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ИНСТИТУЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ: МЕТОДЫ И РЕЗУЛЬТАТЫ
УДК 338.22 JEL Q55, Q58
N. Delille
Novosibirsk State University 1 Pirogov Str., Novosibirsk, 630090, Russian Federation
ECOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP: THEORETICAL ANALYSIS FOR A NEW VISION OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Environmental policies have been considering citizens as passive actors of the change for many years, the new economics, and more precisely the notion of ecological citizenship, transcend this view by introducing citizens as actors of change and source of progress. In this article I try to put in perspective the literature on that topic with the rising of Community Supported Agriculture, to try to give weight to this new view. This new type of sustainable consumption might be considered as a tangible evidence of the theory of Dobson on ecological citizenship, if so, the scientific literature has to take more interest in it, so as to understand its implication in terms of public policies, which has yet not been done.
Keywords: sustainable consumption, ecological citizenship, environmental policies.
Introduction
What has mattered so far in terms of policies stimulating environmentally friendly behaviour, has been to understand consumption in order to implement relevant policies to change its patterns by incentives such as taxes, implementation of environmental norms and so on. This change pattern, relies on the idea that the consumer act in some way that needs to be figured out, in order to be oriented by the decision maker, in a more sustainable way.
However, this would suppose that the consumer does not act naturally in a responsible way, and that the change will occur from top to bottom, but in many countries citizen's initiative promoting environmentally friendly behaviour have been created without any direct help from any environmental policy. Moreover, those initiative have been noticed by governments, those ones sometimes decide to support them or just to let them be.
Therefore, change could come from society first, from citizen consciousness, the role of decision maker would not be to try to directly incent citizens in a precise way, but to give them the tools to think and to understand collective challenge properly, in the first place, and then to support the citizenly created tools to live on.
Having an environment friendly behaviour has many aspects and the one that will be analysed here is consumption, more precisely sustainable consumption. It is defined by the Oslo Symposium on Sustainable Consumption (1994) as "the use of services and related products which respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life while minimizing the use of natural resources and toxic materials as well as emissions of waste and pollutants over the life cycle of the service or product so as not to jeopardize the needs of future generations." (Norwegian Ministry of the Environment).
A legitimate question at this point would be to enquire the choice of consumption for this work, the answer is twofold: first because it is, in main developed and developing countries one of the first
Delille N. Ecological Citizenship: Theoretical Analysis for a New Vision of Environmental Policy // Мир экономики и управления. 2017. Т. 17, № 2. С. 130-141.
ISSN 2542-0429. Мир экономики и управления. 2017. Том 17, № 2 © N. Delille (Н. Делилль), 2017
drive of economic growth; second and most of all, because outside of its economic dimension, which in extreme cases leads to consumerism, a notion far from any environmental concerns, consumption is the corner stone of our economy and society operating. Consumption is a signal, a choice from one individual that has a tremendous amount of consequences, that is the starting point of new decisions that will determine the future of our economic and social schemes.
Consumption has been seen as an economical gesture which factors need to be understood in order to be oriented, here consumption will be understood as a vote, which would be, as the political vote, lead by education, social background and life experiences.
Considering consumption as vote, and consumers as more aware actors then they generally are will lead us to another important concept evoked in this research, ecological citizenship. This notion has been developed by Dobson [1] and combines the idea of citizenship with ecological convictions such as the consideration of one's ecological footprint.
The goal of this article is to check if ecological citizenship is nowadays a factor that make consumers consume in a more sustainable way, or in other words, can ecological citizenship motivation can be identified in the consumption pattern of sustainable consumers. Thus, the object of consideration here is the consumer, and the subject is the sustainable consumers' consumption pattern as an evidence of ecological citizenship, how it would affect their consumption, and what would be the conclusion in terms of environmental policy.
To this end, the first step consist in answering the following question: Is there any evidence of a change in agent's behaviour, and more precisely in consumption patterns that seems to come from agent's initiative? 1 The first part of the answer will consist in an attempt of identification of the motivational factors of sustainable consumption, they will be organized in three sections: Environmental values and concerns, socio-demographic variables and psychological factors. The second part of the answer will consist in wondering about how and which factors the decision maker could use in order to enhance the ecological situation. This last step will lead to the heart of our reflexion - Ecological citizenship.
