Environmental Politics,

Vol. 14, No. 2, 163 178, April 2005

Globalisation, Cosmopolitanism and

Ecological Citizenship
ANGEL VALENCIA SAIZ
University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain

ABSTRACT Globalization is patently changing our understanding of environmental

politics. It relates to environmental problems in two ways. First, environmental problems
and their eects are global, and hence solutions beyond the remit of nation states are
required. Second, globalization may benet local global relationship and contribute to the
realization of a sustainable society. These points obviously inuence green political theory
since one of its tasks is to understand the transformation of political community in the
context of the global scope of environmental problems. One route is through laying the
foundations for an autochthonous idea of citizenship namely, ecological or environmental
citizenship. The goal of this article is to explore the connections between cosmopolitan
reections on citizenship on the one hand, and green political theorys attempts to develop
its own idea of citizenship, on the other. It is argued that although the idea of ecological
citizenship may be regarded as a kind of cosmopolitan or global citizenship, its features and
current degree of development move towards a new kind of citizenship.

Introduction
Globalisation is patently changing our understanding of politics, involving a
dierent approach to the denition of social problems and the search for
political solutions. One of the most interesting questions that the debate on
globalisation has posed is the degree to which the traditional role of the nationstate, as a decisive factor unifying political community and shaping citizenship,
is currently being eroded. It seems that an idea of global politics is emerging.
But in turn this poses questions about the source and nature of political
legitimacy. In contemporary political theory, all this has given birth to a new
cosmopolitanism that defends the need for a new conception of democracy and
citizenship.
This relates to environmental problems in two ways. First, some environmental problems and their eects (for instance, climate change) are global, and
hence transnational solutions are required. Second, globalisation might just
contribute to the realisation of a sustainable society: today it is possible to
think and act globally and locally at the same time because the spatial
Correspondence Address: Faculty of Law, University of Malaga, Campus de Teatinos, 29071
Malaga, Spain. Email: avalencia@uma.es
ISSN 0964-4016 Print/1744-8934 Online/05/02016316 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/09644010500054848

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dierentiation of global and local has gone and the tools of citizens juries, of
citizens forums and of virtual citizens networks are all becoming available.
Never before has it been possible to act as a global-local citizen in the
transition to sustainability. It is also unlikely that we will be able fully to grasp
the opportunities on oer (ORiordan, 2001: 237).
These points obviously inuence green political theory since its task is to
understand the transformation of political community in the context of the
global scope of environmental problems. One way in which this has been done
recently is through laying the foundations of an idea of citizenship of its own,
namely, ecological or environmental citizenship. Work has been done on this in
the last ten years especially, beginning with Fred Steward (1991), Bart van
Steenbergen (1994a, 1994b), through the more developed ideas of Peter
Christo (1996), Mark Smith (1998) and John Barry (1999, 2002) to the recent
and systematic work of Andrew Dobson (2000b, 2003, 2005).
The goal of this article, then, is to explore the connections between
cosmopolitan reections on citizenship on the one hand, and green political
theorys attempts to develop its own idea of citizenship on the other. This study
proposes that although the idea of ecological citizenship may be regarded as a
kind of cosmopolitan or global citizenship, its features and current degree of
development go further, towards a new kind of citizenship.
The Turn towards Global Politics and the Environment
As indicated above, one of the most important eects of globalisation is the
loss of centrality of the nation-state as the core of political community. This
is occurring at the same time as issues in the international political dimension
are of growing salience. The subject matter here is the close relationship
between this political shift towards the global, and ecological issues. In this
sense, environmental problems are a component of global politics and green
political theorys reections on citizenship comprise an axis which provides
the backbone of a conception of political community that no longer
corresponds neatly with those usually assumed by liberal or social citizenship.
In this context, some of the aspects of the approach of the new
cosmopolitanism, concretely, those related to the formulation of citizenship,
connect to the attempt by green political theory to develop a notion of
ecological citizenship. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for this theoretical
evolution lies in the movement of ecological problems to the domain of what
has come to be known as global governance. Thus climate change or the
destruction of the ozone layer are examples of new global public goods: those
that cannot be satised individually and that demand co-operation in the
search for solutions. To this would have to be added the global dimension of
the risks generated by ecological problems themselves. This dual aspect of
the environmental as a public good to defend and as a potential threat
beyond the nation-state makes necessary new theoretical spaces to justify the
conservation of nature and the avoidance of ecological catastrophes. The

