Social Citizenship and the Environment
Environmental Politics,
Vol. 14, No. 2, 239 – 254, April 2005
Social Citizenship and the
Environment
JOAQUI´N VALDIVIELSO
Department of Philosophy, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
ABSTRACT Social citizenship, an idea and practice that is currently undergoing
substantial reconsideration, is often regarded as requiring high economic growth and the
spread of the market economy and formal work. But this may have consequences for
sustainability. To consider whether or not sustainability and social citizenship are
compatible, the notion of social citizenship is here divided into three elements of social
commitment: industrial, waged and contractual. The analysis attempts to reveal the extent
to which the nature of social citizenship has been transformed, and examines its
relationship with sustainability and the idea of ecological citizenship.
Introduction
The debate on citizenship has been central in moral and political theory and
philosophy in the last decade. To a large degree, this academic revival has given
priority to political and civil dimensions and largely overlooked others of great
importance. This particularly affects social citizenship, which has been
immersed in a substantial reconsideration of its own at the same time.
For example, in July 2004, benefits for the unemployed in Germany – the
paradigm of broad social citizenship – suffered the deepest cuts in the last 50
years. The red–green alliance in the Federal Government has just started to
implement the social democratic programme called Agenda 2010, a substitute
for the old Godesberg Programme which ‘paved the way for freedom, justice
and solidarity by providing the framework for social and economic reforms
based on a social market economy’ (SDP 2003: 2). Like similar programmes,
Agenda 2010 stresses the need for a ‘modernisation of the labour market’ and
‘ecological modernisation’ in addition to growth and employment, the classic
means of achieving the old ideals. In any case, these new issues are secondary
to the old requirements, which has led to extremely ambitious approaches.
Thus, Swedish Premier Goran Perssons wondered recently, ‘How can we create
growth, full employment, and a sound environment, as well as develop the
European social model (. . .)?’ (Perssons, 2004: 1).
Correspondence Address: UIB. Edif. Ramon Llull Crta. Valldemossa, km. 7.5. 07122 Palma de
Mallorca, Spain. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0964-4016 Print/1744-8934 Online/05/020239–16 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/09644010500055142
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The green movement has always suspected that achieving sustainability
would be difficult if economic growth and formal employment were encouraged
to achieve their highest possible rates. The purpose of this article is to consider
whether or not sustainability and social citizenship are necessarily incompatible.
Rather than examining the possible financial feasibility of a more environmentally benign social State, the notion of citizenship itself in terms of both social
and environmental questions will be considered. To do so, social citizenship is
analysed in a way that reveals the extent, if any, to which its nature has been
transformed and its possible relationship with sustainability and even with the
idea of ecological citizenship. To shed light on the complexities of a possible
model which combines the requirements of ecological and social citizenship, the
notion of social citizenship has been divided into three elements or dimensions
of social commitment: industrial, waged and contractual.
The Tripartite Soul of the Old Social Citizenship
Social citizenship is frequently viewed in terms of socio-economic rights: rights
to the socialisation of certain risks thanks to a relative redistribution of wealth
through the welfare state. As with other dimensions of citizenship, the
responsibility for reducing social citizenship to a bundle of rights is largely due
to the influence of T. H. Marshall. According to Marshall’s (1992) seminal
thesis, welfare rights represent a third ‘part’ or ‘element’ in the development of
citizenship, after civil and political rights. This view conveys the impression
that satisfying social rights depends on the prior realisation of civil and
political rights. Although fruitful on one hand, three limitations to this
perspective can be pointed out.
The first limitation is that the conceptual distinction between the civil,
political and social arenas is itself deceptive. In fact, securing social rights
sanctioned the rights to political organisation, representation and action in
productive activity – political rights – as an inseparable part of the social
package. Obviously, the relative ‘constitutionalisation’ or politicisation of the
private economic sphere altered the very idea of civil rights and in particular,
the liberal-Lockean vision of ownership of the means of production as an
extension of the corporeal meum. It implied a right to another’s property – ‘jus
in res aliena’ – in favour of workers (Dome´nech, 2004).
The second limitation is that interpreting the typology in evolutionary terms,
as if the development of rights would lead in a linear fashion from one
generation to another, to a ‘phase’ rather than a ‘part’, is not very convincing.
As socialist criticism has pointed out, the real enlargement of some rights may
coexist with severe restrictions in others; in fact, communist regimes in the midtwentieth century were more intensive in social rights and less so in civil and
political rights than many of their contemporaries in the West (Bottomore,
1992: 55, 62).
Lastly, criticism has been aimed at the unilateralism of the rights-centred
focus. Subsequent debate has even led to a stereotyping of the different
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conceptions of citizenship around two basic poles, a rights-centred conception
belonging to Marshall’s liberal tradition and a duties or obligations-centred
conception belonging to the civic-republican tradition (Dobson, 2003: 38).
It is more useful to argue that social rights in democratic societies have
transformed the architecture of the very idea of citizenship itself and have
structurally affected other rights, especially property rights. The result of
concrete social struggles and class conflict, the modern ideals of freedom,
justice and solidarity were taken one step further to transform the similarly
modern ideals of individual, property and market. In other words, these ideals
were not mere appendices to the basic, core rights of a liberal origin that took
normative priority over other core rights of socialist origin. Instead, they were
the contingent and concrete resolution of the tension between different
elements in the modern notion of citizenship and especially in the notions of
justice and equality.
At the same time it seems that social citizenship cannot be reduced to a mere
bundle of rights. In fact, its own lexicon refers to ‘social contract’, ‘post-war
social consensus’ and ‘industrial agreement’, expressions which bring to mind a
weighing of rights and duties. In general, political economy has indicated two
distinct levels of institutionalisation in the social pact, especially comprehensible
within the context of the post-war economy and the prevalence of the Fordist
model of production and consumption. At the micro level, the relative
democratisation of the workplace was channelled through trade union
representatives, yet it also involved the renunciation of the maximalist objectives
of workers’ control and self-management so fervently supported by a part of the
working class of the time. At the macro level, it meant participating in social pacts
(frequently specified and arbitrated by the state) aimed at productivity and
economic growth. The indexed growth in wages and the multiplier effect of the
consumption it favoured also formed part of the agreement.
In other words, the social agreement also implied the involvement of great
swaths of the population in the success of enterprises and the economy in
general and in particular in a specific way of consuming and producing.
Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) considered that this type of commitment
configured the very notion of political community – ‘cite´’ – and of the general
or common good and could therefore be denominated a ‘civic-industrial
commitment’. Interestingly, in the 1950s, T. H. Marshall himself thought of
citizens imbued with a certain fundamental morality of industrial origin; when
differentiating citizenship from the regime of serfdom, he held that ‘citizenship
requires a bond of a different kind, a direct sense of community membership
based on loyalty to a civilisation which is a common possession’ (1992: 24). In
his opinion, with the advent of social rights, ‘social integration spread from the
sphere of sentiment and patriotism into that of material enjoyment’:
Mass production for the home market and a growing interest on the part of
industry in the needs and tastes of the common people enabled the less well-todo to enjoy a material civilisation which differed less markedly in quality from
that of the rich that it had ever done before (1992: 28; italics added).
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On this reading, the social element of citizenship provides access to ‘material
civilisation’, ‘material enjoyment’, ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum
of economic welfare and security to the right to share in the full social heritage
and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the
society’ (1992: 8; italics added). Marshall could not be clearer, and he spoke of an
‘industrial citizenship parallel with and supplementary to the system of political
citizenship’ (1992: 26). Then, ‘social integration’, membership in and loyalty
extended from (patriotic) morality to the common heritage of industrial
civilisation and citizenship. Marshall even refers to the concrete way in which
that commitment is carried out. When most of the population had a job, he wrote,
It is no easy matter to revive the sense of the personal obligation to work
in a new form in which it is attached to the status of citizenship. It is not
made any easier by the fact that the essential duty is not to have a job and
hold it, since that is relatively simple in conditions of full employment,
but to put one’s heart into one’s job and work hard (1992: 46–47).
Here it appears that ‘the personal obligation to work’ is ‘attached to the status
of citizenship’ and that ‘the sense of obligation’ is put into practice by working
‘hard’, ‘with one’s heart in it’. Marshall is usually read (and there is textual
evidence for this of course) as insisting on the idea that the sole concrete duty
of the citizen is to pay taxes and that ‘[t]he other duties are vague, and are
included in the general obligation to live the life of a good citizen, giving such
service as one can to promote the welfare of the community’ (1992: 45).
However, giving oneself up to work is not the type of duty that can be labelled
‘vague’, especially when Marshall seemed to lament the lack of a greater moral
commitment by workers.
In short, these are not simply welfare rights. On the one hand, the right to
equal citizenship is fulfilled by accessing material consumption in a more
egalitarian manner in industrial civilisation, namely, as an ‘industrial citizen’.
On the other hand, maintaining this civilisation depends on virtuous
participation in the world of labour and the enterprise, that is, as a ‘worker
citizen’. From this point of view, the duty of the ‘social citizen’ lies not only in
contributing to maintaining the welfare state with his taxes, but also in morally
committed actions with a particular idea of civilisation in mind when
consuming and working, namely, as a ‘citizen’ and not just as a mere taxpayer. Distinguishing between the three distinct components of the idea of
social citizenship – referred to here as industrial, waged and contractual
components – may be of use in better understanding the possible intersection
between social and environmental questions.
