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Ecological Citizenship: Justice, Rights and the Virtue of Resourcefulness

Article  in  Environmental Politics · June 2006

DOI: 10.1080/09644010600627741

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Environmental Politics,
Vol. 15, No. 3, 435 – 446, June 2006

Debate

Ecological Citizenship: Justice, Rights

and the Virtue of Resourcefulness
TIM HAYWARD
University of Edinburgh, UK

Andrew Dobson,1 in his recent work and particularly in his book Citizenship
and the Environment (1), has engaged in far-reaching exploration of the
meaning that might be assigned to the idea of ecological citizenship. His central
theoretical thesis is that ecological citizenship has to be understood as a
radically new form of citizenship. My aim in this article, however, is to defend a
contrasting thesis, namely, that ecological citizenship should be understood as
giving distinctive substance to a more conventional understanding of citizen-
ship. In the first section I explain why I find Dobson’s theoretical construction
of a new form of citizenship problematic, and in the second I offer a brief
sketch of my alternative understanding. My concluding claim is that while on
major points of normative substance the difference between Dobson’s view and
the alternative I sketch is not great, the theoretical difference between them
could be of some significance in terms of persuading the wider community of
political theorists, as well as fellow citizens, that the pursuit of ecological
citizenship is a desirable and viable project.

Dobson’s Sui Generis Conception of Postcosmopolitan Ecological Citizenship

The idea of citizenship normally refers, inter alia, to a status which arises with
membership of a polity and confers on citizens a set of reciprocal responsibilities
and rights. Each of the features referred to by the terms in italics, however, is
argued by Dobson not to be a necessary condition of citizenship in the sense he
gives to the idea of ecological citizenship. On a conventional understanding,
therefore, what Dobson calls ‘citizenship’ would not count as such. If we are to
investigate whether Dobson’s conception is intelligible as a conception of
citizenship, however, we cannot simply invoke standard assumptions about
what features citizenship has to have to be intelligible, as doing so would beg
the question of whether Dobson really has formulated a radically distinctive

Correspondence Address: Tim Hayward, School of Social and Political Studies, Adam Ferguson
Building, George Square, Edinburg, EH8 9LL. Email: tim.hayward@ed.ac.uk

ISSN 0964-4016 Print/1743-8934 Online/06/030435–12 Ó 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09644010600627741
436 T. Hayward

new conception. The main question I shall thus focus on is whether his
conception is intelligible and non-self-contradictory purely in its own terms.
Particular reference will nonetheless be made to the points at which he departs
from more conventional understandings of citizenship. I shall first ask how
Dobson conceives the political community to which ecological citizens belong,
and how they have obligations in virtue of belonging to it. This discussion will
lead to consideration of the related question of how to determine who belongs
to the relevant political community.
On a conventional understanding of it, citizenship is a status one has in
virtue of membership of a polity, even if on some, especially republican,
accounts citizenship is not merely a status but also, importantly, a practice.
Dobson takes a further step, however, to conceive of citizenship as not a status
at all, and not even entailing membership of any particular polity. One critical
question, therefore, is whether citizenship can be conceptualised intelligibly, as
Dobson believes it can, without any necessary reference to a polity to which the
citizens in question belong. Dobson denies quite reasonably that citizenship is
intrinsically tied to the nation-state, noting that the latter’s pre-eminence as the
locus of political sovereignty is being undermined in various ways. Emphasis-
ing, too, the historicity of citizenship and its characteristics (e.g. 71–3), he
suggests that just as there was citizenship before the existence of modern
nation-states, so there will be citizenship even as they are increasingly
dissolved. One presupposition this does not shift, however, is that of the
existence of an actual polity of which citizens are members; there is no
historical precedent for a form of citizenship of which this is not true. Dobson’s
view is that the existence of a polity with the key features of a state (which the
Ancient and Renaissance city-states shared with the modern nation-state) is
not necessary for citizenship. In Dobson (2004) he rejects both the state and its
‘homologues’ as supplying necessary conditions for the exercise of citizenship.
The existence of a ‘political community’ with a more minimal set of features,
on his account, suffices.
Regarding the existence of a relevant political community, two relatively
independent accounts can be discerned in what Dobson writes.
On one of them, Dobson suggests a suitable political community is to be
found in ‘global civil society’. Global civil society is a candidate for being
considered an actually existing political community in so far as international
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), their members and sympathisers
clearly do have concrete campaigning linkages and some common goals. They
do not, of course, have a grip on political power, even if they have some
influence, and they cannot be considered to constitute a polity, at least in any
sense that implies sovereign power or authority. Part of Dobson’s response to
this point is to note that even nation-states cannot be considered to have
absolute sovereign power: with the contemporary dispersal of sovereignty,
both ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’, he suggests, we should perhaps be looking
for a multiplicity of political bodies (73). Yet one might still want to insist on a
difference between a multiplicity of sites of sovereignty, on the one hand and,
 Ecological Citizenship 437