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concept of ecological citizenship constitutes one of these new theoretical

spaces.
The argument here is that ecological citizenship is still under construction, but it can already be seen that this has its own architectural inections
that break with traditional notions of citizenship. The focus is on three
aspects: rst, the relationship between globalisation, environmental problems
and the new cosmopolitanism; second, the reason why it is proposed that
ecological citizenship is part of the concept of global citizenship and starts
from a notion of collective responsibility; and nally, why it is argued that
ecological citizenship is a post-cosmopolitan citizenship not only because it
has its own architecture as opposed to the traditional dimensions of the
citizenship (as Andrew Dobson has suggested; Dobson, 2003), but also
because of its relationship with a green democratic model, which is clearly
deliberative.
Globalisation, Environment and Cosmopolitanism
Some analyses of globalisation suggest that it is an expression of deeper
structural changes in the scale of modern social organisation. Such changes are
evident in, among other developments, the growth of multinational corporations (MNCs), world nancial markets, the diusion of popular culture and the
salience of global environmental degradation (Held & McGrew, 2002: 56).
The globalisation of environmental problems and environmental degradation
raise two essential issues: on the one hand, the boundaries of liberal democracy
for their resolution are put into question (Goldblatt, 1997); and, on the other,
the appearance of a cosmopolitan conscience and perhaps institutional
design may just be discerned. If environmental problems are global, then
liberal democracy, despite its potential eectiveness in the context of the
nation-state, may turn out to be ineective in the global context. Against this
background, disagreements are located at three levels:
In the rst place, there are those who adopt a constructive position with regard
to the governability of globalisation but maintain dierent theoretical positions
concerning its denitional criteria and the political project of a cosmopolitan
society.
Second, there are those who maintain a pessimistic position with regard to
governing globalisation, and who say that the control of natural resources may
even be one of the sources of future international conicts.
Finally, there are those who from a realist position maintain that the situation
of the current international order hinders the global political management of
environmental problems.
These three positions will be taken in turn. In the rst case, the scope of the
discussion is the capacity and the options oered by politics to bring about
global change that recongures the role of the nation-state, our idea of political

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community and the role of international relationships in the solution of global

political problems, such as the environmental one. Globalisation involves,
then, a transition from a state-centred politics to a new and complex multilevel
global politics in which the positions of both supporters and critics of neoliberalism and globalisation are inadequate. This means adopting a
transformationalist position, according to which recasting globalisation needs
to be conceived as a double-sided process and by a double-sided process
or process of double democratization is meant not just the deepening of
political and social reform within a national community, involving the
democratization of states and civil societies over time, but also the creation
of greater transparency, accountability and democracy across territorial
borders (Held & McGrew, 2002: 107).
The polar opposite of Helds approach is the second in the list above that
represented by those authors who think that globalisation is ungovernable and,
therefore, more a source of conict than the foundation for a cosmopolitan
society. This is John Grays position in referring to the so-called real limits of
globalisation (Gray, 2003). Gray argues (2003: 355356) that globalisation is
leading us back to a series of long-standing problems that are dicult to
overcome above all, conicts over the control of natural resources. Wars, he
says, will be more and more Malthusian. Battles will not be over ideologies but
over land, water and crude oil frequently in connection with religious and
ethnic enmities. From this point of view, the centrality of crude oil to the
economies of developed countries and its character as a nite energy source
takes the world back to the classical geopolitics of the nineteenth century,
where dependence and shortage of natural resources such as crude oil and
water will be the source of international conicts.
The growing shortage of resources provokes, among other eects (Gray,
2003: 357), an increase in the number of ecological and environmental refugees
and, as a response, a revival of ultra right-wing parties in wealthy countries. In
a nutshell, one of the most interesting elements in Grays position is his notion
that globalisation is ungovernable, among other things, because it is
conditioned by environmental limits such as overpopulation or control of
natural resources like crude oil or water, which lead to an intensication of
instability and conict and not not at all to a cosmopolitan society.
Third and nally among our analyses of globalisation is the critical
perspective (Falk, 2002) that points out the paradox of the relationship between
politics and environment under globalisation. From this point of view,
environmental problems are one of the decisive topics on the global political
agenda, at the same time as there is no clear way to manage them globally. It
may be true that there is a growing environmental conscience around the world
and that there is a global consensus as regards environmental protection but
there will only be progress in the resolution of these problems if states cooperate to achieve sustainable development. The thesis is simple: the current
world order is not suited to dealing with global environmental problems. The
main issue is the absence of political will, on the part of both states and markets.