The Industrial Citizen
The inclusion of citizens in the benefits of the welfare state and consumer
society put material civilisation within reach of nearly the entire population in
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more advanced, industrialised societies. But, what does ‘industrial civilisation’
mean from the environmental point of view? The ecological economist,
J. M. Naredo (2001), thinks that it is the fact that humans no longer produce
and reproduce their lives like other species that defines ‘industrial civilisation’.
The notion of industrial civilisation is related to the industrial human-nature
metabolism: based for the first time in history on the transformation and
movement of materials and fossil fuels and not on photosynthetic products.
Under current conditions this involves great material inequalities at different
levels. According to Naredo’s calculations, at the intra-generational level in
1995, the total material requirement was 18 tonnes per capita, with rich
countries averaging 75 tonnes and poorer societies coming in at just 7. Based
on data from Wackernagel’s and Rees’ work on the ecological footprint,
approximately 20% of the worldwide population consumes 70–80% of its
natural resources (cited in Sachs, 2002: 19). At the inter-generational level,
Wackernagel would add that humanity is currently exceeding the biosphere’s
biological capacity by over 20%, which means that the common heritage of
future generations is being depleted (Wackernagel et al., 1999: 385). Other
methodologies and categories, such as the ‘environmental space’ used by
Friends of the Earth or the ‘ecological rucksack’ of the Friedrich SchmidtBleek from the Wuppertal Institute (see Naredo, 2001), have added to these
conclusions and show the extent to which industrial civilisation provides
opportunities for material consumption. All these methodologies stress the fact
that the material basis of industrial civilisation is finite and non-renewable,
which is why the relationship between differences in consumption is causal; the
consumption of some members impedes the improvement of others.
Globalisation boosts this process. On one hand, the dominance of the
financial world over the productive economy implies extra pressure on natural
planetary resources: purchasing power increases while the available stock of
natural wealth decreases. On the other hand, the growing asymmetry between
the monetary costs of extraction and the much higher costs of the final phases
of administration and marketing make increasing international specialisation
stress the divide ‘between poles of capitals and products accumulation and
those of mining and dumping’ (Naredo, 2001: 59).
The ‘Jo’burg Memo’ Fairness in a Fragile World, presented at the
Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, extended this view
to the language of citizenship. For its authors, sustainability is the ‘permissible
use [of global environmental space] among all world citizens’, taking into
account future generations as well (Sachs, 2002: 40). Equity, from this
perspective, implies less consumption by over-consumers in affluent societies to
make ‘convergence’ with other consumers possible. If this is a proper use of the
term citizen, social citizenship in its industrial dimension implies that this
‘material civilisation’ cannot be universal(ised) over a certain threshold of
consumption. In cases of over-consumption, ‘the life of civilised being
according to the standards prevailing in the society’, in Marshall’s words, is
made possible by excluding others from those standards. So, for instance,
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‘when G. Bush Sr. asserts that the American way of life is not up for
negotiation, he asserts [not just] that its vital space cannot be reduced’ (Flipo,
2002: 62), but that others’ vital space cannot be enlarged and secured. There is
a causal link between the over and under-use of natural space. Thus, overconsumers possess a kind of de facto ‘jus industrialis’, a privilege of entitlement
restricted and guaranteed by their power to purchase environmental space.
Andrew Dobson makes much of this kind of thinking in his appropriation of
the idea of ecological space as the ‘space of citizenship’ in his theory of
ecological citizenship (Dobson, 2003).
Nevertheless, the question must be asked whether this is a licit use of the
term citizenship. From the viewpoint of the tradition of citizenship, there is one
important deficit: the lack of a global political structure which guarantees the
rights of ecological citizenship. Despite this, the idea is present in certain
discourses employed by environmental non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and networks in global civil society, such as the example of the
Jo’burg Memo. These agents denounce the relationships of power of the
national and international institutions that generate and promote them: global
trade and financial organisations, corporations, states, etc. When developing
this idea from citizenship itself, Dobson stresses the challenging nature of this
non-territorial idea, based on ‘thick’ material obligations, such as ‘ensuring
that ecological footprints have a sustainable impact’ (2003: 119), and applying
that, wherever pertinent, to the private-domestic sphere as well.
One of the problems with this conception from ecological citizenship has to
do with membership. This article has previously highlighted the importance
that access to material enjoyment as a means to inclusion has in Marshall’s
view. In this regard, although it would be difficult to identify the ecological
citizen in relation to a political structure, some criteria are required to
distinguish between ecological and non-ecological citizens. Along the lines of
this argument, one response would be to identify ecological citizenship by the
sustainable consumption of environmental space. Nevertheless, and although
the use of a universalisable footprint would allow under-consumers access to
material civilisation, many ecological activists often do not have the
opportunity to maintain sustainable consumption. Especially for those in
wealthy societies, the needs of mobility, food, work, housing, training or leisure
frequently cannot be met in accordance with criteria of sustainable consumption; the least impact possible is often still much higher than the desired impact
in universal terms. Therefore, the notion of ecological citizenship must include
the aspiration to being able to live sustainably, namely, the will to carry out the
‘thick’ obligation that Dobson indicates and social action aimed at sanctioning
rights that protect it and make it feasible. This might be considered the possible
boundary of the community of ecological citizens – their sphere of membership.
Nevertheless, environmental injustice affects not only intra- and intergenerational issues, but intra-societal ones as well. Material relationships
between low and high consumption zones were regarded in the Jo’Burg Memo
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(Sachs, 2002) as social relations between under- and over-consumers: ‘more
affluent groups’, ‘consumer classes around the world’ and ‘urban-based middle
classes’ deprive ‘the poor’, ‘the marginalised majority’. From this perspective,
equity should involve reducing over-consumers’ consumption. The ecological
footprints within a society are enormously disparate and, significantly for the
purposes at hand, the greatest over-consumers are probably not the main
beneficiaries of social citizenship (see Stymme & Jackson, 2000), although this
does not exempt them from their corresponding share of responsibility. As
mentioned above, the growing purchasing power of the well-to-do is the root of
environmental injustice; therefore, ecological citizenship must aspire not only
to guaranteeing the right to live sustainably, but also to bringing those who do
not do so closer to sustainable ways of life. This article proposes that this is
predictable in terms of membership in the global community of sustainable
consumers, although undoubtedly not in the classic terms of the right to
national citizenship based on jus solis or sanguinis and in clear contrast to what
here has been called jus industrialis.
The Worker Citizen
In recent decades, fulfilling ‘the essential duty to have a job’ has not been as
simple as it was in Marshall’s time. This has to do with the change in the nature
of formal work. After the experiences of the 1970s and 1980s, being employed
is no longer the normal state of affairs: ‘the gap between the imagined
normality of employment and a steady job and the experienced reality of
unemployment, under-employment and precarious or irregular employment is
widening’, indicated Offe and Heinze (1992: 2). In spite of the increasing
number of gainfully employed people, structural changes in advanced
economies have meant that standard well-paid employment is disappearing.
‘We have ended welfare as we know it’, in Bill Clinton’s words, much as we
have ended employment as we knew it, replaced by a myriad of temporary and
sub-standard flexible forms of employment: telework, self-employment, freelancing, on-call work contracts, job-sharing, and so forth, or simply undeclared
work (EIRO, 2004: 59–67). As Sennett aptly indicated (1998), it is increasingly
harder to build a biographical narrative from a professional career. Two
consequences of importance for the ecological question deserve attention.
The first consequence is the close relationship between having a job and
being able to access material civilisation, between being an industrial citizen
and a waged citizen. In general, membership as social citizenship is linked to
the paid labour market, with inclusion and exclusion being different degrees of
proximity as regards ‘the benefits of growth and economic progress’ (Boltanski
& Chiapello, 1999: 445). That is, inclusion in the labour force allows members
to be civilised ‘according to the standards prevailing in the society’, to access
the means of consumption (money) and participate in the productive system.
Green criticism has rightly emphasized how entry into capitalist social relations
makes us accomplices in the industrialist model, in the subordination ‘of all
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other concerns to the primary goal of profit-maximisation’ and ‘increasing
inequality and commodification of ‘nature’ as ‘natural resources’ (Paterson,
2001: 46–48), ‘workers’ as the ‘labour force’, ‘creative beings’ as ‘human
capital’ (Gorz, 2003: 1) and ‘citizens’ as ‘consumers’ (Bauman, 1998: ch.2).
The second is that industrial-labour integration also has a moral dimension.
The work ethic and vigour that Marshall yearned for referred not only to its
productive dimension, but also to its civic and civilising ones as well. Work well
done was viewed not only as part of a labour contract, but also as a contribution
to the common good – ‘public service’ – and even to the Promethean project of
harnessing nature. This idea of civilisation brought different traditions together,
including socialist and liberal ones, which were at odds for other reasons
(Lipietz, 1993: ch.3) and led to the enthusiastic championing of work as a
universal unifier on more than one occasion. Nowadays, two types of pressure
pulling in opposite directions are affecting the work ethic.