on the other, ‘political communities’ that are not themselves the site of any
sovereignty at all. There are both normative and conceptual reasons for so
insisting.
In the broader context of international politics, agents and associations of
civil society can be portrayed as relatively minoritarian partisan factions,
and as factions whose globalisation–critical unity may conceal significant
affirmative differences that would become evident if they did have power.
Dobson sees the anti-globalisation activists as ‘the tip of an iceberg of global
citizenship activity’ (75); but apart from the disparate and sometimes mutually
contradictory aims of such individuals and groups, there is still the question
why their activity should be conceived as citizenship. [On this particular point I
find myself in some sympathy with David Miller (cited at 115) when he refuses
to regard the Greenpeace activist as a citizen.] There are, I would argue,
important principled differences between civil associations and a polity: the
former can pursue whatever commitments they choose; a polity has to be able
to accommodate and mediate contrasting commitments and to do so, if it is a
just one, in ways that all can find legitimate. The distinction between a civil
association and a polity is thus of normative import.
Conceptually, there is a requirement of the relevant political community that
it has properly political bonds, which civil relations do not suffice to constitute.
Civil relations may be political, on a broad construal of the term, as much else
in associative life may be; and they may constitute bonds, of a certain kind; but
civil relations in and of themselves do not constitute political bonds in
any sense that have to do with political obligation. Dobson maintains that
ecological citizenship can be constituted through horizontal relations between
people (116); but on standard accounts of political obligation (and Dobson
nowhere challenges traditional understandings of political obligation) the
establishment of horizontal relations – between individuals, constituting them
as a people – is a prepolitical precursor to the political compact which brings
into being a body politic (or republic) vested with power and authority by the
people. It is only with institutionalised agreement about political governance
that the polity comes into being. Civil society – whether global, national or
subnational – lacks power, authority and institutions and so is not political in
the sense it would need to be to generate political obligations.
It is in response to this point that Dobson introduces his other answer to the
question about the existence of the relevant political community. He rejects the
account offered by cosmopolitans like Linklater who suggest citizenship arises
with participation in global civil society understood as a discursive public
sphere. Dobson finds this too ‘thin’ a conception of community which, in being
based on bonds of ‘common humanity’, does not really distinguish political
from moral obligation. He refers instead to a ‘thick’ community of ‘historical
obligation’ (81). The general idea here is that ‘the patterns and effects of glo-
balization have given rise to a series of material conditions within which
the idea of transnational citizenship obligations can make sense’ (127). His
more specific claim is that ‘the relevant political community is that created by
438 T. Hayward

the ecological footprint’ (116). The ‘ecological footprint’ represents an estimate