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There are, though, dierent factors at work. First there is an absence of

responsibility of political leaders towards adverse eects on environment.
Second, electoral terms do not coincide with the time periods characteristic of
environmental challenges. Third, the necessary changes in the political culture
of citizenship as regards ecological issues collide with consumerism and the
submission to market forces of advanced capitalist societies and, nally, there
is a prioritising of immediate economic issues over environmental ones.
Simultaneously, this has generated a new type of domination, which involves a
shift from North to South of polluting processes and wastes, as a consequence
of the location in the South of the industries that provoke it and that the North
no longer wants. This shift is seen by some critics of globalisation as both a new
type of domination generated by capitalism in its current phase (Amin, 1997)
and as further evidence of the ecological self-destructive tendencies of the
current capitalist system (Wallerstein, 2001).
In this context, the main obstacle the international order faces when
confronting ecological issues (Falk, 2002: 28) is not its acknowledgement as
one of the main problems the world confronts on a global scale, but the
absence of political willingness to cope with them due to the fact that states
show a reticent attitude towards making easier the co-ordination mechanisms
of eective global government in relation to the environmental agenda. For
Falk the paradox is clear (Falk, 2002: 41): the urgency and complexity of the
environmental challenge demands a supranational mechanism that has the
benet of political and nancial independence, but only states in co-operation
are able to produce such a mechanism. Their reluctance to go beyond
traditional diplomatic practices suggests that the realist attitude persists. The
environmental challenge reveals, then, the persistence of statism, including its
adaptive impulses, as well as the gulf that exists between current problems and
possible solutions.
In this context, the dierent positions that have just been analysed show that
the key questions revolve not only around identifying environmental problems
and recognising that national solutions are less and less appropriate. The real
issue is to nd theoretical principles and political formulae that might regulate
global ecological issues. In the authors opinion, and in this context, reections
around citizenship constitute a way of reorientating globalisation toward the
aims of a sustainable society.
Global Citizenship and Collective Responsibility: Keys to Understanding the
Concept of Ecological Citizenship
Recently an irresistible rise of citizenship in contemporary political theory and
practice has been witnessed, due to the changes the nation-state is going
through in western societies as a consequence of processes of social change that
strengthen the international dimension of politics. The need to think about
institutional change and the democratic control of these processes of social
change has led some authors to dene a cosmopolitan project (Held, 1995;