First, the reformulation of capitalism in the 1980s gave birth to a new ethos
that Boltanski and Chiapello call a ‘new spirit’ (1999). Nowadays, businesses
attempt to value all the skills that make employees more flexible, including
relational, communicative and emotional skills (as mentioned previously, this
‘knowledge economy’ is not an immaterial economy, at least not from the
viewpoint of its relationship with the natural environment). The old social
contract, by contrast, signified a change in the regime of servitude in the sense
that it was a ‘contract’: workers did not alienate their person, only their labour
(Gorz, 2003: 16). At any rate, this ‘total mobilisation’ of the flexible worker
(Gorz, 2003: 22) has important repercussions on citizenship, as it promotes
group adhesion, corporate patriotism and hypercompetitive attitudes in
general – as can be seen in management narratives that invoke coach, leader,
hero and so forth. Thus, in an environment of extreme uncertainty, labour
socialisation under globalised capitalism, in Sennett’s words, ‘corrupts
character’, hinders the establishment of stable commitments and dissolves
the presumed universality of the old work ethic. This new morality questions
the very idea of the worker citizen itself.
Conversely, the second pressure on traditional worker morality is a revolt
against capitalism itself. As Habermas already denounced three decades ago,
the demands for autonomy, creativity and authenticity that the civic-industrial
commitment blocked led to a rebellion against integration into capitalism and
the work ethic and resulted in a crisis of legitimacy (Habermas, 1976) – a crisis
of legitimacy for industrial citizenship itself. When resisting corporate
patriotism and the industrialist mythology, it becomes very difficult to ‘put
one’s heart’ into an activity which is carried out as instrumentally as possible.
Consequently, when thinkers such as Offe or Gorz underline this type of trend
as the end of what might be called the labour society (Offe, 1985; Gorz, 1989),
they are putting a name to the end of the hegemony of the worker and the
industrial bourgeoisie, but they are further asking us to consider the possibility
of a new post-productivist social contract, to relax the identification of social
rights with industrialist commitment through waged work.
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As can be seen, a contract of this type would seem to benefit from a certain
cultural change. On the one hand, the morality generated by this new
capitalism has lost the universalist aspiration of the old work ethic, while
relaxing the identification between work well done and the industrialist dream.
Two questions arise from the standpoint of sustainability: Must one stop being
a worker citizen in order to become an ecological citizen? In other words, does
entry into the labour force necessarily lead to ‘industrial integration’? If not,
then how is it possible to be an ecological citizen while being a waged worker?
And if so, how would social citizenship be possible without any type of labour
commitment?
Reflecting on the different forms of membership in terms of social citizenship
may be useful in addressing the first question. Even before the crisis in the full
employment society, social critique had denounced the existence of a ‘fourth
world’ of social exclusion in a broader sense, which it denominated ‘social
exclusion’ (Klanfer, 1965). In those days, the term had a broader character and
emphasized the structural generation of different forms of social pathologies
and deprivation. It was not until the 1990s, under the looming shadow of
massive unemployment, that it was restricted to the lack of integration into the
legal, remunerated, productive environment, and structural analysis was
replaced by individualist explanatory models. Those who wished to maintain
the structural perspective have not left off denouncing what they have
metaphorically christened ‘dualisation’, ‘South-Africanisation’ or ‘Brazilianisation’ and predicting that a third and even half of the population will be
permanently excluded (for example, Gorz, 1989: 88). These predictions have
not come true, at least in wealthy countries, although stratification between
different forms and degrees of vulnerability or exclusion has become the
prevailing note (Bauman, 1998). In other words, there are different degrees of
membership in social citizenship.
The volume and forms of exclusion also depend on the way each society
redistributes social provision. Welfare theorists, with some differences, usually
agree on at least three ideas in this regard. Firstly, they agree that economic
security and provisioning should be promoted not only by the state, but also by
other institutions, such as the market and families. Secondly, they agree that
the models that promote access to the most egalitarian standards of living are
the least conditional models, with the paradigmatic example of the
Scandinavian countries. The least universalist, such as the North American
model, leave access to welfare in the hands of the market, although they usually
include some type of palliative assistance for the most vulnerable groups.
Thirdly, welfare theorists agree that the current trend in welfare regimes is to
lose the centripetal, inclusive and unconditional State-centred dialectics in
favour of a greater commodification of provisioning (see Esping-Andersen,
1990; Handler, 2002).
Nevertheless, not even the least conditional models are perfectly universalist.
Status-based citizenship regimes have not completely solved the unequal
treatment of women – the ‘gender gap’ – or the restriction to a national jus
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which Marshall or Handler take for granted and which does not prevent entire
pockets of the population, particularly immigrants, from being excluded.
However, the greater levels of labour freedom they promote have made some
of these societies exemplary models for those who strive for equality. Yet
beyond that, this greater freedom made these societies laboratories for all kinds
of social experiments and more sustainable consumption and production
methods that are less dependent on capitalist imperatives: co-operative social
economy, non-lucrative mutuals, do-it-yourself activities, moneyless exchange
and self-supply networks, barter clubs, and so forth. This third sector has been
not only an activator of moral stock but also an authentic source of basic
sustenance when it lacks the backing of a strong state, as the recent crisis in
Argentina has demonstrated (Castro, 2003). In general, this has made critics of
the labour society invest a great deal of their post-productivist hopes into
developing a ‘third sector’ of a ‘convivial’ or ‘reciprocal’ economy (Lipietz,
2000; Gorz, 1997: 161–175; Graham Smith and Gill Seyfang, this volume). In
short, a productive sphere is proposed in which living sustainably, the first
requirement of ecological citizenship, can be promoted, in which the ecological
citizen escapes waged labour.
However, total liberation from industrialism is not easily achieved; the
dependability of monetary income flows to finance modern finance systems
involves a limit to the volume of coverage that can be de-commodified, as
indicated by Offe and Heinze, defenders of the development of this third sector
(1992: 4). Even when alternative ways of life, work and consumption reduce
certain social expenditures at the same time, it does not seem likely that services
such as health or pensions can be made totally independent from the formal
economy.
This tension between gainful and meaningful work has led theorists of the
post-productivist social contract to propose the maximum freedom of
movement between different productive activities and particularly to favour
the sphere of freely defined needs and sustainable self-production guided by
concrete reciprocity and solidarity. A post-Keynesian social contract would
thus promote a ‘multi-activity society’, thanks to social reforms based on the
shortening and sharing of working hours and life, some form of basic income
and public policies which promote a reduced-scale sustainable economy.
Although the term originated with Andre´ Gorz (1997), different combinations
of such reforms have been proposed by authors such as C. Offe and A. Lipietz,
as well as U. Beck, J. Habermas and J. Rifkin, among many other important
social theorists. The third sector would become an additional pillar of a welfare
regime that would sanction the right ‘not to work to destroy the world’, thus
debilitating the association between industrial/wage and social aspects of
labour.
Would this be an unconditional social contract? Gorz himself justifies it in
civic terms. He holds that inasmuch as social citizenship means ‘the right to
accede to the public economic sphere through one’s work’, the post-industrial
citizen should enjoy the ‘right to act in the different activities deployed in the
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public space’ (Gorz, 1997: 65). In short, this perspective continues to conceive
of social provision as a counterpart to some type of public service – in this case,
productive but not necessarily within the labour market. Thus, one comes to
the question of whether it is possible to conceive of social citizenship without
any labour obligation at all, waged or not.
Citizen or Taxpayer?
The crux of the so-called guaranteed basic income (GBI) is precisely its rupture
with any kind of conditionality in the social contract, whether commercial or
moral. This is not a post-wage contract, but rather goes beyond the idea of
contract through ‘an income paid by a political community to all its members
on an individual basis, without test or work requirement’ (Van Parijs, 2004: 7).
Its unconditionality and universality are what separate it from earlier
proposals. It should be recalled, for example, that active employment policies
are not always conditional. For example, the French RMI (revenu minimum
d’insertion), a guaranteed minimum income established in 1988, is almost
unconditional compared to workfare, as it does not demand proof of the will to
(re)enter the labour market. Nevertheless, it is limited to the most vulnerable or
excluded groups, while GBI is not.
Evidently, the political and economic feasibility of this proposal is extremely
problematic, especially if the failure of similar, much more modest proposals is
taken into account, such as the 35-hour working week, in clear regression
wherever it has been implemented, such as in France and Germany. Despite
that, it is justifiable in terms of citizenship and comparable to the universal
right to vote, in terms of the unconditional distribution of a minimum of power
to co-determine the destinies of the community itself (Dome´nech, 2004: 7–8).
Through it, ecological citizens could access waged and non-waged forms of
attractive activities which would be less vulnerable to the imperatives of
capital, against which they would be endowed with a greater bargaining force.
Although it would not prescribe public services – as would be prescribed for the
classic republican citizen – it would sanction the right to be able to act
responsibly in the productive sphere without splitting society into two types of
citizens: first-class ones and the rest, excluded from material civilisation. GBI is
also thus justified in ecological terms and its champions remind us that it allows
the link between productivity and welfare to be overcome (Van Parijs, 2004:
18). This is the key to its possible compatibility with ecological citizenship.