of ‘the resource consumption and waste assimilation requirements of a defined
human population or economy in terms of a corresponding productive land
area’ (Wackernagel & Rees in Dobson: 100). The respective sizes of footprint
for richer and poorer populations are so dramatically different that Dobson
quite reasonably believes the rich have obligations to bring about a more
equitable distribution of ecological space utilisation. He writes that ‘the eco-
logical footprint gives rise to relationships with those ‘‘on whom it impacts’’‘
(115) and that ‘the footprint creates obligations that are explicitly non-
reciprocal, but no less citizenly for all that’ (116).
The problem, however, is that the relations as defined in terms of differential
ecological space utilisation are precisely not political relations. Dobson’s
suggestion that ecological space is ‘ecological citizenship’s version of political
space’ (99) involves a category mistake: for while neither kind of ‘space’ maps
onto discrete parcels of territory, the former nonetheless refers to the
biophysical properties of territory, not to the ‘space’ within which people
have political relations. It certainly makes sense to say the relations in question
ought to come under political governance, and it is also intelligible to say that
anyone who is active in seeking to bring that about is acting as an ecological
citizen should. But I do not think that being able to say these things is sufficient
to ground an intelligible notion of ecological citizenship in Dobson’s sui generis
sense; so I am not persuaded by either of the answers he gives to the question of
how the relevant political community is constituted.
At the root of the problem here, I believe, is the key question of what
distinguishes the political obligations of citizenship specifically from the moral
obligations of ‘common humanity’ more generally. This is a question that
Dobson wrestles with time and again, and in various contexts in his book, as it is
a critical one for the more ambitious theoretical aspect of his project. I do not
propose to respond in detail to the various answers he attempts, however, but
shall say simply why I think that no non-self-contradictory answer is available
to the question of how political and moral obligations can be distinguished in
the terms of his theory. The reasoning can be stated very briefly. We have
noted that Dobson advances the proposition that the ‘community’ of post-
cosmopolitan citizenship ‘is created by the ‘‘historical’’ or (better) ‘‘always
already’’ obligations of globalization’ (81). This proposition makes manifest an
internal contradiction in Dobson’s position: for Dobson, obligations are
obligations of citizenship as distinct from morality, when they are created by
the political community; but the obligations in the proposition are said –
conversely – to create the community; therefore the obligations referred to in the
proposition are not obligations of citizenship. He has thus not succeeded in
showing that the obligations in question are other than the moral obligations of
a common humanity; nor, therefore, has he shown that a new form of
citizenship is constituted through the (moral) existence of such obligations.
Supposing, however, that Dobson could answer this objection, there would
remain a second, namely, that the criteria for determining who is an ecological
 Ecological Citizenship 439

citizen are radically indeterminate. What Dobson considers the relevant

political community is not only not ‘bounded’ in any conventional way – e.g.
by reference to territoriality, jurisdiction or sovereignty – it does not have a
determinate membership.
I should note in passing that Dobson rejects the concept of ‘membership’ as
a criterion of citizenship on grounds that appear problematic. He suggests that
the importance of the membership issue for traditional notions of citizenship is
due to the tight relationship between membership and entitlements: ‘no
membership, no entitlement’ (116). He states that the issue of membership
arises for rights but not for duties (117). However, I do not see any reason why
the membership issue should not apply just as much to duties if these are to be
political, citizenship, duties rather than human, moral, duties.
Regardless, however, of whether we speak of membership per se, we do need
to know how ecological citizens are to be identified. The political community to
which Dobson’s ecological citizens belong is constituted by the thickly material
bonds of (unequal) ecological space utilisation. Now because everyone needs
ecological space, and everyone either benefits from an excess or suffers from an
inadequate amount, or else enjoys a just share of it, everyone belongs to the one
global community. From this perspective, everyone would belong to the
community that confers ecological citizenship (albeit, respectively, as ecological
debtor, creditor or equal). Yet it is not at all clear whether Dobson considers
everyone to be an ecological citizen, or to be eligible for ecological citizenship.
So how is it determined whether someone is an ecological citizen on
Dobson’s account? We have seen that he identifies the ecological citizen as one
who is bound by the obligations arising from an excessive ecological footprint.
The obligations of the ecological citizen are asymmetrical and non-reciprocal,
according to Dobson, and that in itself does not preclude their being relations
of citizenship, as on his conception citizenship does not entail relationships of
reciprocity. Yet while in principle this is not necessarily an untenable claim
there is, nonetheless, because of the nature of the non-reciprocal obligations on
which he focuses, the puzzling result that not everyone is or needs to be an
‘ecological citizen’: only those responsible for harms need to be, not the
victims. The ties of citizenship bind in one direction only, on the beneficiaries
of the inequalities; the others are effectively cast in the role of ‘moral patients’.
This account does not establish clearly whether there is any political com-
munity which includes the ‘victims’ as citizens.
A critical question is whether the victims – i.e. those on the receiving end of
ecological deprivation and the obligations deriving from it – can or cannot be
ecological citizens. An affirmative answer, that they are or can be ecological
citizens, could be advanced on the grounds that they can recognise and respect
the duties arising from existing injustices even though these duties do not
happen to fall upon them. A weakness of this response is that a proportion
(possibly a high proportion) of the victims might in fact prefer to have a share
of the benefits of ecological unsustainability and thus only be ‘ecological
citizens’ by default and against their will. This affirmative answer would thus
440 T. Hayward