Through this notion we will draw the central idea of this work, according to which the decision maker is not at the corner stone of the change of behaviour, the factors that influence environmentally friendly behaviour are not only economic, and one of the growing factor of change in behaviour is the spreading of ecological citizenship, itself in particular materialized by Community Supported Agriculture.
The second and final part of this article will consist in answering this naturally emerging second interrogation: As the decision maker is not set as an initiator of change, what would be his role? This second part will also be the place of an analysis of tangible evidence of the theoretical arguments brought before.
1. Consumer's Behaviour Analysis
A. Analyse of the Factors of Sustainable Consumption
According to Gilg, Barr, and Ford [2] determinant factors for sustainable consumption can be divided in three groups: Environmental values and concerns, Socio-demographic variables, and psychological factors.
Environmental Values and Concerns
Shalom and Schawrtz [3] define values as desirable trans-situational goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in the life of a person or other social entity. Values are said to motivate action and to justify them, then this definition invites us to consider our behaviour to be lead by values, and our values to be changed by behaviour.
The behaviour of interest here is the environmentally friendly one, the identification of the values that relate to this type of behaviour are developed as follow.
First of all, Steel [4] shows that altruism and considering that the environment is something important in a person's life, are two states of mind that are correlated. Moreover, Karp [5] also found
1 And which therefore could be, to some extent, associated with ecological citizenship manifestation.
that altruism was a characteristic feature of the sustainable consumer. In the Schwartz classification [3], in the two set of poles "altruistic-egoistic" and "conservative- open to change", Stern et al. [6] have shown that the environment friendly consumer would be more altruistic and open to change, therefore closer to the "self-transcendent" pole than to the "self- enhancement" one.
Indeed, Ingelhart's [7] showed that this part of the population would be likely to have post materialistic concerns and values. Finally, Roberts [8] found out that subjects that scored high on a scale he created for his study ("Ecologically Conscious Scale"), where also having positive view about "limit to growth", "equality with nature", "spaceship earth".
In a nutshell, Gilg, Barr, and Ford [2], conclude that relying on the work of Dunlap and Van Liere's [9] and Dunlap et al.'s [10], O'Riordan's [11] and Shwartz [3], Stern et al. [6], LeonardBarton [12] and Ingelhart's [7], who all of them tried to draw a continuum of values in two poles, we could define the sustainable consumer to be closer to ecocentric and biospheric values.
The values of the environmentally friendly consumers are identified, as explained above, the relationship between values and behaviour is complex, this is why the question of knowing which values are linked to sustainable consumption, and environmentally friendly behaviour, gains to be insert in a deeper reflexion on the sense of causality between the behaviour and the values.
This as been discussed by Thogersen, and Olander [13], using a survey among Danish population, using Schwartz classification of values. Two important results can be obtained from this study. First, that the values that seem to be linked with environment friendly behaviour are, in order of power, universalism and benevolence over power and achievement. Indeed, those values are closer to the "self-transcendence" pole than the "self-enhancement" pole; two axes that dived values into two categories according to Schwartz classification. Second, they got support for the hypothesis that in the short term values orient behaviour, however, they noticed that both of them where very stable. Indeed, according to Rokeach [14] values priorities is on of the most stable phenomena in a person's mental set up.
This lead us to think that changing in behaviour is a long run phenomenon; first, because it is oriented by values, or values priorities which take a long time to change according to Eagly and Kulesa [15]; second, because on a societal level, in the long run, behaviour also tends to have an effect on values; finally, because according to Berger [17] change is something that spread, therefore to observe it at a national scale some time is needed.
This learns us that value are a mean that would lead society toward a more environmentally friendly one, a change in values would push the consumer towards sustainable consumption, moreover, values are built by education, familial environment and also political one. Therefore, decision makers could have a long term impact on consumption, and stimulate sustainable one by promoting universalism and benevolence through educational system.
