Green Behaviour - a Matter of Citizenship?

In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have pointed out the active involvement of individuals in pro-environmental activities as an important prerequisite for targeting the sources of environmental degradation. Such involvement can for example consist in a willingness to accept environmental policies or in the adoption of comprehensive individual lifestyle-changes. Within political theory an Ecological Citizenship (EC), reinterpreting the traditional state/individual relationship by straddling the private – public; national – global; and present – future divides, has been suggested a valuable approach to realising a personal responsibility for the environment. As of today, examples of empirical research analysing the prospects for ecological citizenship to actually function as a route towards individual environmental responsibility are still rare. For example, we do not know if any of the major EC-characteristics (i.e., a stronger emphasis on responsibility for private, global and future consequences) actually are correlated with environmental behaviour among citizens. In this paper we distinguish between and compare two sets of individuals, one group guided by traditional (liberal) democratic political citizenship ideals and another group representing the citizenship ideals emphasised in the ecological citizenship-literature. The key question in the paper is weather and to what degree “traditional” citizens with strong green attitudes differs from ecological citizens in regard to environmental behaviour. Is a general green attitudinal orientation enough to bring about behavioural changes? Or does it also take a different conception of citizenship to achieve this? The paper uses survey data based on a mail questionnaire sent out in Spring 2009 to a random sample of the Swedish population. We conclude that ecological citizens are considerably more pro-environmental in their behaviour than others and that there is in fact a negative correlation between traditional (liberal) democratic citizenship ideals and pro-environmental behaviour, which is not the least an interesting finding seen in the light of the considerable number of environmentally oriented theorists arguing that there is a tense relationship between liberal democracy and sustainable development.