run counter to Dobson’s view that an ecological citizen pursues sustainability

from an internalised commitment or desire to be virtuous. A further problem
with an affirmative answer is that if victims as well as beneficiaries are included
in the relevant community it ceases to be the case that duties but not rights fall
to the ecological citizen, as the victims have rights but not duties. If Dobson
were to allow this, then he would be brought back to accept a more
conventional architecture of citizenship.
Consistently to maintain his alternative architecture, therefore, I think his
answer would have to be negative. A negative answer is indeed implied, for
instance, when he writes that ‘the ecological footprint gives rise to relationships
with those ‘‘on whom it impacts’’’ (115). The reader might infer here that
ecological citizens have relationships with those ‘others’, but that the question
of ecological citizenship does not arise for those others because they do not
have the obligations in question. This would make eligibility for ecological
citizenship a privilege of the better-off.
To embrace this conclusion would be uncomfortable, to say the least. The
discomfort is increased by the way that Dobson’s arguments can be used to
give principled support for it. Here, a distinction he emphasises between
ecological citizenship and environmental citizenship comes into play. The
former, he maintains, entails duties of citizenship whereas the latter tends to
focus on rights. It is the latter that seems to be of most obvious relevance to the
ecological victims/patients. Dobson writes that ‘the likelihood of environ-
mental citizenship is in direct proportion to the lived experience of systematic
exposure to environmental breakdown’ (93–4). Those so exposed are likely to
press for environmental justice and environmental rights. In his view, the focus
on environmental rights is a pragmatically valuable complement to ecological
citizenship but does not constitute it. Environmental citizenship, on his
construal, is a conventional form of citizenship which takes environmental
issues seriously, not a new form of citizenship. For Dobson, it refers to ‘the
way in which the environment–citizenship relationship can be regarded from a
liberal point of view’, and is ‘a citizenship that deals in the currency of
environmental rights, that is conducted exclusively in the public sphere, whose
principal virtues are the liberal ones of reasonableness and a willingness to
accept the force of the better argument and procedural legitimacy, and whose
remit is bounded political configurations modelled on the nation-state. For the
most rough-and-ready purposes, it can be taken that environmental citizenship
here refers to attempts to extend the discourse and practice of rights-claiming
into the environmental context’ (89).
It might therefore be asked whether the arguments of this paper amount to a
defence of environmental citizenship as Dobson defines it in contradistinction
to ecological citizenship. Certainly, these arguments do defend a conventional
understanding of politically bounded citizenship and assume the appropriate-
ness of liberal procedural standards of political legitimacy. However, they do
not accept that a concern with environmental rights entails a commitment to
substantive liberal values when these conflict with ecological ones, nor that a
 Ecological Citizenship 441

concern with rights can be separated from a concern with duties. More
crucially, I have argued so far that a more conventional ‘architecture’ of
citizenship can be defended on the grounds not merely of normative preference
but of conceptual coherence: if this is correct, it means that any intelligible
notion of ecological citizenship would share that architecture; there would be
no analytically clear-cut distinction to draw between ecological and environ-
mental citizenship.

Ecological Citizenship: New Wine, Old Bottle

I therefore return to my claim that what is required for ecological citizenship is
not a new form of citizenship but a new view of its substantive commitments.
In this section I flesh out this claim a little, first by suggesting a different view of
the substantive commitments that would make citizenship ecological: here the
focus is on the virtues which an ecological citizen should be expected to display,
and a different account from Dobson’s is sketched. The second part offers
some thoughts about how ecological citizenship is most cogently conceptua-
lised as citizenship: here the central claim is that the obligations of ecological
citizenship have to be seen as indissolubly linked to rights of ecological
citizenship if – as I believe is the case – the obligations include those which
Dobson has identified.
Before beginning, I wish to acknowledge that Dobson does not claim
ecological citizenship leaves no place for environmental citizenship, and he
does see a constructive role for environmentally reforming conventional
citizenship. This role is a complementary one, however, in his view. The view I
endorse, by contrast, is that much of Dobson’s substantive discussion could
make perfect sense as relating to citizens – understood conventionally, as
citizens of a polity – trying to be more ecological, and also trying to get the
polity to be more ecological. In fact, it is when he is discussing the substantive
meaning of ecological citizenship in his radical sense that Dobson is actually at
his most conventional – or so I shall now claim. This can be illustrated by
particular reference to his discussion of the virtues to be expected of a good
ecological citizen.