Socio-Demographic Variables
Quoting different studies, we could draw the portrait of the typical sustainable consumer as being liberal, and wealthy [17], young [18-20], educated [20], and as being a woman [21, 20, 18]. However, the impact of the age and income are discussed. For instance, Gilg, Barr, and Ford [2] found out that "The mean age of committed environmentalists is highest, with the mean age of non-environmentalists being the lowest" (p. 11).
Moreover, according to a study on Swiss population performed by Tanner and Wolfing Kast [22] there isn't any correlation between sustainable consumption patterns and monetary constraints or socioeconomic characteristics, this gives support to the hypothesis that wages and standard of living are not determinant factors to sustainable consumption, that it is not an economical question but an educational and informational question.
This does not contradict the features of the "typical sustainable consumer" as being educated, moreover in the same study they found regarding education that sustainable consumption patterns were positively linked with concerns of environmental protection, fair trade and local product. Rising awareness of citizens regarding those concerns would dramatically increase sustainable patterns of consumption. What is prescribe by the authors in terms of policy making is that information and education should be stimulated, and oriented towards environmental issue and product quality.
Finally, Ping Wang, Qian Liu, Yu Qi [23] ran a study on rural Chinese population, their results are striking in terms of demonstrating the importance of education as they show that the lack of sustainable consumption is mainly due to a lack of education, another factor of great importance is the absence of supportive environment, infrastructure and sufficient supply to lead to more sustainable consumption.
Psychological Factors
The main psychological aspect that impact sustainable consumption is the perceived consumer effectiveness, the notion as been first defined by Kinnear et al. [24] as: "[...] a measure of the extent to which a respondent believes that an individual consumer can be effective in pollution abatement." (p. 21). It is shown that the higher the perceived consumer effectiveness the higher the consumer will act in a sustainable way.
Another psychological factor that could have an impact on sustainable consumption would be free riding, Olson [25] worked on such a phenomenon, Baumol and Oates [26] defined the free rider problem to occurs "when those who benefit from resources, goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in an under-provision of those goods or services." In the case of sustainable consumption, and environment friendly behaviour in general, this kind of problem could occur; indeed, if a consumer knows that no one act in a sustainable way, he has no incentive to do so because his own action alone will not have any impact on the global state of society. This kind of situation does not perfectly fit the free riding typical issue, it is some sort of "negative free riding", a more classical situation occurs when consumers rely on the sustainable behaviour of the greatest number of people in order to keep consuming in a non-sustainable way. This second kind of issue might occur later in our society as for now on only a minority of people act in a sustainable way, nevertheless it could be a problem in the future.
The first kind of issue we mentioned is likely to be reduced by the perceived consumer effectiveness, indeed, the more the consumer would consider his action as efficient, the less he would base it on the action of others.
Finally, other factors seem to influence sustainable consumption behaviour, for instance fear, Seguin et al shown that the fact of perceiving environmental change as a threat increases sustainable behaviour, or habit.
The first intermediate conclusion that can be drawn is that changing behaviour is process that will be long, and that will pass through an educational change; in terms of values and in terms of information on what can be done and how efficient it is. Moreover, exploring the theory of planned behaviour might illuminate us, and bring support to the idea that a change in consuming behaviour brings towards a wider change of the society.
The Theory of Planned Behaviour
In the Theory of Planned Behaviour, Ajzen [27] explains that behaviour is driven by intention and perceived behavioural control (i.e. The perceived ease or difficulty to perform an action). Intention is itself influenced by perceived behavioural control, however, two other factors impact it as well: attitude toward the behaviour (i.e. what you personally think of such a behaviour) and subjective norm (i.e. how the behaviour is perceived by society).
On another level of implication, those three factors are themselves determined by belief of the individual on the factor (behavioural belief, normative belief and control belief).
This explanation on how behaviour is performed make us realized that to change them, and to pull them toward more sustainability the population must challenge itself not only as consumers but as individual, products of our environment and society, it must challenge itself as citizens.