Nevertheless, is pure unconditional citizenship feasible? Delving into the
normative background of social citizenship may shed some light here.
As has been seen, thanks to their access to material civilisation, it is possible
for entire layers of the population in developed countries to enjoy much better
living conditions than their parents did. The guarantee of new social citizenship
rights served not only to partly legitimise a capitalism brought into question by
a century of social struggles, but also to ratify the success of worker movements
in their struggle for the de-commodification and achievement of the ideals of
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‘freedom, justice and solidarity’, to cite Germany’s Social Democratic Party
(SDP). That is the essence of the welfare state: the distribution of market
income through full employment and regulated labour markets, the
redistribution of market income among households through the tax/transfer
system and the relative emancipation of market income through entitlements to
health care, education, training, housing, recreation, culture and a wide range
of social services such as childcare and care for the elderly. Non-market
indirect wages have tended to protect the most disadvantaged groups, such as
the elderly or the disabled, in a wide variety of more solidaristic or charitable
ways, but always by redistributing material goods. This vision of the nature of
protection is precisely the distinguishing feature between the classic outlook
and the moderniser.
Returning to the example of Germany’s SDP, the main difference between its
current Agenda 2010 and the old Godesberg programme resides in ‘the
modernisation of the labour market’ by means of a ‘carrot and stick principle’.
‘[T]hose who do not try hard enough to find a job or who turn down a
reasonable job will be forced to accept a reduction or termination of their
benefit’ (SDP, 2003: 15; italics added). On this reading, and in Marshall’s own
words, unemployed people could be accused of being bad citizens. This idea
squares with current (new) conservative or ‘Third Way’ discourses, with
current Chancellor Gerhard Schro¨der’s assertion that ‘no one has the right to
be lazy’, part of the critique of the ‘dependency culture’. Thus, Anglo-Saxon
workfare, Agenda 2010, socialist flexisecurity in France and the European
Union’s ‘new social contract’ accentuate social citizenship’s conditionality on a
waged labour contract.
Joel Handler, following in Marshall’s steps, insists that this new regime
produces the displacement of citizenship from ‘status’ to ‘contract’. Previously,
‘social benefits [were] rights that were attached by virtue of status – the status
of citizenship’. According to Handler, ‘as with all citizenship rights, [the core of
social citizenship] is fundamentally moral. Redistribution is an act of solidarity,
of inclusion’ (2002: 5). His thesis is that inclusion through workfare obligations
is ‘contradictory’ (2004), and results in the exclusion of those who cannot
comply with the rules, especially immigrants, women, lone parents, long-term
unemployed and even workers in a weak position from which to bargain with
entrepreneurs.
Thus, from the most restrictive point of view of the contract, only those
already in the labour market or struggling to enter it deserve welfare. So people
deserve social rights because they contribute to finance the welfare regime and
are not a burden to others. Nowadays, given the emphasis on the voluntary
feature of unemployment, making the excluded ‘responsible’ transforms the
have-nots – the workless, homeless – into the ‘deserving poor’. From this point
of view, the moral commitment to others as citizens is reduced to a reciprocal
contract with others as taxpayers or job-hunters, while the aspiration to an
egalitarian standard of material living falls by the wayside. To Pierre
Rosanvallon – who has defined and defended this ‘contractual individualism’
Social Citizenship and the Environment
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– the raison d’eˆtre of the shift lies in the fiscal pressure to which welfare states
are subject nowadays and equally in what he considers the disappearance of the
‘moral mechanism’ that founded post-war social citizenship (Rosanvallon,
1995: ch.7). Today, in his opinion, there is no social cement for a type of shared
ethnicity in favour of unconditional solidarity. People find themselves in a
‘post-Rawlsian age’: the veil of ignorance from the war has been torn off and
the wealthy are aware of their status and do not acknowledge any debt to the
poor. Nevertheless, then, even for him, social citizenship was the result of the
reinforcement of civic ties forged during the struggle against fascism. At any
rate, and in the words of Rousseau’s Social Contract, Rosanvallon states, ‘La
Patrie has a debt towards its citizens because they are ready to die for her if
necessary’ and the welfare state ‘is no more than an ordinary and restrained
version of this ideal’ (1995: 49).
Given such as a shift, given that this ideal has been lost, does the new
contract preserve the original core of citizenship? Rosanvallon himself returns
to the idea that the foundation of the acquis social does not respond to a
pragmatic quid pro quo agreement between those who finance and use the
welfare state – basically, the middle class. This article has stated that it was
not so much the willingness to die – as Rosanvallon does – as to adhere to
the national material civilisation and tame class conflict which developed the
contract, but the main point is that it seems inevitable to acknowledge the
idea that the real moral grounds for citizenship is that everyone, not just
taxpayers, deserves to be a citizen in similar conditions. In any event, it refers
to some type of moral covenant, an inter-subjective commitment to equity
and justice, that GBI tries to maintain. However, in the case of social
citizenship the commitment has to do with the production and distribution of
material goods. Here, a pure unconditional GBI can be fruit from the
poisoned tree.
Authors such as Gorz have insisted that a GBI would serve to subsidise the
least skilled work in a framework of growing commodification and would
become just an assistance income (Gorz, 1997: 134–145). He believes that a
liberating income could only be possible in a solid state setting of universalist
welfare, whenever it was sufficient to meet its beneficiaries’ basic needs. Just as
there are conservative and emancipating GBI schemes, it is possible for
sustainable and unsustainable basic incomes to exist. According to the idea’s
originator, Phillipe Van Parijs, ‘the only political unit which has ever
introduced a genuine basic income, as defined, is the state of Alaska in the
United States’. There, ‘The dividend scheme is funded out of the return on a
diversified investment fund which the state built up using the royalties on
Alaska’s vast oil fields’ (Van Parijs, 2000: 11). Although it apparently allows
sustainable ways of life and work to be developed, in this case, basic income is
a kind of pay-off for industrial sins. The problem with social citizenship is that
it rests on the distribution of material goods; from the point of view of
sustainability, it is no longer possible to be abstract about the concrete way in
which these goods are produced. The idea of unconditionality in terms of
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J. Valdivielso
beneficiaries is attractive, but unconditional monetary flows do not exist; they
are always generated at the expense of some type of consumption and
production.
Conclusion
Social citizenship fundamentally refers to a moral and civic commitment to
equality and justice. Therefore, it rests on the assumption of a notion of the
common good and the commitment to ensure the rights to exercise the
concomitant duty of participating in its definition and its fruits. The old
social contract was the result of the historical processes of social struggles
that materialised in institutions, values, images and concrete beliefs in its
industrial and waged dimensions. Without a doubt, globalisation challenges a
good part of the institutional framework, both micro and macro, which
sustains it, but also unmasks its limitations: its restricted national scope, the
productivist aura of the work and consumption ethic, in short its lack of
civilising content.
The moral cement of social commitment is being redefined day by day, from
the most commodified and compassionate to the most universalist and
unconditional viewpoints. Ecological citizenship has a role to play in this space
for social construction. From the viewpoint of sustainability, a new social
contract should encourage forms of sustainable work and production patterns
which do not destroy resources. From the viewpoint of social citizenship, it
would aspire to similar material conditions and a dignified way of life for all.
This is the framework that defines what a ‘reasonable’ work and welfare could
be, the civic and civilising criteria which the old work ethic yearned for. If an
ecological and social contract were to be implemented, the conditionality of
social coverage should be focused in that direction rather than on integration
into the workplace at all costs. In this case, wage citizens should have the
possibility to develop their activities as free as possible from the imperatives of
growth and capitalism’s new morality. The bio-transformative aspect of work
should not be overlooked, nor should the fact that the private-productive
sphere, whether market or not, can be a locus from which the ecological citizen
can struggle to live sustainably. Escaping the wage requirement does not seem
to be a fully generalisable option and therefore overcoming the industrial trap
must also include regulating the formal economy with ecological criteria –
those activities that nurture social provision as well as those which make them
necessary, especially if they are, like the consumption of fossil resources,
unsustainable. Unfortunately, social provision sustained by the last type of
activity does not satisfy civilising criteria.
In any case, a social contract of this type would alter the structure of civil
and political citizenship, particularly the freedoms which endow the right to
pursue forms of unsustainable and ecologically unjust ways of living,
consuming, working, owning and investing. Perhaps there is no ‘moral cement’
at hand to do so, nor any manner of acceding to material civilisation without
Social Citizenship and the Environment
253
sliding down the slippery slope of consumerism and productivism; perhaps the
constrictions of globalisation are unsalvageable. Nevertheless, the idea of
citizenship should no longer serve as an alibi for industrial civilisation.
Acknowledgements
This research was developed within the Justice, Social Change and the Limits
of Welfare State research programme funded by the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Education (BSO2000-1116-C04-01). The author is indebted to the
research group on Politics, Labour and Sustainability from the University of
the Balearic Islands (UIB) for its support and comments, and to the
participants in the ‘Citizenship and the Environment’ workshop at the ECPR
Joint Sessions (Uppsala, Sweden, 13–18 April 2004).