The Virtues of Ecological Citizenship

Dobson claims that the first virtue of the ecological citizen is justice, and he
notes that other virtues include care, compassion and taking responsibility for
the vulnerable. While not wishing to deny a place to such virtues, I would point
out that there is nothing distinctively ‘ecological’ about them. In particular, I
would question the rationale for considering justice to be the ‘first’ virtue. For
even allowing that justice might be predicated as a virtue of individuals and not
only of social institutions, its meaning would be indeterminate across a range
of possible conceptions of what justice requires of that person in their conduct.
Dobson, of course, does have a clear sense of what justice in broad terms
442 T. Hayward

requires of the ecological citizen, namely, to accept the obligations arising from
inequitable usage of ecological space as measured in ecological footprint
analysis; but the practical and conceptual reach of virtues does not equate with
or reduce to what one has an obligation to do. A readiness to accept one’s
obligations can perhaps be considered a virtue, but talk of virtue applies more
appropriately to the qualities exhibited in the conduct of one’s life in the light
of the various obligations one is under. In short, if justice is accepted
generically as a virtue of the citizen, it remains to specify what virtue or virtues
specifically characterise an ecological citizen.
What I want to propose is that if there are peculiarly ecological virtues, then
foremost among them is one which can be called ‘resourcefulness’. Resourceful-
ness is an ‘inner’ quality whose ‘outward’ manifestation is particularly relevant
in an ecological context. If a major vice of environmentally harmful practices is
the profligate use of resources, and rendering into ‘mere resources’ items which
should be considered to be of inherent value, then the countervailing virtue can
be characterised as ‘resourcefulness’. Resourcefulness involves the development
and exercise of human capacities, and thus fulfils part of the substance of a good
human life; it also eases pressure on finite natural phenomena that are needed as
resources in (roughly) inverse proportion to resourcefulness. Developing the
virtue of resourcefulness – at individual, group and even national levels – is what
gives substance to the (ecological) justice that is the virtue of institutions.
The virtue of resourcefulness also answers well to the motivational problem,
the question of why do as (ecological) justice demands. Its development does
not depend on adopting an ‘altruistic’ attitude; rather, it depends on developing
human capacities which, on fairly uncontentious assumptions about the pre-
moral ‘goods’ of a human life, it is in a person’s interest to develop. Developing
this virtue thus does not involve any leap from a narrow conception of one’s
self-interest to the abnegation of self-interest, but can rather be seen as part of a
process of self-enlightenment about one’s own interests.
Resourcefulness is not, then, a ‘moral’ virtue or a ‘disposition of character’, in
a direct or immediate sense. On this score, I am in agreement with Dobson, in
contrast to John Barry, that dispositions of moral character are not the central
virtues of ecological citizenship (133). On the question of what the virtues
actually consist in, however, I am actually closer to Barry. In his view,
responsible citizenship should be seen as ‘a practice within which ecologically
beneficial virtues such as self-reliance and self-restraint can be learnt and
practised’ (Barry, 1999: 228). Self-reliance and self-restraint are certainly con-
ducive to resourcefulness. My caveat is that framing these as moral dispositions
can unnecessarily heighten the appearance of the motivational problem, since
with that framing they are as assimilable, or more so, to the idea of ‘self-
sacrifice’, rather than to the idea that employing human ingenuity to cultivate
resourcefulness can be inherently rewarding, a fulfilment of enlightened self-
interest. Being resourceful is not, in fact, inconsistent with exhibiting traits in
one and the same line of conduct, that in other respects might be morally
unpraiseworthy.
 Ecological Citizenship 443