B. Sustainable consumption and ecological citizenship
The New Economics, as it is explained in by Seyfang [28] provides a new vision of what should be environmental transition. The new of this vision relies on the difference between the environ-
mentalists who wish a simply "greener" production without any fundamental change in the society (OECD, 2002) and the ecologists who advocate for a total rethinking of our lifestyle [29, 30, 31]
The New Economics recommends downscaling, and the purchase of quality of life, as a development goal, instead of economic growth. In this alternative vision, but also in the mainstream one, the consumer is at the centre of the change, interestingly enough, Sagoff [32] describe the economical agent as driven by two entities: the consumer and the citizen, who are constantly fighting. In the wake of this work, Dobson [1] created the notion of ecological citizenship, this descriptive theorisa-tion of some kind of new citizenship would constitute a path toward a new economy, a new society that would revolve around sustainability.
Seyfang [28] propose five critics to the actual mainstream political way to respond to environment issues. The first one is that those policies rely on externalized environment and social costs markets which lead to a wrong price signal. The second one is that they do not take into account the psychological and sociological motivations that one consumer is driven by. The third one is that it splits individuals whereas environmental issues are inherently solvable only by collective action. The fourth one is that they only focus on the consumer-good relationship without taking care of institutions' consumption. Finally, the last one is that they do not provide the necessary tools to create new institutions representative of ecological values.
In a nutshell, the actual environmental policies would be too shallow and deeply inefficient due to the fact that they will always have economical growth as first goal which has been proved to be incompatible with sustainable development by Porritt [33]. The concept of ecological citizenship would overcome those issue by holding a societal, political, economical and environmental position rather than simply responding to superficial incentives. Seyfang [28] proved this new citizenship lead to sustainable behaviour, and more specifically consumption according to the following dynamic:
Amended diagram showing relationships between ecological citizenship, local organic food networks and sustainable consumption. Seyfang [28]
Ecological Citizenship: Definition
Citizenship can be described as a contract between the state and the citizen, Ignatieff [41] sees citizenship as a bargain between the two parties that are constituted by the political sphere and citizens. Beyond this vision of citizenship lies reciprocity of duty and right, the citizen receives protection and services, which constitutes his rights, rights to which he has access provided that he does his duty (i.e. paying his taxes, finding some work and so one). If the reciprocity of the workfare citizenship seems constitutive of the notion, or at least essential for its operation, Dobson [1] considers ecological citizenship as a relation between the citizen and the future generations and the other species from which arise different kind of obligation, far from the right-duty reciprocity, but based on what we owe to strangers, based on compassion. Here, obligation is understood in its unreciprocated and unilateral nature, therefore, the duty of the ecological citizen is to "act with care and compassion towards distant stranger, human and non human in space and time" [1]. Its evaluation is based on ecological footprint and on the idea that it should be equally distributed among
population of the earth, notion that is close to the "planetary citizenship" of Henderson and Ikeda [34].
Ecological Citizen Consuming in a Sustainable Way:
Benefits in Practice
Ecological citizenship is said by Maniates [35] to emphasis on collective action in order to overcome the powerless and individualisation of responsibility inherent to the mainstream policies. By it promoting the production of organic food (i.e. products which come from "agriculture that does not use artificial chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and animals reared in more natural conditions, without the routine use of drugs, antibiotics and wormers common in intensive livestock farming."). (Ecological citizenship and sustainable consumption: Examining local organic food networks [28]) it provides a safest economic situation to food producers [36], it creates new channel of distribution for organic food, and avoid supermarket, ecological citizenship then creates new social bonds [37], it makes money circulate more locally which is good for the local economy [38]. Finally, it simply presents itself as a rational alternative to the logic of global food economy, once the social and environmental costs are included in the calculation [39, 40].
This new theoretical notion is rather descriptive and theoretical, and Dobson faced several critics regarding the accuracy of the choice of the term "citizenship". For instance, Ignatieff expressed the idea that "compassion is a private virtue that cannot be legislated or enforce" [41], moreover, some authors opposed to the fact that citizenship could exist outside of reciprocity. All those critics are embraced by Dobson in his paper, but the epistemological and rather political put into questions are a matter of political science which is not the subject of this work. However, the idea being this new kind of citizenship might be a new prism to look through in order to understand the stakes of environmental policy.
