept of eco-terrorism and its power to marginalize citizens engaged in non-violent
protest is also an important one for thinking more strategically about conceptions of green citizenship
(Smith 2005). Another recent example of the promise of this type of work is Agrawals
Environmentality: technologies of government and the making of subject (2005) which uses
Foucaults concept of governmentality to track the relationship between changing government
policies and the related construction of citizens environmental subjectivites.

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