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Archibugi et al., 1998; Linklater, 1998b; Held & McGrew, 2002). This involves
its own vision of democracy (Held, 1995) and citizenship (Linklater, 1998a,
1998b, 1998c; Held, 2001). In this context, the concept of citizenship plays a
key role in implying
the enjoyment of civil, political, social and cultural rights, and
corresponding duties to remove barriers to equal membership of the
political community. A society that is committed to realising the ideals of
citizenship is obliged by this conviction to engage outsiders in open
dialogue about the respects in which its actions may harm their interests.
It has an obligation to transcend the dichotomy between citizens and
aliens by establishing systems of joint rule (Linklater, 1998b: 211212).
One of the most interesting elements of the cosmopolitan approach to
citizenship is its role as a mediator concept in the dialogue of a political
community made up of dierent cultural traditions and political discourses in
the establishment of a framework that aims at overcoming the dichotomy
between citizens and aliens. Thus David Held suggests (as was seen earlier) that
one of the political challenges of the future will be that
each citizen of a state will have to learn to become a cosmopolitan
citizen as well: that is, a person capable of mediating between national
traditions, communities of fate and alternative styles of life. Citizenship
in a democratic polity of the future is likely to involve a growing
mediating role: a role which encompasses dialogue with traditions and
discourses of others with the aim of expanding the horizons of ones own
framework of meaning and prejudice (Held, 2001: 399).
The key insight of this approach is that it locates cosmopolitan citizenship as
both a principle for dialogue in a diverse political community and an essential
starting point for global governance. This is critical for the environment, given
all that has been said about the globalisation of environmental problems.
Cosmopolitan citizenship is, of course, an old idea in a new context. It is
nothing but a new formulation of the venerable idea of world citizenship that
appears and disappears throughout the history of political theory. As April
Carter has pointed out,
the idea of world citizenship is fashionable again. It is a very old idea,
which goes back in western thought to the Greek and Roman Stoics, was
revived in the Renaissance and elaborated in the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment. It also had some currency in the middle of the twentieth
century and immediately after the Second World War. But the term world
citizenship was not widely used . . . after the consolidation of the cold war
in the early 1950s. In the 1990s world citizenship, quite often renamed
global or cosmopolitan citizenship, surfaced again (Carter, 2001: 1).

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The relevant issue here is that it has also aected green politics in so far as green
politics have also challenged traditional approaches to citizenship by stressing
that environmental problems need international decisions (Carter, 2001: 5).
This lends support to the thesis that the citizenship notions emerging from green
thought are variations on the theme of global citizenship. This appears logical.
In the rst place, the global and transnational character of environmental
degradation has already been noted. Second, the international strategy adopted
by some environmental groups to carry out their goals is argued by some to
amount to an expression of global citizenship, and nally, the citizenship theory
present in green political thought itself can be expressed through notions such as
planetary citizenship (Steward, 1991) or ecological citizenship (Dobson, 2000b).
One other interesting aspect of the foundations of the concept of ecological
citizenship is the emphasis on the relationship between collective responsibility
and citizenship theory, highlighted by other analysts (for example, Delanty,
1997, 2000). In his work, where the ecacy of the post-national citizenship
model within the European integration process is analysed, Delanty takes as a
starting point the insuciency of formal denitions of citizenship, exclusively
based on a model of citizen rights. He writes that,
there is more to citizenship than rights. Other dimensions include
responsibilities or duties, participation in a broader sense, and identity.
These dimensions rights, duties or responsibilities, identity and
participation altogether express the dierent aspects of what membership of a political community entails (Delanty, 1997: 286).
This implies that citizenship is a multilevel concept involving four dimensions:
rights, responsibilities, participation and identity (Delanty, 1997: 294), and
therefore his thesis is that post-national citizenship in the European integration
context should, in relation to the previous denition, include several aspects:
human rights, including cultural rights (rights), environment (responsibilities),
democracy, including subnational democracy (participation) and multiculturalism and reexivity (identity) (Delanty, 1997: 301).
There are two key aspects to this research: rst, the focus on the
inadequacy of formal approaches and, second, the contribution of ecologism
to the idea of citizenship that emphasizes obligations or responsibilities. As
Delanty says,
environmentalists have argued for the inclusion of a notion of collective
responsibility, raising the question whether nature has rights, and the
concept of responsibility cannot be exhausted by reference to the notion
of duties to the state, for it is held we have duties to nature as well as
society (Delanty, 1997: 286).
One reason for the green emphasis on this dimension of citizenship comes from
its vision of nature as a subject of rights, which implies, simultaneously, the