2. Tangible Evidence of Ecological Citizenship and a New Role for the Decision Maker
In his 2006 paper Gill Seyfang [28] tries to identify an example of ecological citizenship by analysing the behaviour of some organisation's actors called Eostre Organic. In his article he demonstrates that this organisation and the people who revolve around it show proof of ecological citizenship behaviour. This organisation "aims to build a 'fair, ecological and cooperative' food system", thought this kind of example could seem mere, this part of the review will try to resume the historic of those kind of organisations in order to try to give a far greater scope to an example that could seem isolated.
Access to organic food for the consumer can be done in many ways, here they are divided in two groups: First, what could be called organic food shop that looks just like supermarket (at least in appearance) but with organic food; Second, other channel of distribution - Community Supported Agriculture.
A. Organic Food Shop
The most conventional, or maybe accessible way to buy Organic food today would be to go to an organic supermarket, there are many companies in the world that provide such services 2. Though those shops often try to promote more than just organic food in a regular supermarket, by having some intern philosophy that spread into the management of their business in general, they can still reasonably thought of as an intermediary, therefore not as an active actor of ecological citizenship.
Indeed, consumers who buy their products there might show some evidence of it by being willing to consume differently, but those structure do not necessarily bring some education to their consumer, they behave as a "passive" structure in the sense that there is not necessarily any relationship between those shop and the consumer from which he could extract some education, which is one
2 To quote some of them : Whole Food (United States), Biocoop (Europe), Naturalia (France).
important point of the ecological citizenship. This is why we will focus more of the second type of food distribution quoted above: community supported agriculture.
B. Community Supported Agriculture
History
Community Supported Agriculture is a north American name given to a worldwide phenomenon. It began in Japan in the 60's, when a group of woman were worrying about the quality of food at a time where industrial food production was spreading, as a response they invented in 1965 the firsts "Teikei" which means cooperation in Japanese. One of their founders group, the Japan Organic Agriculture Association, founded in 1971, defines the Teikei as an idea aiming the creation of an alternative system of distribution, independent from the conventional market system, namely, a system of direct distribution. Moreover, they add that Teikeis are not only a practical idea but also a philosophical dynamic where people could think of better way of living through the interaction between producers and consumers. It can be seen how this second point relates with the principal of ecological citizenship. Although nowadays, due to urbanisation, Japanese no longer use Teikei that much but organic food shop, which creates an intermediate and therefore removes the direct link between producers and consumers, in 1993 on quarter of the Japanese population was taking part into a Teikei. At the same period in Switzerland some communal farms named food guilds developed their own partnership with local consumers by supplying them with fresh products. In 1985, in the USA, a farmer coming back from one of those food guilds founded in cooperation with Robyn Van Hen, an organic farmer, the first Community Supported Agriculture farm.
The idea spread to the rest of the USA, then to Canada and the rest of the world. In 2000 there were more than 1100 CSA in the world, and in 2003 - 1500 in the USA only. This system goes by many names in the rest of the world, CSA for the English speaking countries, Teikeis in Japan, AMAP in France, Landwirtschaftsgemeinschaftshof in Germany...
The operating
The main features of those organisation which is common among all of them is the wish to develop a particular and strong relationship between the food producers and the consumers. This relation is based on trust and commitment on both parts:
The consumers commit to pay in advance their food consumption for a whole season in order to found the producer, by doing so consumers commit to share the risks and the variations of seasons.
The producers commit to provide quality food, often using organic or biodynamic methods in exchange for the trust and founds given by the consumers.
The distribution modality can vary from one country to another, or even form one organisation to another. Sometimes consumers also commit to visit the producing site, to organise events taking place there, with the aim of revitalizing them.
It is important to precise here that the food distributed through those channels are not necessary organic, it is the case most of the time, but not always, the mandatory feature here is for the food to by local, and to create a strong bond between food producers and consumers.
This last points brings us to the conclusion that the thriving of those organisations over the past few years could be considered as tangible proof of some kind of growing ecological citizenship. As it is explained above what Seyfang [28] proved to show some evidence of ecological citizenship, the Eostre organisation, is nothing else but one example among many.