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Citizenship and S
Vol. 14, No. 2, 239 – 254, April 2005
Social Citizenship and the
Environment
JOAQUI´N VALDIVIELSO
Department of Philosophy, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
ABSTRACT Social citizenship, an idea and practice that is currently undergoing
substantial reconsideration, is often regarded as requiring high economic growth and the
spread of the market economy and formal work. But this may have consequences for
sustainability. To consider whether or not sustainability and social citizenship are
compatible, the notion of social citizenship is here divided into three elements of social
commitment: industrial, waged and contractual. The analysis attempts to reveal the extent
to which the nature of social citizenship has been transformed, and examines its
relationship with sustainability and the idea of ecological citizenship.
Introduction
The debate on citizenship has been central in moral and political theory and
philosophy in the last decade. To a large degree, this academic revival has given
priority to political and civil dimensions and largely overlooked others of great
importance. This particularly affects social citizenship, which has been
immersed in a substantial reconsideration of its own at the same time.
For example, in July 2004, benefits for the unemployed in Germany – the
paradigm of broad social citizenship – suffered the deepest cuts in the last 50
years. The red–green alliance in the Federal Government has just started to
implement the social democratic programme called Agenda 2010, a substitute
for the old Godesberg Programme which ‘paved the way for freedom, justice
and solidarity by providing the framework for social and economic reforms
based on a social market economy’ (SDP 2003: 2). Like similar programmes,
Agenda 2010 stresses the need for a ‘modernisation of the labour market’ and
‘ecological modernisation’ in addition to growth and employment, the classic
means of achieving the old ideals. In any case, these new issues are secondary
to the old requirements, which has led to extremely ambitious approaches.
Thus, Swedish Premier Goran Perssons wondered recently, ‘How can we create
growth, full employment, and a sound environment, as well as develop the
European social model (. . .)?’ (Perssons, 2004: 1).
Correspondence Address: UIB. Edif. Ramon Llull Crta. Valldemossa, km. 7.5. 07122 Palma de
Mallorca, Spain. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0964-4016 Print/1744-8934 Online/05/020239–16 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/09644010500055142
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The green movement has always suspected that achieving sustainability
would be difficult if economic growth and formal employment were encouraged
to achieve their highest possible rates. The purpose of this article is to consider
whether or not sustainability and social citizenship are necessarily incompatible.
Rather than examining the possible financial feasibility of a more environmentally benign social State, the notion of citizenship itself in terms of both social
and environmental questions will be considered. To do so, social citizenship is
analysed in a way that reveals the extent, if any, to which its nature has been
transformed and its possible relationship with sustainability and even with the
idea of ecological citizenship. To shed light on the complexities of a possible
model which combines the requirements of ecological and social citizenship, the
notion of social citizenship has been divided into three elements or dimensions
of social commitment: industrial, waged and contractual.
The Tripartite Soul of the Old Social Citizenship
Social citizenship is frequently viewed in terms of socio-economic rights: rights
to the socialisation of certain risks thanks to a relative redistribution of wealth
through the welfare state. As with other dimensions of citizenship, the
responsibility for reducing social citizenship to a bundle of rights is largely due
to the influence of T. H. Marshall. According to Marshall’s (1992) seminal
thesis, welfare rights represent a third ‘part’ or ‘element’ in the development of
citizenship, after civil and political rights. This view conveys the impression
that satisfying social rights depends on the prior realisation of civil and
political rights. Although fruitful on one hand, three limitations to this
perspective can be pointed out.
The first limitation is that the conceptual distinction between the civil,
political and social arenas is itself deceptive. In fact, securing social rights
sanctioned the rights to political organisation, representation and action in
productive activity – political rights – as an inseparable part of the social
package. Obviously, the relative ‘constitutionalisation’ or politicisation of the
private economic sphere altered the very idea of civil rights and in particular,
the liberal-Lockean vision of ownership of the means of production as an
extension of the corporeal meum. It implied a right to another’s property – ‘jus
in res aliena’ – in favour of workers (Dome´nech, 2004).
The second limitation is that interpreting the typology in evolutionary terms,
as if the development of rights would lead in a linear fashion from one
generation to another, to a ‘phase’ rather than a ‘part’, is not very convincing.
As socialist criticism has pointed out, the real enlargement of some rights may
coexist with severe restrictions in others; in fact, communist regimes in the midtwentieth century were more intensive in social rights and less so in civil and
political rights than many of their contemporaries in the West (Bottomore,
1992: 55, 62).
Lastly, criticism has been aimed at the unilateralism of the rights-centred
focus. Subsequent debate has even led to a stereotyping of the different
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conceptions of citizenship around two basic poles, a rights-centred conception
belonging to Marshall’s liberal tradition and a duties or obligations-centred
conception belonging to the civic-republican tradition (Dobson, 2003: 38).
It is more useful to argue that social rights in democratic societies have
transformed the architecture of the very idea of citizenship itself and have
structurally affected other rights, especially property rights. The result of
concrete social struggles and class conflict, the modern ideals of freedom,
justice and solidarity were taken one step further to transform the similarly
modern ideals of individual, property and market. In other words, these ideals
were not mere appendices to the basic, core rights of a liberal origin that took
normative priority over other core rights of socialist origin. Instead, they were
the contingent and concrete resolution of the tension between different
elements in the modern notion of citizenship and especially in the notions of
justice and equality.
At the same time it seems that social citizenship cannot be reduced to a mere
bundle of rights. In fact, its own lexicon refers to ‘social contract’, ‘post-war
social consensus’ and ‘industrial agreement’, expressions which bring to mind a
weighing of rights and duties. In general, political economy has indicated two
distinct levels of institutionalisation in the social pact, especially comprehensible
within the context of the post-war economy and the prevalence of the Fordist
model of production and consumption. At the micro level, the relative
democratisation of the workplace was channelled through trade union
representatives, yet it also involved the renunciation of the maximalist objectives
of workers’ control and self-management so fervently supported by a part of the
working class of the time. At the macro level, it meant participating in social pacts
(frequently specified and arbitrated by the state) aimed at productivity and
economic growth. The indexed growth in wages and the multiplier effect of the
consumption it favoured also formed part of the agreement.
In other words, the social agreement also implied the involvement of great
swaths of the population in the success of enterprises and the economy in
general and in particular in a specific way of consuming and producing.
Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) considered that this type of commitment
configured the very notion of political community – ‘cite´’ – and of the general
or common good and could therefore be denominated a ‘civic-industrial
commitment’. Interestingly, in the 1950s, T. H. Marshall himself thought of
citizens imbued with a certain fundamental morality of industrial origin; when
differentiating citizenship from the regime of serfdom, he held that ‘citizenship
requires a bond of a different kind, a direct sense of community membership
based on loyalty to a civilisation which is a common possession’ (1992: 24). In
his opinion, with the advent of social rights, ‘social integration spread from the
sphere of sentiment and patriotism into that of material enjoyment’:
Mass production for the home market and a growing interest on the part of
industry in the needs and tastes of the common people enabled the less well-todo to enjoy a material civilisation which differed less markedly in quality from
that of the rich that it had ever done before (1992: 28; italics added).
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On this reading, the social element of citizenship provides access to ‘material
civilisation’, ‘material enjoyment’, ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum
of economic welfare and security to the right to share in the full social heritage
and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the
society’ (1992: 8; italics added). Marshall could not be clearer, and he spoke of an
‘industrial citizenship parallel with and supplementary to the system of political
citizenship’ (1992: 26). Then, ‘social integration’, membership in and loyalty
extended from (patriotic) morality to the common heritage of industrial
civilisation and citizenship. Marshall even refers to the concrete way in which
that commitment is carried out. When most of the population had a job, he wrote,
It is no easy matter to revive the sense of the personal obligation to work
in a new form in which it is attached to the status of citizenship. It is not
made any easier by the fact that the essential duty is not to have a job and
hold it, since that is relatively simple in conditions of full employment,
but to put one’s heart into one’s job and work hard (1992: 46–47).
Here it appears that ‘the personal obligation to work’ is ‘attached to the status
of citizenship’ and that ‘the sense of obligation’ is put into practice by working
‘hard’, ‘with one’s heart in it’. Marshall is usually read (and there is textual
evidence for this of course) as insisting on the idea that the sole concrete duty
of the citizen is to pay taxes and that ‘[t]he other duties are vague, and are
included in the general obligation to live the life of a good citizen, giving such
service as one can to promote the welfare of the community’ (1992: 45).
However, giving oneself up to work is not the type of duty that can be labelled
‘vague’, especially when Marshall seemed to lament the lack of a greater moral
commitment by workers.
In short, these are not simply welfare rights. On the one hand, the right to
equal citizenship is fulfilled by accessing material consumption in a more
egalitarian manner in industrial civilisation, namely, as an ‘industrial citizen’.
On the other hand, maintaining this civilisation depends on virtuous
participation in the world of labour and the enterprise, that is, as a ‘worker
citizen’. From this point of view, the duty of the ‘social citizen’ lies not only in
contributing to maintaining the welfare state with his taxes, but also in morally
committed actions with a particular idea of civilisation in mind when
consuming and working, namely, as a ‘citizen’ and not just as a mere taxpayer. Distinguishing between the three distinct components of the idea of
social citizenship – referred to here as industrial, waged and contractual
components – may be of use in better understanding the possible intersection
between social and environmental questions.