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search for a set of criteria to regulate the collective responsibility of human

beings towards it. Thereby the idea of collective responsibility goes beyond the
state and towards post-national citizenship. As Delanty remarks:
[In respect of] the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, it may also be
argued that these are now extending to matters beyond the nation state
and which cannot be reduced to the level of the state. For instance, we
have duties to other social groups as well as to the environment . . . Bart
Van Steenbergen argues that citizenship is once again becoming a
revolutionary concept, this time in the guise of ecological citizenship that
entails responsibility for nature. In other words, the idea of responsibility
is being decoupled from the idea of duty and is becoming a key theme in
the reinvention of politics today: social movements activists as well as the
wider public have a sense of being responsible for nature and the future.
We may say that under the conditions of ideological fragmentation, the
discourse of responsibility has been released from the conservative
ideology and is being taken over by new social actors (Delanty, 1997:
294295).
In consequence, one of the challenges for green political thought is to strike a
balance between the vindication of environmental rights and the justication of
the idea of collective responsibility. If it is so important to maintain the view
that nature is a bearer of rights, it is equally important to think about the
criteria for collective responsibility of human beings that serve to make good
both those rights and those of future generations. In this sense, the concept of
ecological citizenship is essential for political ecologism as it can provide the
foundation for the articulation of the appropriate form and levels of collective
responsibility.
Ecological Citizenship and Green Democracy
There is no unanimous consensus on the part of theorists of ecological
citizenship, in part because of disputes over its relationship to formal
denitions of citizenship. So ecological citizenship must be regarded as under
construction. This thematic evolution can be described in two stages: rst, in
which this notion constitutes another contribution to the denition of a green
democratic model within a critical reconstruction of the liberal tradition and,
second, in which there is an attempt to dene a proper conceptual space within
a set of citizenship theories marked by the global age (Delanty, 2000) where
the transnationality of environmental problems demands a theoretical framework for both obligations and collective responsibility. Thus the notion of
ecological citizenship can be linked not only to democracy but also to political
globalisation. It is a notion that aims at dening its own space both within
the green democratic model and in respect of what Dobson calls the conceptual
architecture of citizenship (Dobson, 2003).

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Interest in the concept of citizenship and its relationship to the environment

is relatively recent in green political theory. As a matter of fact, within this subdiscipline a rst wave can be distinguished, from the end of the 1980s until the
beginning of the 1990s, oriented towards the political-ideological aspects of
ecologism, and a second wave, which runs from the mid-1990s until now,
focused on the relationship between ecologism and issues and concepts of
political theory such as democracy, justice and citizenship (Dobson, 2000a: ix).
Situated in this second wave, the debate about citizenship articulates, on the
one hand, the problems of this liberal concept in relation to ecological issues
and, on the other, elaborates a citizenship theory compatible with the
theoretical principles of ecologism (Valencia Saiz, 2000: 183; authors
translation). In this way, and from a perspective internal to the evolution of
ecologism, this is a debate that contributes to the encounter between liberalism
and ecologism in which green political theory carries out a revision of the
institutions and principles of liberal democracy which is at the same time
critical and reconstructive (Arias Maldonado, 1999: 187; authors translation).
From this perspective the reconstruction of the concept of liberal citizenship
as ecological citizenship underlines
the responsibilities and obligations of the citizen in the framework of a
sustainable society and in relation to underrepresented collectives, as well
as its socialising role as a facilitator of ecologically conscious citizens. It is
about, then, an active citizenship which must go hand in hand with an
extension of political participation (Valencia Saiz, 2000: 191; authors
translation).
Since the mid-1990s, ecological citizenship has been talked about as a notion
whose goal is a contribution to the formulation of the ecologist project from a
perspective that takes into account topics such as environmental constituencies, future generations and the transformation of the concept of
participation and political representation in the context of the construction
of a dierent democratic model. Thus reections on citizenship within the
debate between ecologism and democracy are an essential element of support
in the construction of a green democratic model.
The main diculty in creating a concept of citizenship in green political
theory derives from an analysis of the troubled relationship between ecologism
and democracy. As as been demonstrated before, there are two issues that
underpin the contingency of the link between democracy and ecologism: in the
rst place, the diculty of deriving democracy from values in nature; and, in
the second place, if green politics emphasizes results over procedures in
accordance with the values of nature, the defence of democracy as a set of
procedures is going to be weak in comparison (Valencia Saiz 1998: 182183).
In this context, the paradox that the construction of a green democratic model
had to face was the postulation of a vision of participative democracy as an
alternative to the principles of liberal democracy that could take account of

