Having the citizenship of a country does not only mean owning a passport from that country and having the right to live, work and vote there. Citizenship in any community means actively participating in the life of that community and the responsibility to obey laws, to care for the well being of the community, and to protect the resource base on which the wealth of that country depends.
Nowadays, promoting sustainable development is a key objective for national and global policy-makers but governments find it is not easy to achieve sustainability. Increasingly, environmental policy is taking a ‘participatory turn' with both ‘active citizenship' and ‘green consumerism' presented as key aspects of the struggle for a greener society.
In fact, policy-makers find it difficult to adopt green policies that have explicit economic costs for consumers (e.g., fuel taxes, household waste charges) or businesses (e.g., imposing stricter pollution regulation). In addition, Command-and-Control (CAC) approach for promoting sustainability may be difficult to enforce. For instance, introducing a charge for collecting household waste may lead to people dumping their rubbish on the pavement, in the countryside or in someone else's backyard. Without charges, we don't get a greener outcome; with charges, we don't get a greener outcome.
The citizen who sorts his garbage or who prefers ecological goods will often do this because he feels dedicated to ecological values. The idea of environmental citizenship has attracted much attention recently with great hopes that the ‘environmental' or ‘ecological' citizen might be a solution to the environmental policy-makers problems/approaches. In fact, the idea of environmental citizenship is similar to and compatible with environmental stewardship but it is not linked with any particular religious or cultural tradition.
Environmental citizenship is an idea that each of us is an integral part of a larger ecosystem and that our future depends on each one of us embracing the challenge and acting responsibly and positively toward our environment. It's about making changes in our daily lives to be environmental citizens all day, every day.
Environmental citizenship is about asserting the ethical responsibilities of individuals, organisations and countries to create new forms of cohesion with the environment. Moreover, negative environmental impacts can empower citizens to pressure governments and the private sector towards attaining more environmentally sound and equitable patterns of production and consumption.
What is good about the idea of environmental citizenship is that it also recognises that our future depends on how we care for our ecosystems and thus it is a sense of responsibility that leads to actions on behalf of the environment.
It brings together issues of society, politics and environment in ways that may help to shift society from un-sustainability towards greater sustainability and challenges the model of the ‘self-interested rational actor' which pervades policy, government thinking and economic modelling — by acknowledging that the rational citizen has wider social and environmental interests and concerns.
Its scope covers both public and private actions as well as local and global actions because environmental problems know no boundaries.
Changing attitudes
The governments in the Arab world should mobilise their forces, if they really want to make progress towards achieving sustainability. It is not enough just to change behaviours, as these can revert. There is a need to change attitudes as well. So the individuals become environmental citizens.
This is not an easy task and cannot happen overnight. It is a long process which depends mainly on awareness and education systems.
Germany, for instance, nowadays sees no need to educate children and youth about environmental issues as environmental citizenship values are an integral part of the attitude of the present generation. The environmental values are instilled into the minds of the new generations.
Beside awareness and education programmes, the Arab world needs to carry out environmental projects that utilise the individuals, especially youth, their energy and passion to serve and protect their countries. We all have witnessed the cleaning and painting campaigns that spread in Egypt and Tunisia after the recent revolutions.
This is a real and practical, but not organised, translation of environmental citizenship.
Governments, in cooperation with civil societies, need to act now and initiate environmental programmes and projects locally and regionally (GCC for instance) in an organised manner to utilise such forces in a way that achieves many objectives, i.e. hit many birds with one stone, use youth energy in a positive and organised way, achieve the social and economic objective of sustainable development and increase citizens loyalty to their countries.
In this respect, it is worth mentioning that, it will be very useful for governments to investigate what they expect from citizens, in particular the attitudes and behaviour associated with environmental citizenship, and to gain direct experience of how this can be measured and improved.
There is no doubt that environmental citizenship is about adopting values and actions that are consistent with sustainability and that all of us have a role to play. To play this role properly we all need to become environmental citizens, citizens of Planet Earth.
Dr Mohamed Abdel Raouf is an independent environmental researcher.