The Industrial Citizen
The inclusion of citizens in the benefits of the welfare state and consumer
society put material civilisation within reach of nearly the entire population in
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243
more advanced, industrialised societies. But, what does ‘industrial civilisation’
mean from the environmental point of view? The ecological economist,
J. M. Naredo (2001), thinks that it is the fact that humans no longer produce
and reproduce their lives like other species that defines ‘industrial civilisation’.
The notion of industrial civilisation is related to the industrial human-nature
metabolism: based for the first time in history on the transformation and
movement of materials and fossil fuels and not on photosynthetic products.
Under current conditions this involves great material inequalities at different
levels. According to Naredo’s calculations, at the intra-generational level in
1995, the total material requirement was 18 tonnes per capita, with rich
countries averaging 75 tonnes and poorer societies coming in at just 7. Based
on data from Wackernagel’s and Rees’ work on the ecological footprint,
approximately 20% of the worldwide population consumes 70–80% of its
natural resources (cited in Sachs, 2002: 19). At the inter-generational level,
Wackernagel would add that humanity is currently exceeding the biosphere’s
biological capacity by over 20%, which means that the common heritage of
future generations is being depleted (Wackernagel et al., 1999: 385). Other
methodologies and categories, such as the ‘environmental space’ used by
Friends of the Earth or the ‘ecological rucksack’ of the Friedrich SchmidtBleek from the Wuppertal Institute (see Naredo, 2001), have added to these
conclusions and show the extent to which industrial civilisation provides
opportunities for material consumption. All these methodologies stress the fact
that the material basis of industrial civilisation is finite and non-renewable,
which is why the relationship between differences in consumption is causal; the
consumption of some members impedes the improvement of others.
Globalisation boosts this process. On one hand, the dominance of the
financial world over the productive economy implies extra pressure on natural
planetary resources: purchasing power increases while the available stock of
natural wealth decreases. On the other hand, the growing asymmetry between
the monetary costs of extraction and the much higher costs of the final phases
of administration and marketing make increasing international specialisation
stress the divide ‘between poles of capitals and products accumulation and
those of mining and dumping’ (Naredo, 2001: 59).
The ‘Jo’burg Memo’ Fairness in a Fragile World, presented at the
Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, extended this view
to the language of citizenship. For its authors, sustainability is the ‘permissible
use [of global environmental space] among all world citizens’, taking into
account future generations as well (Sachs, 2002: 40). Equity, from this
perspective, implies less consumption by over-consumers in affluent societies to
make ‘convergence’ with other consumers possible. If this is a proper use of the
term citizen, social citizenship in its industrial dimension implies that this
‘material civilisation’ cannot be universal(ised) over a certain threshold of
consumption. In cases of over-consumption, ‘the life of civilised being
according to the standards prevailing in the society’, in Marshall’s words, is
made possible by excluding others from those standards. So, for instance,
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‘when G. Bush Sr. asserts that the American way of life is not up for
negotiation, he asserts [not just] that its vital space cannot be reduced’ (Flipo,
2002: 62), but that others’ vital space cannot be enlarged and secured. There is
a causal link between the over and under-use of natural space. Thus, overconsumers possess a kind of de facto ‘jus industrialis’, a privilege of entitlement
restricted and guaranteed by their power to purchase environmental space.
Andrew Dobson makes much of this kind of thinking in his appropriation of
the idea of ecological space as the ‘space of citizenship’ in his theory of
ecological citizenship (Dobson, 2003).
Nevertheless, the question must be asked whether this is a licit use of the
term citizenship. From the viewpoint of the tradition of citizenship, there is one
important deficit: the lack of a global political structure which guarantees the
rights of ecological citizenship. Despite this, the idea is present in certain
discourses employed by environmental non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and networks in global civil society, such as the example of the
Jo’burg Memo. These agents denounce the relationships of power of the
national and international institutions that generate and promote them: global
trade and financial organisations, corporations, states, etc. When developing
this idea from citizenship itself, Dobson stresses the challenging nature of this
non-territorial idea, based on ‘thick’ material obligations, such as ‘ensuring
that ecological footprints have a sustainable impact’ (2003: 119), and applying
that, wherever pertinent, to the private-domestic sphere as well.
One of the problems with this conception from ecological citizenship has to
do with membership. This article has previously highlighted the importance
that access to material enjoyment as a means to inclusion has in Marshall’s
view. In this regard, although it would be difficult to identify the ecological
citizen in relation to a political structure, some criteria are required to
distinguish between ecological and non-ecological citizens. Along the lines of
this argument, one response would be to identify ecological citizenship by the
sustainable consumption of environmental space. Nevertheless, and although
the use of a universalisable footprint would allow under-consumers access to
material civilisation, many ecological activists often do not have the
opportunity to maintain sustainable consumption. Especially for those in
wealthy societies, the needs of mobility, food, work, housing, training or leisure
frequently cannot be met in accordance with criteria of sustainable consumption; the least impact possible is often still much higher than the desired impact
in universal terms. Therefore, the notion of ecological citizenship must include
the aspiration to being able to live sustainably, namely, the will to carry out the
‘thick’ obligation that Dobson indicates and social action aimed at sanctioning
rights that protect it and make it feasible. This might be considered the possible
boundary of the community of ecological citizens – their sphere of membership.
Nevertheless, environmental injustice affects not only intra- and intergenerational issues, but intra-societal ones as well. Material relationships
between low and high consumption zones were regarded in the Jo’Burg Memo
Social Citizenship and the Environment
245
(Sachs, 2002) as social relations between under- and over-consumers: ‘more
affluent groups’, ‘consumer classes around the world’ and ‘urban-based middle
classes’ deprive ‘the poor’, ‘the marginalised majority’. From this perspective,
equity should involve reducing over-consumers’ consumption. The ecological
footprints within a society are enormously disparate and, significantly for the
purposes at hand, the greatest over-consumers are probably not the main
beneficiaries of social citizenship (see Stymme & Jackson, 2000), although this
does not exempt them from their corresponding share of responsibility. As
mentioned above, the growing purchasing power of the well-to-do is the root of
environmental injustice; therefore, ecological citizenship must aspire not only
to guaranteeing the right to live sustainably, but also to bringing those who do
not do so closer to sustainable ways of life. This article proposes that this is
predictable in terms of membership in the global community of sustainable
consumers, although undoubtedly not in the classic terms of the right to
national citizenship based on jus solis or sanguinis and in clear contrast to what
here has been called jus industrialis.
The Worker Citizen
In recent decades, fulfilling ‘the essential duty to have a job’ has not been as
simple as it was in Marshall’s time. This has to do with the change in the nature
of formal work. After the experiences of the 1970s and 1980s, being employed
is no longer the normal state of affairs: ‘the gap between the imagined
normality of employment and a steady job and the experienced reality of
unemployment, under-employment and precarious or irregular employment is
widening’, indicated Offe and Heinze (1992: 2). In spite of the increasing
number of gainfully employed people, structural changes in advanced
economies have meant that standard well-paid employment is disappearing.
‘We have ended welfare as we know it’, in Bill Clinton’s words, much as we
have ended employment as we knew it, replaced by a myriad of temporary and
sub-standard flexible forms of employment: telework, self-employment, freelancing, on-call work contracts, job-sharing, and so forth, or simply undeclared
work (EIRO, 2004: 59–67). As Sennett aptly indicated (1998), it is increasingly
harder to build a biographical narrative from a professional career. Two
consequences of importance for the ecological question deserve attention.
The first consequence is the close relationship between having a job and
being able to access material civilisation, between being an industrial citizen
and a waged citizen. In general, membership as social citizenship is linked to
the paid labour market, with inclusion and exclusion being different degrees of
proximity as regards ‘the benefits of growth and economic progress’ (Boltanski
& Chiapello, 1999: 445). That is, inclusion in the labour force allows members
to be civilised ‘according to the standards prevailing in the society’, to access
the means of consumption (money) and participate in the productive system.
Green criticism has rightly emphasized how entry into capitalist social relations
makes us accomplices in the industrialist model, in the subordination ‘of all
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other concerns to the primary goal of profit-maximisation’ and ‘increasing
inequality and commodification of ‘nature’ as ‘natural resources’ (Paterson,
2001: 46–48), ‘workers’ as the ‘labour force’, ‘creative beings’ as ‘human
capital’ (Gorz, 2003: 1) and ‘citizens’ as ‘consumers’ (Bauman, 1998: ch.2).
The second is that industrial-labour integration also has a moral dimension.
The work ethic and vigour that Marshall yearned for referred not only to its
productive dimension, but also to its civic and civilising ones as well. Work well
done was viewed not only as part of a labour contract, but also as a contribution
to the common good – ‘public service’ – and even to the Promethean project of
harnessing nature. This idea of civilisation brought different traditions together,
including socialist and liberal ones, which were at odds for other reasons
(Lipietz, 1993: ch.3) and led to the enthusiastic championing of work as a
universal unifier on more than one occasion. Nowadays, two types of pressure
pulling in opposite directions are affecting the work ethic.
