environmental politics - paradoxes of increased individuation and public awareness of environmental...
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Paradoxes of increasedindividuation and publicawareness of environmentalissuesAndy Scerri aa Global Cities Research Institute, RMIT University,Melbourne, Australia
Available online: 24 Jul 2009
To cite this article: Andy Scerri (2009): Paradoxes of increased individuation and publicawareness of environmental issues, Environmental Politics, 18:4, 467-485
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Paradoxes of increased individuation and public awareness of
environmental issues
Andy Scerri*
Global Cities Research Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Since the 1990s, politicising the environment has often involved thedevelopment of green concepts of citizenship. Informed by these concepts,cultural anthropology is used to examine prevailing ideas and practices ofstakeholder citizenship. Of central concern are conditions whereinheightened individuation coincides with increased awareness of environ-mental issues. In the prevalence of stakeholder citizenship norms, the socialtask of addressing the ecological challenge is represented as individualopportunities and personal responsibilities. One upshot of this is that, asstakeholders, citizens are led to feel personally responsible for resolvingsocially created problems. In such contexts, increased awareness ofenvironmental issues has the paradoxical effect of compromising citizens’ethical commitments within the ecosphere. By privileging managedconsultation over motivating citizens politically, the normalising ofstakeholder citizenship poses a problem for green politics by making itdifficult to put sustainability into practice, while obscuring the unsustain-ability of much social activity.
Keywords: citizenship; individualism; personal responsibility; environmentalawareness; environmental ethics
Introduction
Across the West, mainstream political parties now embrace public environ-mental awareness as part of vote-winning electoral strategies, while large andsmall businesses respond to green concerns. Laudable as these things might be,however, green political theorists continue to criticise as ineffectual or at leastas insufficient the ecological modernisation and action-free ‘spin’ that seem theprimary products of state and corporate environmental policies (Beder 2000,Martinez-Alier 2002, Monbiot and Prescott 2006). Recognising the existence ofsuch a gulf between awareness and practice implies that, although welcome, theshift from activist-centred to more broad-based environmentalism has
*Email: [email protected]
Environmental PoliticsVol. 18, No. 4, July 2009, 467–485
ISSN 0964-4016 print/ISSN 1743-8934 online
� 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09644010903007344
http://www.informaworld.com
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important political dimensions. Increased public environmental awarenessbrings with it a requirement for efforts to clarify if such awareness is affectingsustainable practices and how – that is, under what conditions – sustainabilitymight better be implemented.
As increased demands for employment flexibility, workplace autonomy andcreativity combine with widespread yet uneven affluence and high levels ofparticipation in leisure-consumption activities, mainstream parties haverecently taken to addressing ‘enlightened stakeholders’ based in perceiveddemands for a ‘new politics’ centred upon concerns for well-being andsustainability (Guha 2004, p. 3, Hamilton 2006, p. 54, Jenkins 2006). Myargument here is that such ideas of citizenship represent solutions to theecological challenge as personal opportunities and responsibilities, and thatthis is a problem for green politics. Indeed, partially a product of institutionalresponses to heightened levels of environmental awareness, stakeholdercitizenship links sustainable practices to emending the self. My concern isthat such ideas of citizenship privilege atomistic voluntarism as if this weresufficient as the West’s strategy for facing the ecological challenge. Through anumber of examples, I examine how government and business practices thatfoster stakeholder citizenship work to neutralise politically, actions directed atachieving sustainable ways of life.
Framing the discussion is recent research that connects green politics withcitizenship (Barry 2006, Dobson 2003, Dobson and Bell 2006, Dobson andValencia Saiz 2005). By recognising that ‘the form of citizens’ daily lives – their‘‘participation’’ in the widest sense – is what shapes the contours of sustainabilityitself’, such research links sustainable social practices with concepts of ‘active’ or‘critical sustainability citizenship’ (Dobson 2006, p. 224). Meanwhile, othersargue that citizenship of itself might be somewhat problematic for these ends,because of its ‘strong methodologically individualistic undertones’. Theserecognize a need for research that addresses the deeply individuated nature ofliberal citizenship, and aims at promoting the ‘collective dimension’ of social life(van der Heijden 2007, p. 161; see also Agyeman and Evans 2006, Smith 2005,Seyfang and Smith 2007). These aim at drawing upon and extending ‘thedemocratic impulse that has long been one of the hallmarks of environment-alism’ (Latta 2007, p. 378), bringing sustainability and justice together as sharedconcerns. A key proposition in all of these arguments is that efforts to re-conceptualise both how people live and the norms that people live by can help tonormalise practices that sustain rather than degrade the ecosphere.