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ecological principles and, at the same time, the use of the principles and
institutions of liberal democracy as a framework. From this point of view, the
concept of citizenship was seen as one of the decits of liberal democracy in
relation to ecological issues.
In this context, Peter Christo (1996) oers a concept of ecological
citizenship as the answer to the under-representation of citizenship in the eld
of environmental problems. The key reason for this is that there is a need to
move beyond a conception of political representation that restricts the
political community to the eld of the nation-state and that therefore does
not properly represent citizenship interests in environmental problems. In this
way,
ecological citizenship is centrally dened by its attempt to extend social
welfare discourse to recognise universal principles relating to environmental rights and centrally incorporate these in law, culture and politics.
In part, it seeks to do so by pressing for recognition of the need actively
to include human non-citizens (in a territorial and legal sense) in
decision making. It also promotes fundamental incorporation of the
interests of other species and future generation into processes of
democratic consideration. This leads to challenges to extend the
boundaries of existing political citizenship beyond the formerly relatively
homogeneous notions of the nation-state and national community that
to date have determined formal citizenship (Christo, 1996: 161162).
In fact, ecological citizenship is linked to the idea of ecological welfare. This
involves an extension of political and social citizenship, new social demands
that require a deep change in the way work is distributed as well as in the
capitalist productive system (see the article by Valdivielso in this volume).
Nevertheless, there is a certain ambiguity at this point. It is not clear whether
this concept implies a reorientation of, or a break with, the capitalist system.
These two positions compete in the ecologist movement, and this ambiguity
perhaps relates more to the dierent tactics of green and wider environmental
movements and their dierent political and economic analyses rather than the
normative construction of ecological citizenship as such (Christo, 1996: 162).
Consequently, ecological citizenship is especially important as a mechanism of
inclusion (Arias Maldonado & Valencia Saiz, 1998)
John Barrys approach to citizenship and the environment is located in this
latter area. For him citizenship is a core element within a green democratic
model. Nevertheless, whereas according to Christo (1996), ecological citizenship is more an institution of inclusion that strengthens participation and
political representation in the institutional eld, for Barry (1996, 1999) the idea
must take us beyond institutional reforms of our democratic systems towards
broader swathes of civil society (Barry & Proops, 2000).
In this sense, citizenship for Barry is closely related to a deliberative
democratic model, that is to say,

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as a form of social learning turns on the view of democracy as a

communicative process. It is also related to such practices as LETS
[Local Exchange Trading Systems], . . . which can be regarded as forms of
social learning and adaptation to changed ecological conditions and
socio-economic conditions, as well as the ecological restructuring of the
state and economy (Barry, 1999: 229).
This relationship is extremely important as it entails the internalisation of
others interests nonhuman, future generations and aliens and a shift of
preferences as a result of democratic deliberation. Thus, citizenship understood
this way is basic to sustaining the idea of an ecological rationality, as
democratic citizenship in short permits the possibility of the voluntary
creation and maintenance of an ecologically rational societynature
interaction, informed by moral as well as scientic considerations. This is
because communicative as well as instrumental rationality characterizes
ecological rationality (Barry, 1999: 230).
So Barrys conception of green citizenship involves a civic virtue that must be
introduced not only in individuals consciences but also in political culture,
within the framework of a deliberative democracy. It is this theoretical
approach that underpins his concern for LETS as an exchange system of goods
and informal services that originated in Canada in 1983 and has generated a
number of dierent sociological and ideological interpretations since then (see
Seyfangs contribution to this volume for more on LETS in connection with
environmental citizenship). Barrys concern for this topic led him and a
colleague (Barry & Proops, 2000) to analyse the attitudes of the LETS
members in the UK. There are two relevant ndings as far as the relationship
between citizenship and environment is concerned: rst, disaection towards
the democratic system and, second, a concept of active citizenship that
contributes to community responsibility. In this way, LETS constitutes an
empirical framework for Barrys citizenship ideas.
Ecological Citizenship
If, up to now, ecological citizenship has played the role of another element
in the green democratic model, today the question seems to be whether it is
a citizenship in its own right, and if so, how it diers from traditional and
other contemporary approaches. Is ecological citizenship a new type of
citizenship that arises as a result of an interaction between the classical
dimensions of citizenship and other new ones? The debate since the end of
1990s has been dened by several positions: rst, that sustained by authors
who reject the possibility of a notion of ecological citizenship (Isin & Wood,
1999), and second, a set of truncated orientations (van Steenbergen, 1994a;
Twine, 1994). (These latter are characterised by a dependence on