C. A New Role for the Decision Maker
The decision maker would place himself in two locations. First, ex-ante, in order to allow citizens to elaborate critical thinking in an appropriate political environment, this will be our first part. Secondly, ex-post after citizens start to initiate some changes in their consumption patterns through, for instance, different organisation the role of the decision maker is to make a spreading possible for this organism. (ex: to help them reach bigger markets...), this will be our second part.
Creating an Appropriate Environment
In order to understand what could be the impact in terms of environmental policy it could be interesting to focus on the conditions in which such a citizen could fulfil himself. Neil Carter explained that ecological citizenship flourish in a state reformed toward more democracy, more decentralization and more equalitarism. Moreover, Dobson [1] develop the ecological citizenship as something that needs to expand in the private realm (which is arguably different from workfare citizenship), and the planetary realm.
Those two statements allow us to structure the change needed for the ecological citizenship to expand in a three-dimensional way: First, the connection that have been established through the process of globalisation need to be used in a different way or even re-though, ecological citizenship is a non-territorial political space, by non-territorial is meant trans-boundaries. Though trans-boundaries mean have settled in our society, they might not fit a rethinking of the latter towards more sustainability.
This rethinking of society brings us to our second dimension, the political one, coming back to the difference between environmentalists and ecologists: the mainstream way of dealing with environmental issue considers a very simple and narrow change of the producing patterns accompanied with changing incentives of consumers, it is an environmentalist way; the ecologist citizenship is an ecologist principal as it needs a change in the production and consumption sphere, but also in the political sphere: more direct democracy in order to avoid authoritarianism abuses; more decentralization to nourish local exchanges; more equalitarism to share the sustainable effort and to provide the collective spirit needed to face environmental challenge.
Finally, the third dimension is the private one, on the private level the citizen learns and embraces the values of sustainability and thus become an ecologist citizen, this happens through education change. Education comes from the educational system (which is provided by the state) and through experiences (i.e. by entrenching into sustainable activities the citizen will receive education).
Of course, action in one dimension is not isolated and the ecologist citizenship needs all three dimension to be change to properly flourish. The dynamic in which such change could occur is uncertain, but it might be reasonable to think that the key, or the first step could be an educational change.
Promoting and Spreading Previous Work
Though it has been specifically indicated at the beginning of this paper that the decision maker is not wished to be considered as cornerstone of change, his role is still assumed to be of great importance. Indeed, even if the citizen places himself as the initiator of change once something is build it generally needs some help from a bigger entity to be able to spread and go from locally influent incentive to tangible scheme change in the entire country (or at least region). Such a spread can be initiated by the government, by making some actual change in the institution, or by investing in those project in order for them to develop. This could also be a line to more subsides for those type of project. Here again lays the idea that the decision maker should not only try to improve the environmental situation of the country by creating new regulation or new taxation, but also by acknowledging the citizen initiatives and set some institutional and financial system that could allow this initiative to develop. This goes in the wake of a political environment that would be more decentralized, idea that we raised previously.
As an example that could be evoked is the case studied in the paper of Gill Seyfang [28], Ecological Citizenship and Sustainable Consumption: Examining Local Organic Food Networks. As it has been said previously, Seyfang analyses a co-operative that supply fresh and processed organic food directly from its partners to local businesses and hospitals. This co-operative has reached a certain level of development, however, at some point it wished to diversify and to include the catering market in its activity, still, the catering system was managed by public sector and this one was reluctant to change its habit in terms of food we can read in the article that "a pro-active push from government would be needed in order to achieve significant changes in these institutions." And that "Public sector catering could be an enormous market for local organic produce, but only if public
policy began to reflect these priorities and insist on building them into its infrastructure." This example makes us understand that government action in the sense of more support for the pro-environmental initiative and organisation would be favourable for their expansion.
The first statement of this paper was that today's ways of thinking environmental policies were considering the consumer as a passive object whose behaviour needed to be understood and then oriented in a precise way by highly direct mean such as taxes, however, in many areas, and after this analysis of the factor for sustainable consumption, probably some well educated area, groups of consumers start to behave differently, the action of those consumers can seem isolated or needing for regulation but it maybe part of a movement that is spreading, and in which consumption of sustainable product should not only be seen as an end in itself but also as a vote by citizens that are aware - ecological citizen, for a wider evolution of society towards more ecological citizenship.
