Environment and Citizenship
Integrating Justice, Responsibility and Civic Engagement
Mark J. Smith and Piya Pangsapa
2008
Hardback: £60.00 ISBN: 9781842779026
Paperback: £18.99 ISBN: 9781842779033
http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=4218
http://us.macmillan.com/environmentandcitizenship

About the Book
This timely book outlines the debates on environmental and ecological citizenship that have emerged out of the concern with environmental justice since the 1990s. The book demonstrates how awareness of environmental hazards, injustices and new forms of risk is only effective when it generates strategies for political change. It examines how environmental movements have become increasingly involved in governance processes at the national, regional and intergovernmental levels, in contexts such as the EU, UN and LA21 initiatives. The authors argue that while 'rights-discourse' has highlighted the status of specific identities, taking account of obligation prompts a consideration of social, cultural, political, economic and environmental injustices. Tackling these injustices demands a concern with both entitlements and obligations of all relevant parties and constituencies. Using new evidence and case studies, this book explores:
     - the new vocabulary of citizenship
     - how successful environmental policy-making depends on the responsible actions of civil society actors as much as on governments and international treaties
     - how stakeholding processes and participatory research in environmental decision-making transform deliberation processes and civic engagement
     - the increased importance of transnational networks creating public-private and civil strategic partnerships between organizations
NGO activists, ministers, academics and environmental philosophers all now refer to 'citizenship' as a key concept for understanding environmental justice and responsibility. Using n contexts as diverse as Southern Spain, the borderlands of Thailand and South Africa, this book demonstrates how ecological citizenship provides the key link between them through processes of civic engagement.
Contents
Introduction: environment, obligation and citizenship
Part 1: Theory informed by practice
1. From environmental justice to environmental citizenship
Citizenship, entitlements and obligations
2. Citizens, citizenship and citizenization
3. Rethinking environment and citizenship
Part 2: Practice informed by theory
4. Environmental governance, social movements and citizenship in a global context
5. Corporate responsibility and environmental sustainability
6. Environmental Borderlands
7. Insiders and outsiders in environmental mobilizations in Southeast Asia
8. The new vocabulary of ecological citizenship

Reviews of Environment and Citizenship
In the last two decades, citizenship studies have moved away from conventional debates about social welfare and income inequality to consider a range of broader and more complex issues about the nature of inclusion, entitlement and identity producing as a consequence a range of new concepts - intimate citizenship, sexual citizenship, consumer citizenship and now ecological citizenship. Environment and Citizenship is definitely part of a new wave of exciting research that challenges our assumptions about state and citizen, public and private, and identity and membership. Citizenship is not simply a language of rights. Smith and Pangsapa critically examine the absence of a theory of duty and obligation in much current debate, demonstrating the importance of our obligations towards animals, environment and nature.  Responsibility towards the environment brings into the foreground our duties towards vulnerable groups (the sick, disabled, frail and elderly) but crucially our responsibility towards future generations. In the crisis over global warming, the question of intergenerational justice is the most salient moral and political issue of our times. Clearly written, cleverly argued and comprehensively supported by evidence, Environment and Citizenship should be on everybody's reading list. A major contribution to the study of responsibility, justice and the environment.
Professor Bryan S. Turner (Co-editor of Citizenship Studies)

Truly essential reading.  Written at a time when citizenship, justice and virtue ethics have made their way - at last - on to the top table of environmental and social thinking, Smith and Pangsapa have woven them all into a magisterial manifesto for sustainability, justice and civic engagement.  Buttressed by case studies from around the world, leavened with recommendations for institutional reform, and with its sights set on the urban as much as the rural context, the book in your hands is an agenda-setting contribution to environmental and social thought and action.
Professor Andrew Dobson (Keele University)