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T. H. Marshalls work and his emphasis on the issue of civil, political, and
social rights.) Third, there have been some isolated instances of a focus on a
new politics of obligation as the ground for ecological citizenship (Smith,
1998), and, nally, there are those authors who try to give their own
epistemological status to the concept (Dobson, 2000b, 2003, 2005; Jelin,
2000).
The most sustained attempt to examine citizenship from an ecological point
of view has come from Dobson (2000b, 2003, 2005). The author has dealt with
his earlier contribution (Dobson, 2000b) elsewhere (see Valencia Saiz, 2002,
2003). Dobsons early thesis is that ecological citizenship can be related to the
traditional architecture of citizenship but that it constitutes an independent and
novel notion due to its break, in a number of ways, with it:
Ecological citizenship has the overall eect of disrupting established ideas
about citizenship . . . It will be clear by now that ecological citizenship is
more about obligations than about rights; that these obligations are owed
primarily to strangers, distant in both space and time; and that they
involve the virtues of care and compassion, practised in both the private
and the public sphere. It is the admission of citizenship activity to the
private realm that is perhaps ecological citizenships most distinctive
contribution to the development of the notion of citizenship . . . From the
point of view of ecological citizenship, the private realm should not be
regarded as a barrier to citizenship, but as a place where it can be carried
out, where virtues can be learnt a springboard to the international and
intergenerational arenas (Dobson, 2000b: 5960).
These themes are carried through in Dobsons most recent work (Dobson,
2003). Here he characterises ecological citizenship as a type of postcosmopolitan citizenship. His position here is that citizenship has a
conceptual architecture containing three elements: citizenship as rightsclaiming and responsibility-exercising; the public sphere as the traditional site
of citizenship activity; and the nation-state as the political container of
citizenship. In the case of ecological citizenship, the architecture remains the
same, but the points of reference alter. So the ecological citizen has rights and
responsibilities and there is no necessary reciprocal relation between the two;
the private sphere, as well as the public, is a key arena of activity; and the
connection between citizenship and any given specic political territory
becomes much less important. Perhaps the most signicant dierence from
his earlier position is that Dobson now argues that justice is the key to
ecological citizenship, in that those with ecological footprints that are too big
are enjoined to reduce their size. The general idea is that those (with oversize
footprints) must live sustainably so that others (with inappropriately small
ones) can live well. Dobson argues that although justice is ecological
citizenships rst virtue, secondary virtues such as care and compassion
might be required to realise it.

