What does it mean to be a citizen?
It might seem like a simple question, with a simple answer. If you are a citizen of a country, you receive certain rights, such as being allowed to vote. You also take on certain responsibilities, like obeying the laws of that country. But if we dig deeper, the answers are much less straightforward.
Do all citizens receive equal rights, or have equal opportunity to take advantage of those rights? Can you be a citizen of something other than a country? Can you be a global citizen? What does it mean to be an ‘ecological citizen’?
This week, I participated in an excellent conference that explored these and many other questions about citizenship. The Citizen in the 21st Century is a conference organised by Inter-Disciplinary.Net and the wonderfully enthusiastic James Arvanitakis.
Inter-Disciplinary.Net conferences try to break the mould of traditional academic conferences by bringing together relatively small numbers of academics, from multiple disciplines, in an interactive format that avoids Powerpoint and encourages engagement with all of the papers. Needless to say, I loved the format. Too many academic conferences run countless parallel streams and give people 10 minutes to present a complex argument, with no time left for questions and debate. This conference was very different and I learnt bucketloads about citizenship, a topic that I haven’t engaged much with before.
I want to reflect on two specific topics in this post. The first is unequal citizenship, the second is ecological citizenship.
Unequal citizenship
In theory, if you are an Australian citizen you receive all of the rights that come with that citizenship. Once you reach 18, you can vote in elections, run for parliament, get an Australian passport and get help from Australian officials while you are overseas. There are also less tangible benefits of being a citizen — you have the right to engage in public debate, to try and shape Australia’s future, to participate in civil society, to access health care and to get an education.
In practice, access to these rights or privileges is unequal. As James pointed out in his opening presentation at the conference, many people are disengaged or disempowered in ways that make it hard for them to use their citizenship to drive social change. They experience what he calls a ‘citizenship deficit’.
The case that immediately came to mind for me was Australia’s Indigenous people. This week saw the release of the latest Closing the Gap Report by the Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Indigenous people have had the right to vote for 50 years, but the report shows that Indigenous people have substantially lower life expectancy than other Australians, higher infant mortality and lower levels of education. Progress on closing these gaps is mixed. It seems that Indigenous people do not have the same access to the rights of citizenship as other Australians.
I believe that we won’t truly close these citizenship gaps until there is full cultural acceptance of Indigenous people in Australia. Cultural change is painstakingly slow but there are positive signs. Kevin Rudd’s apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples was an important step in the right direction. The recent success and recognition for The Sapphires — a wonderfully positive story about Indigenous people — is also heartening. I hope Australia can continue to embrace Indigenous story and culture and close the citizenship deficit for Indigenous people.
Ecological citizenship
My own contribution to the conference explored ecological citizenship. I argued that, as we become more aware of our personal environmental impacts and our dependence on global ecological systems, we need to grapple with our responsibility to reduce our impacts. I’ve summarised my argument below. The full paper is available from the conference website.
We live in a time when the mundane actions of an individual citizen, such as heating their home or driving their car, add to the sum of human suffering and ecological damage in distant places and times. Greenhouse gas emissions generated from our daily practices contribute to climate change that damages the living conditions of humans and other species, albeit through a complex causal chain that feels temporally and spatially distant.
For some, an individual ethics of sustainability demands that they take action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and rectify these damages. But is this reasonable? If individual citizens are free agents that can act unhindered on their ethical imperatives, it is indeed reasonable. However, if we see citizens as enacting practices at the juncture between agency and structure, then we need to recognise that structures can constrain (as well as enable) individuals acting on their ethical imperatives.
Social practice theory contends that individuals carry practices that are made up of integrated elements, including materials, competences and meanings. The absence of these elements, or their specific form, can make individual action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions problematic. For example, the materials required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as capital to buy efficient appliances or solar panels, may not be available. An individual citizen may not have the necessary competence to reduce their emissions — they may not know what to do, or have the skills to act on that knowledge. Further, a citizen may hold meanings that work against the necessary actions, such as a feeling that all people and organisations should be contributing fairly towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
In the paper, I use a social practice framework to explore the constraints on enacting an individual ethics of sustainability and ask what responsibility citizens have to act ethically, despite these constraints. The existence of supportive meanings emerged as the most serious constraint on individual responsibility. Where supportive meanings exist and materials can be readily obtained, I argue that individuals have a strong responsibility to develop the necessary competences to reduce their environmental impact. Where there is a cost to the necessary materials, I argued that responsibility to obtain those materials increases with wealth and access to resources.
I do not believe that individuals have a moral responsibility to work to develop new meanings and I question whether consciously developing new meanings is even possible. However, I do endorse Ty Raterman’s argument that:
each individual ought constantly to strive to do more than she/he does currently and to push her/himself into new, uncomfortable territory, though no one is obligated to martyr her/himself for an environmental cause.
One thing that is known about the development of meanings, values and worldviews is that further development can be triggered by uncomfortable experiences that result in ‘disequilibrium’. Thus pushing into uncomfortable territory where personal growth is possible can expand our meanings and support further action to reduce our environmental impact. In this light, Raterman’s advice should become the mantra of the ecological citizen.