If the virtue of resourcefulness is not first and foremost a ‘moral virtue’ or a

‘disposition of character’, nor does it figure prominently among ‘civic virtues’.
It thus is not tied inherently to a republican conception of citizenship, even if
there is nothing in it that is inherently inconsistent with one. There is nothing in
the idea of developing a culture favourable to resourcefulness that entails a
general priority to ‘common good’ over individual good, as republicanism
implies by contrast with liberalism. Nor, however, does it imply the reverse.
Thus if this virtue has no particular connection to either moralism or
republicanism, nor is it immediately recognisable as a liberal virtue. It can
nonetheless be derived as such from an immanent criticism of liberalism’s
departure from its own grounding value in the autonomy of the individual
understood as representing and facilitating the full development of individual
capacities. This does not need to be understood in a purely individualistic
sense, as it can include capacities exercised in association with others and
capacities that emerge through association. Thus, while the good ecological
citizen will have various moral and civic virtues, what makes the good citizen a
good ecological citizen, above all, is the virtue of resourcefulness.
Where there is a degree of tension with some versions of liberalism is in the
cultural shift entailed by pursuit of this virtue towards valuing resourcefulness
over the values of consumerism. Nonetheless, this particular shift can go with
the grain of motivations as they are assumed to exist in liberal democracy
(development of individual autonomy and capacities) and have a ‘positive’ cast
more appealing to many than the ‘sacrifices’ that others might vainly call for. I
should emphasise, however, that in asserting the opposition between the virtue
of resourcefulness and, implicitly, the ‘vices’ of consumerism, I am not
endorsing the idea that qua citizen one can be virtuous but qua consumer one
cannot. On this score I am with Dobson (and also Russell Keat, 1994) against
Mark Sagoff (1988), for instance, in holding that the virtue of resourcefulness
does not depend on its bearer being a citizen as distinct from consumer, but can
be pursued in a range of circumstances, including in one’s consumption, which
for most people is the main area of life where the virtue is actually called for.
Finally, a particularly important point about the virtue of resourcefulness is
that it not only applies to a variety of spheres of life, but it also can be achieved
by degrees, and by anyone. The focus on this virtue enables us to characterise
good ecological citizenship in such a way that does not make it appear to be the
preserve of the converted, of a self-selecting group who are presumed to have
transcended self-interest. This focus thus also arguably promises more to
motivate the broader population.

Ecological Citizenship: Why Justice Entails Rights

I have suggested that justice is not the first virtue of ecological citizenship, but I
would express my broad agreement with Dobson’s normative position by
saying that justice, in much the sense he understands it, is an important part of
the point of ecological citizenship. Dobson advances a conception of justice
444 T. Hayward

whose main essentials I would endorse. At the level of its most fundamental
principles there is a presumption in favour of a universal entitlement of access
to or use of ecological space. A corollary is that those who currently use or
occupy substantially more than their share of the available space have an
obligation to reduce the size of their ecological footprint, as well as having
redistributive obligations towards those to whom they owe an ‘ecological
debt’. In order to meet such obligations, I have suggested, the virtue of
resourcefulness plays a key part – by contributing to the aim of reducing use or
consumption of resources. But its exercise has to be called forth in a context
governed by principles of justice, and for two reasons that should be stressed.
One is the need to safeguard people against being urged by governments to be
resourceful as a substitute for receiving benefits to which they ought to be
entitled. The other is that resourcefulness only influences the ecological
efficiency with which a particular bundle of resources is used; it does not of
itself represent any constraint on the total amount of resources that might be
used. In formulating such constraints, it is hard to see how the language of
rights can be avoided, or why avoiding it could be desirable.
As long as there is a need for obligations to reduce inequalities of ecological
footprint, there is no less a need to maintain a right of all to an equal, or fair,
entitlement to ecological space. It would be recognition of this right, held by all
pople worldwide, that would give both substance and force to the idea that the
obligations of the better-off are not simply moral duties of charity, but strict
duties of justice, and as such come appropriately within the ambit of coercively
backed political obligations. Substantively, were it not the case that humans
have a right to sufficient (or, arguably, equal) ecological space, there would be
no obligation to ensure their secure enjoyment of that just share. Or rather,
whatever obligation there might be would hold irrespectively of any causal
connection between right-bearers and duty-bearers, and thus not arise in the
way that Dobson holds political or historical, as distinct from merely moral,
obligations arise. Yet that causal connection alone is not sufficient to yield any
obligation. Dobson claims to offer ‘a thickly material account of the ties that
bind. . . by the material production and reproduction of daily life in an unequal
an asymmetrically globalizing world’ (30). The material bonds so generated,
however, are binding, above all, on the weak, poor and disadvantaged. The
bonds of normative obligation, by contrast, have to bind at the other end and
the other way round. If the rich are actually to recognise their obligations and
feel bound by them, as reasons for action, it is not simply a case of pointing out
material asymmetries – as if these had not already been noticed – but of
providing reasons linking the facts to the normative conclusions. If the rich are
to be constrained to recognise obligations correlative to rights, then they have
to be acknowledged to be participating in a system of justice in which rights are
generally recognised. As I have argued more fully elsewhere (Hayward, 2005),
because transnational economic relations manifest an existing system of rights
which disfavours the poor, it is more appropriate to engage critically with how
those rights already operate with a view to transforming them, than leave the
 Ecological Citizenship 445