First, the reformulation of capitalism in the 1980s gave birth to a new ethos
that Boltanski and Chiapello call a ‘new spirit’ (1999). Nowadays, businesses
attempt to value all the skills that make employees more flexible, including
relational, communicative and emotional skills (as mentioned previously, this
‘knowledge economy’ is not an immaterial economy, at least not from the
viewpoint of its relationship with the natural environment). The old social
contract, by contrast, signified a change in the regime of servitude in the sense
that it was a ‘contract’: workers did not alienate their person, only their labour
(Gorz, 2003: 16). At any rate, this ‘total mobilisation’ of the flexible worker
(Gorz, 2003: 22) has important repercussions on citizenship, as it promotes
group adhesion, corporate patriotism and hypercompetitive attitudes in
general – as can be seen in management narratives that invoke coach, leader,
hero and so forth. Thus, in an environment of extreme uncertainty, labour
socialisation under globalised capitalism, in Sennett’s words, ‘corrupts
character’, hinders the establishment of stable commitments and dissolves
the presumed universality of the old work ethic. This new morality questions
the very idea of the worker citizen itself.
Conversely, the second pressure on traditional worker morality is a revolt
against capitalism itself. As Habermas already denounced three decades ago,
the demands for autonomy, creativity and authenticity that the civic-industrial
commitment blocked led to a rebellion against integration into capitalism and
the work ethic and resulted in a crisis of legitimacy (Habermas, 1976) – a crisis
of legitimacy for industrial citizenship itself. When resisting corporate
patriotism and the industrialist mythology, it becomes very difficult to ‘put
one’s heart’ into an activity which is carried out as instrumentally as possible.
Consequently, when thinkers such as Offe or Gorz underline this type of trend
as the end of what might be called the labour society (Offe, 1985; Gorz, 1989),
they are putting a name to the end of the hegemony of the worker and the
industrial bourgeoisie, but they are further asking us to consider the possibility
of a new post-productivist social contract, to relax the identification of social
rights with industrialist commitment through waged work.
Social Citizenship and the Environment
247
As can be seen, a contract of this type would seem to benefit from a certain
cultural change. On the one hand, the morality generated by this new
capitalism has lost the universalist aspiration of the old work ethic, while
relaxing the identification between work well done and the industrialist dream.
Two questions arise from the standpoint of sustainability: Must one stop being
a worker citizen in order to become an ecological citizen? In other words, does
entry into the labour force necessarily lead to ‘industrial integration’? If not,
then how is it possible to be an ecological citizen while being a waged worker?
And if so, how would social citizenship be possible without any type of labour
commitment?
Reflecting on the different forms of membership in terms of social citizenship
may be useful in addressing the first question. Even before the crisis in the full
employment society, social critique had denounced the existence of a ‘fourth
world’ of social exclusion in a broader sense, which it denominated ‘social
exclusion’ (Klanfer, 1965). In those days, the term had a broader character and
emphasized the structural generation of different forms of social pathologies
and deprivation. It was not until the 1990s, under the looming shadow of
massive unemployment, that it was restricted to the lack of integration into the
legal, remunerated, productive environment, and structural analysis was
replaced by individualist explanatory models. Those who wished to maintain
the structural perspective have not left off denouncing what they have
metaphorically christened ‘dualisation’, ‘South-Africanisation’ or ‘Brazilianisation’ and predicting that a third and even half of the population will be
permanently excluded (for example, Gorz, 1989: 88). These predictions have
not come true, at least in wealthy countries, although stratification between
different forms and degrees of vulnerability or exclusion has become the
prevailing note (Bauman, 1998). In other words, there are different degrees of
membership in social citizenship.
The volume and forms of exclusion also depend on the way each society
redistributes social provision. Welfare theorists, with some differences, usually
agree on at least three ideas in this regard. Firstly, they agree that economic
security and provisioning should be promoted not only by the state, but also by
other institutions, such as the market and families. Secondly, they agree that
the models that promote access to the most egalitarian standards of living are
the least conditional models, with the paradigmatic example of the
Scandinavian countries. The least universalist, such as the North American
model, leave access to welfare in the hands of the market, although they usually
include some type of palliative assistance for the most vulnerable groups.
Thirdly, welfare theorists agree that the current trend in welfare regimes is to
lose the centripetal, inclusive and unconditional State-centred dialectics in
favour of a greater commodification of provisioning (see Esping-Andersen,
1990; Handler, 2002).
Nevertheless, not even the least conditional models are perfectly universalist.
Status-based citizenship regimes have not completely solved the unequal
treatment of women – the ‘gender gap’ – or the restriction to a national jus
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which Marshall or Handler take for granted and which does not prevent entire
pockets of the population, particularly immigrants, from being excluded.
However, the greater levels of labour freedom they promote have made some
of these societies exemplary models for those who strive for equality. Yet
beyond that, this greater freedom made these societies laboratories for all kinds
of social experiments and more sustainable consumption and production
methods that are less dependent on capitalist imperatives: co-operative social
economy, non-lucrative mutuals, do-it-yourself activities, moneyless exchange
and self-supply networks, barter clubs, and so forth. This third sector has been
not only an activator of moral stock but also an authentic source of basic
sustenance when it lacks the backing of a strong state, as the recent crisis in
Argentina has demonstrated (Castro, 2003). In general, this has made critics of
the labour society invest a great deal of their post-productivist hopes into
developing a ‘third sector’ of a ‘convivial’ or ‘reciprocal’ economy (Lipietz,
2000; Gorz, 1997: 161–175; Graham Smith and Gill Seyfang, this volume). In
short, a productive sphere is proposed in which living sustainably, the first
requirement of ecological citizenship, can be promoted, in which the ecological
citizen escapes waged labour.
However, total liberation from industrialism is not easily achieved; the
dependability of monetary income flows to finance modern finance systems
involves a limit to the volume of coverage that can be de-commodified, as
indicated by Offe and Heinze, defenders of the development of this third sector
(1992: 4). Even when alternative ways of life, work and consumption reduce
certain social expenditures at the same time, it does not seem likely that services
such as health or pensions can be made totally independent from the formal
economy.
This tension between gainful and meaningful work has led theorists of the
post-productivist social contract to propose the maximum freedom of
movement between different productive activities and particularly to favour
the sphere of freely defined needs and sustainable self-production guided by
concrete reciprocity and solidarity. A post-Keynesian social contract would
thus promote a ‘multi-activity society’, thanks to social reforms based on the
shortening and sharing of working hours and life, some form of basic income
and public policies which promote a reduced-scale sustainable economy.
Although the term originated with Andre´ Gorz (1997), different combinations
of such reforms have been proposed by authors such as C. Offe and A. Lipietz,
as well as U. Beck, J. Habermas and J. Rifkin, among many other important
social theorists. The third sector would become an additional pillar of a welfare
regime that would sanction the right ‘not to work to destroy the world’, thus
debilitating the association between industrial/wage and social aspects of
labour.
Would this be an unconditional social contract? Gorz himself justifies it in
civic terms. He holds that inasmuch as social citizenship means ‘the right to
accede to the public economic sphere through one’s work’, the post-industrial
citizen should enjoy the ‘right to act in the different activities deployed in the
Social Citizenship and the Environment
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public space’ (Gorz, 1997: 65). In short, this perspective continues to conceive
of social provision as a counterpart to some type of public service – in this case,
productive but not necessarily within the labour market. Thus, one comes to
the question of whether it is possible to conceive of social citizenship without
any labour obligation at all, waged or not.
Citizen or Taxpayer?
The crux of the so-called guaranteed basic income (GBI) is precisely its rupture
with any kind of conditionality in the social contract, whether commercial or
moral. This is not a post-wage contract, but rather goes beyond the idea of
contract through ‘an income paid by a political community to all its members
on an individual basis, without test or work requirement’ (Van Parijs, 2004: 7).
Its unconditionality and universality are what separate it from earlier
proposals. It should be recalled, for example, that active employment policies
are not always conditional. For example, the French RMI (revenu minimum
d’insertion), a guaranteed minimum income established in 1988, is almost
unconditional compared to workfare, as it does not demand proof of the will to
(re)enter the labour market. Nevertheless, it is limited to the most vulnerable or
excluded groups, while GBI is not.
Evidently, the political and economic feasibility of this proposal is extremely
problematic, especially if the failure of similar, much more modest proposals is
taken into account, such as the 35-hour working week, in clear regression
wherever it has been implemented, such as in France and Germany. Despite
that, it is justifiable in terms of citizenship and comparable to the universal
right to vote, in terms of the unconditional distribution of a minimum of power
to co-determine the destinies of the community itself (Dome´nech, 2004: 7–8).
Through it, ecological citizens could access waged and non-waged forms of
attractive activities which would be less vulnerable to the imperatives of
capital, against which they would be endowed with a greater bargaining force.
Although it would not prescribe public services – as would be prescribed for the
classic republican citizen – it would sanction the right to be able to act
responsibly in the productive sphere without splitting society into two types of
citizens: first-class ones and the rest, excluded from material civilisation. GBI is
also thus justified in ecological terms and its champions remind us that it allows
the link between productivity and welfare to be overcome (Van Parijs, 2004:
18). This is the key to its possible compatibility with ecological citizenship.