The concept of “environmental citizenship” emerged in the academic literature in the mid-1990s and has since become an increasingly useful one for thinking about the socioecological interface that constitutes most contemporary environmental challenges. Smith and Pangsapa build on the strengths of this growing body of literature and open up new, provocative, and valuable directions for future scholarship with a text that is both theoretically compelling and richly textured with empirical examples. As such, the text not only offers a normative conception of environmental citizenship but also introduces the reader to an array of particular contexts that may actually serve as a first step in developing the kind of citizenship practices the book so ably advocates. Among the many contributions of this volume, first and foremost is the authors’ commitment to show that environmental issues cannot be separated from questions of social justice. On this score, the authors differentiate their approach from much of the work that has been done within the fields of environmental ethics and green political theory. Furthermore, they suggest that the most innovative approaches to addressing questions of environment and social justice are being generated not in the traditional political space of legal and nationalist policies but rather in the more decentralized space of civil society. Nongovernmental organizations and social movements — often of a transnational character—are coalescing, organizing, and cooperating with for-profit organizations and state entities to cultivate civic engagement and bring about democratic and environmental reform. The focus on civil society carries through the volume and highlights the new scales to which citizen practices, directed toward social justice and the environment, must work …and demonstrates the extent to which citizenship can no longer be conceptualized solely in terms of a spatial ordering that distinguishes public from private within the nation-state.
A second strength of the volume is the authors’ effort to moderate the traditional liberal emphasis on rights and entitlements with a “politics of obligation” that emphasizes citizen virtues and responsibilities. The exact character of these virtues and responsibilities will depend on the particulars of the situation; particulars that can vary significantly given the expanded scope and multiple scales in which citizenship practices might develop. Smith and Pangsapa are clear that the local cultural context and the everyday practices that create such spaces have a profound impact on the construction of environmental citizens. Drawing on radical democrats, such as Mouffe, the authors envision citizenship as constructed through agonistic democratic politics. Citizens are made, not born; they are always in a process of becoming, of adopting subject positions that are necessarily partial, provisional, and temporary. Thus, Smith and Pangsapa seek to show that the internalization of the “politics of obligation” can succeed, where coercive regulatory mechanisms may prove inadequate. A “must read” for scholars interested in questions of environmental citizenship, sustainability, and environmental justice.
Professor Teena Gabrielson (University of Wyoming, Organization and Environment)

Smith and Pangsapa, in their Environment and Citizenship: Integrating Justice, Responsibility and Civic Engagement, certainly meet the promise of their title. They draw upon a wide range of social disciplines including sociology, ethnography, politics, philosophy and law. Further, they have achieved a high level of virtually seamless integration. This is clearly a very courageous book, opening up and exposing many of the global dilemmas and conflicts in a volume of only 256 pages.The authors refer to the ‘export’ of environmental degradation as one of the major outcomes and this has increased rapidly as a response to the international financial crisis. The relative absence of government involvement and control, through either economic or environmental policies, means that such actions remain more or less uncontrolled. Perhaps the most inherently critical topic of discussion deals with problems of corporate responsibility, or to be more precise, irresponsibility. This applies virtually to all spheres of activity in the Asian region. The ethical stance of many corporations is strongly influenced by the extent of western investment and stakeholding in Asian corporations. Again, this becomes a potent force in shaping the ‘export’ and ‘import’ of environmental degradation and, at the same time, reshaping Asian thinking in commercial and industrial affairs. An extremely useful contribution to sociological understanding.
Professor Elery Hamilton-Smith (Charles Sturt University, International Sociology)

About the Authors
Dr. Mark J. Smith, Politics & International Studies and Center for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, Open University, researches environmental responsibility, transnational corporations, civic engagement and the role of ethics in politics and the environment. He is author or editor of numerous books including Ecologism: Towards Ecological Citizenship (1998), Social Science in Question (1998), Thinking through the Environment (1999), Rethinking State Theory (2000) and articles on environment, politics and corporate responsibility. His current work considers environmental citizenship and civic engagement in Asia, America and Europe. As a writer, campaigner and academic, he seeks to explore how ideas can make a difference in politics, global society and the environment.
Dr Piya Pangsapa, Head of the Institute of Gender and Development Studies, University of West Indies at St. Augustine, researches gender, work and civic engagement in Southeast Asia. She is the author of Textures of Struggle (Cornell University Press, 2007) as well as articles on migration, women's rights and labour standards, ethnographic research methods and cultural inclusivity in American universities. Her current work considers the impact of corporate responsibility on the global supply chain, the changing nature of factory production, the status and citizenship rights of migrant workers and transnational activist networks between NGOs, policy makers, states, communities, and local and regional campaigns on gender, labor and environmental issues.



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