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In this recent work Dobson oers a number of ideas as to how ecological

citizenship might be encouraged in democratic societies for example through
the formal education system wherever opportunities for teaching citizenship
exist. This optimistic view of the power of education is tempered, though, by
the observation that lived experience is probably more successful in terms of
behavioural change than hours spent in the classroom.
In his book, Dobson establishes a distinction between environmental and
ecological citizenship:
I . . . take environmental citizenship to refer to the way in which the
environmentcitizenship relationship can be regarded from a liberal point
of view . . . This is a citizenship that deals in the currency of
environmental rights, that is conducted exclusively in the public sphere,
whose principal virtues are the liberal ones of reasonableness and a
willingness to accept the force of the better argument and procedural
legitimacy, and whose remit is bounded political congurations modelled
on the nation-state. For the most rough-and-ready purposes, it can be
taken that environmental citizenship here refers to attempts to extend the
discourse and practice of rights-claiming into the environmental context.
I shall reserve the term ecological citizenship, on the other hand, for the
specically form of post-cosmopolitan citizenship . . . At rst blush, then,
ecological citizenship deals in the currency of non-contractual responsibility, it inhabits the private as well as the public sphere, it refers to the
source rather than the nature of responsibility to determine what count as
citizenship virtues, it works with the language of virtue, and it is explicitly
non-territorial. Once again let me stress that I do not think that
ecological citizenship is any more politically worthy or important than its
environmental counterpart. From a political point of view, indeed, I
regard environmental an ecological citizenship as complementary in that,
while they organize themselves on dierent terrains, they can both
plausibly be read as heading in the same direction: the sustainable society
(Dobson, 2003: 89).
This distinction is important because it takes note of the positive aspects of the
liberal and cosmopolitan traditions and oers one or two further advantages: a
more rigorous treatment of the notion of rights, a denition of the space of
ecological citizenship that takes better account of the globalisation of
environmental problems, and nally a broader treatment of the virtues of
citizenship that puts the ethic of care and/or compassion in a less central
position than in his earlier work. From this perspective,
Ecological citizenship is . . . both an example of post-cosmopolitan
citizenship and a particular interpretation of it. It possesses all the basic
features of post-cosmopolitan citizenship, such as its stress on
responsibilities rather than rights, and its determination to regard these

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A. Valencia Saiz
responsibilities as non-reciprocal rather than contractual, thus contrasting with both liberal and civic republican articulations in its sense that
these virtues need to be drawn from the private as well as the public
arenas. Similarly, it unusually regards the private arena as a legitimate
site of citizenship activity, both because the kinds of relationship
normally associated with that arena are similar in content to those of
ecological citizenship and because the private realm generates the space
the ecological footprint that gives rise to the obligations of ecological
citizenship itself (Dobson, 2003: 139).

Dobsons view will denitely not be the last word in environmental (or
ecological) citizenship theory, but it is a distinctive one with which future
participants in the debate should engage. Perhaps the most critical blind spot in
his work is his apparent insistence on the ecacy of individual political agency.
While he explicitly refuses to be associated with a na ve voluntarism, the motif
of his work is the individual citizen striving to be a better citizen. But surely the
way in which citizenship is structured as well as the degree to which citizens can
structure is critical. What are the conditions under which environmental or
ecological citizenship can be engendered? What are the economic, social and
political obstacles collectively to this engendering? Most generally, what is
the political economy of environmental or ecological citizenship? In this regard
Dobson has provided a point of departure, no more and no less, and
contributors to this collection have grasped the opportunity of taking the
debate to new levels.
Conclusion
So, can a notion of citizenship be derived from political ecologism? It is this
authors belief that it can be. It has been argued that green political theory has
made two attempts to answer this question: rst, by regarding citizenship as a
key idea in the green democratic project; and, second, by locating it in and
around citizenship theory itself. In both cases, it is a notion that inects the
architecture of citizenship theory through identifying a shift in the relationship
between the global and the local in the ecological context, and in the
responsibilities and scope of citizenship that this brings in its train.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of a broader research project that the author started at Keele
University, UK, in 200001, thanks to a grant from the Subprogramme for
Spanish Researchers Visits to Spanish and Foreign Research Centres
(PR2000-0361). He would like to thank Andrew Dobson for his support on
the occasion of that visit and for the observations he has made on the authors
work since then. An earlier version of this article was presented at the
Citizenship and Environment workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions

Globalisation, Cosmopolitanism and Ecological Citizenship

177

(Uppsala, Sweden, 13 18 April 2004). I would also like to thank an

anonymous referee for comments on a previous version.
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