Nevertheless, is pure unconditional citizenship feasible? Delving into the
normative background of social citizenship may shed some light here.
As has been seen, thanks to their access to material civilisation, it is possible
for entire layers of the population in developed countries to enjoy much better
living conditions than their parents did. The guarantee of new social citizenship
rights served not only to partly legitimise a capitalism brought into question by
a century of social struggles, but also to ratify the success of worker movements
in their struggle for the de-commodification and achievement of the ideals of
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‘freedom, justice and solidarity’, to cite Germany’s Social Democratic Party
(SDP). That is the essence of the welfare state: the distribution of market
income through full employment and regulated labour markets, the
redistribution of market income among households through the tax/transfer
system and the relative emancipation of market income through entitlements to
health care, education, training, housing, recreation, culture and a wide range
of social services such as childcare and care for the elderly. Non-market
indirect wages have tended to protect the most disadvantaged groups, such as
the elderly or the disabled, in a wide variety of more solidaristic or charitable
ways, but always by redistributing material goods. This vision of the nature of
protection is precisely the distinguishing feature between the classic outlook
and the moderniser.
Returning to the example of Germany’s SDP, the main difference between its
current Agenda 2010 and the old Godesberg programme resides in ‘the
modernisation of the labour market’ by means of a ‘carrot and stick principle’.
‘[T]hose who do not try hard enough to find a job or who turn down a
reasonable job will be forced to accept a reduction or termination of their
benefit’ (SDP, 2003: 15; italics added). On this reading, and in Marshall’s own
words, unemployed people could be accused of being bad citizens. This idea
squares with current (new) conservative or ‘Third Way’ discourses, with
current Chancellor Gerhard Schro¨der’s assertion that ‘no one has the right to
be lazy’, part of the critique of the ‘dependency culture’. Thus, Anglo-Saxon
workfare, Agenda 2010, socialist flexisecurity in France and the European
Union’s ‘new social contract’ accentuate social citizenship’s conditionality on a
waged labour contract.
Joel Handler, following in Marshall’s steps, insists that this new regime
produces the displacement of citizenship from ‘status’ to ‘contract’. Previously,
‘social benefits [were] rights that were attached by virtue of status – the status
of citizenship’. According to Handler, ‘as with all citizenship rights, [the core of
social citizenship] is fundamentally moral. Redistribution is an act of solidarity,
of inclusion’ (2002: 5). His thesis is that inclusion through workfare obligations
is ‘contradictory’ (2004), and results in the exclusion of those who cannot
comply with the rules, especially immigrants, women, lone parents, long-term
unemployed and even workers in a weak position from which to bargain with
entrepreneurs.
Thus, from the most restrictive point of view of the contract, only those
already in the labour market or struggling to enter it deserve welfare. So people
deserve social rights because they contribute to finance the welfare regime and
are not a burden to others. Nowadays, given the emphasis on the voluntary
feature of unemployment, making the excluded ‘responsible’ transforms the
have-nots – the workless, homeless – into the ‘deserving poor’. From this point
of view, the moral commitment to others as citizens is reduced to a reciprocal
contract with others as taxpayers or job-hunters, while the aspiration to an
egalitarian standard of material living falls by the wayside. To Pierre
Rosanvallon – who has defined and defended this ‘contractual individualism’
Social Citizenship and the Environment
251
– the raison d’eˆtre of the shift lies in the fiscal pressure to which welfare states
are subject nowadays and equally in what he considers the disappearance of the
‘moral mechanism’ that founded post-war social citizenship (Rosanvallon,
1995: ch.7). Today, in his opinion, there is no social cement for a type of shared
ethnicity in favour of unconditional solidarity. People find themselves in a
‘post-Rawlsian age’: the veil of ignorance from the war has been torn off and
the wealthy are aware of their status and do not acknowledge any debt to the
poor. Nevertheless, then, even for him, social citizenship was the result of the
reinforcement of civic ties forged during the struggle against fascism. At any
rate, and in the words of Rousseau’s Social Contract, Rosanvallon states, ‘La
Patrie has a debt towards its citizens because they are ready to die for her if
necessary’ and the welfare state ‘is no more than an ordinary and restrained
version of this ideal’ (1995: 49).
Given such as a shift, given that this ideal has been lost, does the new
contract preserve the original core of citizenship? Rosanvallon himself returns
to the idea that the foundation of the acquis social does not respond to a
pragmatic quid pro quo agreement between those who finance and use the
welfare state – basically, the middle class. This article has stated that it was
not so much the willingness to die – as Rosanvallon does – as to adhere to
the national material civilisation and tame class conflict which developed the
contract, but the main point is that it seems inevitable to acknowledge the
idea that the real moral grounds for citizenship is that everyone, not just
taxpayers, deserves to be a citizen in similar conditions. In any event, it refers
to some type of moral covenant, an inter-subjective commitment to equity
and justice, that GBI tries to maintain. However, in the case of social
citizenship the commitment has to do with the production and distribution of
material goods. Here, a pure unconditional GBI can be fruit from the
poisoned tree.
Authors such as Gorz have insisted that a GBI would serve to subsidise the
least skilled work in a framework of growing commodification and would
become just an assistance income (Gorz, 1997: 134–145). He believes that a
liberating income could only be possible in a solid state setting of universalist
welfare, whenever it was sufficient to meet its beneficiaries’ basic needs. Just as
there are conservative and emancipating GBI schemes, it is possible for
sustainable and unsustainable basic incomes to exist. According to the idea’s
originator, Phillipe Van Parijs, ‘the only political unit which has ever
introduced a genuine basic income, as defined, is the state of Alaska in the
United States’. There, ‘The dividend scheme is funded out of the return on a
diversified investment fund which the state built up using the royalties on
Alaska’s vast oil fields’ (Van Parijs, 2000: 11). Although it apparently allows
sustainable ways of life and work to be developed, in this case, basic income is
a kind of pay-off for industrial sins. The problem with social citizenship is that
it rests on the distribution of material goods; from the point of view of
sustainability, it is no longer possible to be abstract about the concrete way in
which these goods are produced. The idea of unconditionality in terms of
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J. Valdivielso
beneficiaries is attractive, but unconditional monetary flows do not exist; they
are always generated at the expense of some type of consumption and
production.
Conclusion
Social citizenship fundamentally refers to a moral and civic commitment to
equality and justice. Therefore, it rests on the assumption of a notion of the
common good and the commitment to ensure the rights to exercise the
concomitant duty of participating in its definition and its fruits. The old
social contract was the result of the historical processes of social struggles
that materialised in institutions, values, images and concrete beliefs in its
industrial and waged dimensions. Without a doubt, globalisation challenges a
good part of the institutional framework, both micro and macro, which
sustains it, but also unmasks its limitations: its restricted national scope, the
productivist aura of the work and consumption ethic, in short its lack of
civilising content.
The moral cement of social commitment is being redefined day by day, from
the most commodified and compassionate to the most universalist and
unconditional viewpoints. Ecological citizenship has a role to play in this space
for social construction. From the viewpoint of sustainability, a new social
contract should encourage forms of sustainable work and production patterns
which do not destroy resources. From the viewpoint of social citizenship, it
would aspire to similar material conditions and a dignified way of life for all.
This is the framework that defines what a ‘reasonable’ work and welfare could
be, the civic and civilising criteria which the old work ethic yearned for. If an
ecological and social contract were to be implemented, the conditionality of
social coverage should be focused in that direction rather than on integration
into the workplace at all costs. In this case, wage citizens should have the
possibility to develop their activities as free as possible from the imperatives of
growth and capitalism’s new morality. The bio-transformative aspect of work
should not be overlooked, nor should the fact that the private-productive
sphere, whether market or not, can be a locus from which the ecological citizen
can struggle to live sustainably. Escaping the wage requirement does not seem
to be a fully generalisable option and therefore overcoming the industrial trap
must also include regulating the formal economy with ecological criteria –
those activities that nurture social provision as well as those which make them
necessary, especially if they are, like the consumption of fossil resources,
unsustainable. Unfortunately, social provision sustained by the last type of
activity does not satisfy civilising criteria.
In any case, a social contract of this type would alter the structure of civil
and political citizenship, particularly the freedoms which endow the right to
pursue forms of unsustainable and ecologically unjust ways of living,
consuming, working, owning and investing. Perhaps there is no ‘moral cement’
at hand to do so, nor any manner of acceding to material civilisation without
Social Citizenship and the Environment
253
sliding down the slippery slope of consumerism and productivism; perhaps the
constrictions of globalisation are unsalvageable. Nevertheless, the idea of
citizenship should no longer serve as an alibi for industrial civilisation.
Acknowledgements
This research was developed within the Justice, Social Change and the Limits
of Welfare State research programme funded by the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Education (BSO2000-1116-C04-01). The author is indebted to the
research group on Politics, Labour and Sustainability from the University of
the Balearic Islands (UIB) for its support and comments, and to the
participants in the ‘Citizenship and the Environment’ workshop at the ECPR
Joint Sessions (Uppsala, Sweden, 13–18 April 2004).
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