The interrogation and potential answers that revolve around the problematic of every member of the society's role in the change towards more sustainability is quite wide. Values, sociological patterns, education, habits, if theoretically it makes sense to discuss them, our field of study should be narrowed to try to establish some quantitative relation that can be mathematically set and verified.
In this work, the role of education has been stressed, education and information about environmental issues, what can be done, and so one are fundamental and help one reach the first step of environmental consciousness. The type of preconisation for the decision maker is quite straightforward to stimulate this initiation to environmental issues in the population, simply promote education and mediatisation of those issues. It is not wished to discuss this here, first because the importance of education in this way has already been discussed in previous work, and second because it might be possible that this first step is not the only one that is to be made to push society towards a substantial and durable change.
For those reasons what will be studied is the behaviour of individuals that have already engaged themselves in some sustainable consumption patterns, and whom already have some consciousness regarding environmental issues. What is to be observed is if the pursuing and possibly the growth of such behaviour could be motivated by ecological citizenship. Of course ecological citizenship is not something measurable, and other factors should be taken into account.
Conclusion
The main objective of this research is to overcome the limitation of traditional approach to environmental policy that considers the consumer as passive, and to try to develop another vision of what should be the environmental policy.
The first part of this work tried to briefly develop the many and non-trivial psychological and sociological patterns that can lead one individual to show sustainable behaviour. This fact brought to attention that not only economical but also educational factors could explain the attraction for some consumers to sustainable consumption. The second part of this work developed the stronger idea that, at least for some part of the population, engaged in more durable and deeper change of our society, economical factors are not at stake but many other that could be synthetized in the concept of ecological citizenship.
Of course, this hypothesis is drawn from a theoretical analysis, that needs empirical proof, or at least a try of proof. The final part of this work was dedicated to the latter task.
The existence of the CSA structures and the fostering of their development in some countries shows evidence that the New Economics might raise interesting points in the understanding of transitions to more environmentally friendly economic models, points that should be taken into account in the actual design of environmental policies.
Indeed, CSA structures could be considered as a proof of ecological citizenship because they are much more than just an intermediate for consumption, they bring education, they gather consumers and producers together, they trigger a new form of exchange and around them revolve a whole new concept of consumption rooted into a new political and economical vision. This is why it can be reasonably assumed that if consuming in CSA turns out to be a significant factor for reinforcing
one's sustainable behaviour, the decision maker should see this as a message, and should therefore set all the good conditions for the further development of structure like CSAs, and to some extend of ecological citizenship.
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The article was admitted to the editorial board 03.03.2017
Н. Делилль
Новосибирский национальный исследовательский государственный университет ул. Пирогова, 1, Новосибирск, 630090, Россия
ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКОЕ ГРАЖДАНСТВО: ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ ДЛЯ НОВОГО ВЗГЛЯДА НА ПРИРОДООХРАННУЮ ПОЛИТИКУ
Природоохранная политика много лет рассматривает граждан как пассивных субъектов (или, скорее, объектов регулирования). Между тем Новая экономическая теория, а точнее,
концепция экологического гражданства в ней, меняет эту точку зрения, представляя граждан как агентов изменений, развивающих природоохранную политику. Эта идея представлена в статье через рассмотрение концепции сельского хозяйства с поддержкой местных сообществ. Этот новый тип устойчивого потребления можно рассматривать как подтверждение теории экологического гражданства Добсона, и если это действительно так, научная литература должна уделять больше внимания этому и подобным феноменам для понимания того, как они могут влиять на публичную политику. В настоящее время таких работ недостаточно.
Ключевые слова: устойчивое потребление, экологическое гражданство, природоохранная политика.
For citation:
Delille N. Ecological Citizenship: Theoretical Analysis for a New Vision of Environmental Policy. World of Economics and Management, 2017, vol. 17, no. 2, p. 130-141. (In Engl.)