sphere of rights and its dominant interpretations unchallenged. While a

commitment to a fundamental right in the normative premises of a theory does
not automatically imply a commitment to rights ‘all the way up’ to determinate
political norms as the means to achieve its aims (Waldron, 1993: 20–1),
international and constitutional rights can and do fulfil that role. Moreover, it
need not be the litigious aspect so much as the standard setting aspect of rights
that is important and provides the assurance that all are bound to respect
similar rules of conduct.
Yet Dobson’s stance towards rights is ambivalent. While he does recognise a
role for rights in environmental citizenship he rules it out for ecological
citizenship, and this, I think, renders his conception of the latter less coherent
than it could be. The key point is one which Dobson himself in one place
actually articulates, for although he generally avoids talk of rights when
expounding his understanding of ecological citizenship, a mention does occur
when he writes that the duty to reduce the size of an overlarge footprint is
‘driven by the correlative right to sufficient ecological space’ (121). This is what
I wish to emphasise. The idea of just (or equal) ecological space utilisation
which is at the heart of Dobson’s substantive normative theory is, in fact,
expressed quite naturally in the language of rights, and rights which corres-
pond to the obligations he emphasises.
What Dobson correctly points out is that rights and duties can be
asymmetrical – in the sense of falling on different citizens – and still be rights
and duties of citizenship. Yet this observation precisely entails that just as some
citizens may bear particular duties, other citizens may bear the corresponding
rights. I have already given voice to puzzlement about how Dobson deals with
those on the receiving end of the duties of ecological citizenship, about how the
environmentalism of the poor seems to stand in an unclear or problematic
relationship to ecological citizenship. If we simply drop the stipulation that
citizenship, ecological or otherwise, consists in duties but not rights, the puzzle
dissolves.
A politically more robust position then becomes possible. Dropping the
idea of a division of labour which Dobson apparently envisages – with
environmental citizenship dealing in rights and ecological citizenship dealing in
duties – also helps to overcome the optimistic voluntarism into which a one-
sided emphasis on duties arguably resolves. If duties are not enforced as part of
a system of rights and duties they are only assumed voluntarily, and are not
obligations in the requisitely strong sense at all. ‘Citizenly activity’ on the part
of some may come to nought if others carry on regardless; and then even the
ecological citizens themselves can become demoralised.

Conclusion
The idea of ecological citizenship as sketched here does not differ greatly from
Dobson’s in terms of the substantive commitments it entails. The disagreement
about the theoretical framing of the normative substance may be of some
 446 T. Hayward

significance, however, particularly if an intention of green political theorists is

to reach a wider audience. Dobson’s idea that ecological citizenship has or
should have a ‘postcosmopolitan’ character is bound to strike many as
premature given that even a political cosmopolitanism is as yet a distant
prospect.
Meanwhile, I think it is worth stressing two things. One is that ecological
citizenship can be construed as a condition of practical virtue attainable by
degrees, through processes of education and deliberative association, and by
all, as citizens of the polity in which they find themselves. The other is that
inasmuch as ecological citizenship entails a commitment to justice, it is
important to recognise that the normative force of justice – at any rate in
political as distinct from purely moral contexts – is such as ultimately to
warrant the use of coercion for its enforcement. This makes the requisite
justification of its principles all the more onerous, and also reminds us that the
question of legitimate power – and thus of conventionally political relations –
should not be bracketed off from discussions of citizenship.

Note
1. All page references given in the text refer to this work (Dobson, 2003), unless stated otherwise.

References
Barry, J. (1999) Rethinking Green Politics (London: Sage).
Dobson, A. (2003) Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Dobson, A. (2004) ‘Citizenship and the Ecological Challenge’, paper delivered at European
Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions, Uppsala.
Hayward, T. (2005) Constitutional Environmental Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Keat, R. (1994) ‘Citizens, Consumers and the Environment: reflections on the Economy of the
Earth’, Environmental Values 3: 333–49.
Sagoff, M. (1988) The Economy of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Waldron, J. (1993) ‘A Rights-Based Critique of Constitutional Rights’, Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies 13: 18–51.

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