Said to form part of a ‘‘‘third wave’’ of green theorising’, work that is moreabstract brings into question how shifting societal conditions affect relation-ships between knowledge, awareness and practice (Barry 2007, p. 688). RichardDagger has argued that concepts of freedom and rights central to both theoriesand practices of liberal citizenship make the task of ‘facing the ecologicalchallenge’ difficult. For him, the job of Ecological Science ‘consists in helpingpeople to see . . . that they are not apart from nature so much as a part of it’.This is because, ‘It is our freedoms and rights as persons that must be
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reconsidered if we are to . . . address the ecological challenge brought on bypeople who have been acting freely and, for the most part, within their rights asordinarily understood’ (Dagger 2006, pp. 200, 209–210). Aimed at ‘historicalre-reading or green re-interpretation of the Western political canon’, suchgreen theorising also explores some of the ideological and psycho-socialconstraints that relatively affluent, economic growth-oriented and technologi-cally developed liberal democracies can place on efforts to change practicesthat damage or exploit the ecosphere (Barry 2007, p. 688; see also Nash andLewis 2006).
Informed by such research, I bring a cultural anthropological approach tocontemporary citizenship in the West. To these ends, I first look to researchthat links the historical intertwining of cultural materialism and individualismin the early-modern West with the political formation of citizen-centred liberaldemocracies. This brief exegesis centres upon the generalised dissimulation ofthe Self from Others and the World, and with the counter-cultural challenges tothe predominance of such ‘modern artificialism’ (Dumont 1986, p. 55) that areoften associated with Western modernisation. This concept frames theapproach of the discussion to changes over time, from the prevalence ofclassical to social and, more recently, stakeholder norms of citizenship in theWestern liberal democracies. The main section of the article focuses uponexamples of practices and discourses associated with stakeholder citizenship.Thus, the approach moves from abstract and speculative to more concrete andnormative theorising. Orienting the overall argument is a claim that in thepredominance of stakeholder citizenship, hitherto marginalised counter-cultural actions aimed at placing a check on the ‘artificial’ separation ofhuman being from the world as a unitary whole now support many of theconditions that exacerbate such dualism. The cost of such a transformation isthat persons are called upon to defer many aspects of their ethico-politicalcommitments within the ecosphere. That is, stakeholder citizenship deepensthose aspects of Western culture and ideology that are premised upon anatomistic severance of Self from Others and the World. In short, the prevalenceof such norms make it difficult to politicise ethical commitments becausedevaluing links between (private) morality and (collective) reasons for acting. Iconclude by outlining some of the difficulties that seeing things in these termsraises for green politics.
Modern artificialism
Cultural anthropologists have sought to understand contemporary conditionsin comparative and historical ways: that is, by asking what it is to be human, ina distinct societal context and at a particular historical conjuncture. In theseterms, the emergence of liberal-democratic citizenship can be understood as apolitical consequence of the synthesis of cultural materialism and individualismthat took place within the West from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesonwards. The ‘plethora of goods’ that came into use in the early-modern
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West – through colonisation and industrial development, for example – did soamidst a Judaeo-Christian culture that emphasised the salvation of the soulthrough individuals’ worldly actions. The materialism that arose was ‘a socio-cultural system in which material interests are not made subservient to othersocial goals’ (Polanyi 2001, Sahlins 1972), such as harmony with some or othercosmological principle. In this atmosphere, ecclesiastic and subsequently feudalauthority came to be understood as constraints upon individuals’ subjection tothe will of God. As the techniques and knowledges associated with the uses ofmaterial goods became more important within society (Mukerji 1983, p. 12),the relatively direct union with the divine central to Judaeo-Christianity gaverise to a ‘peculiar ideology of Western individualism’ (Dumont 1986, p. 10).This cultural-ideological syncretism brings atomistic individuals to the centreof the universe, which appears both socially structured and subjectivelyexperienced as something comprehensible on ‘objective’ terms: as matter,forces and energy.
Indeed, the belief-system that had once offered ‘refuge from this imperfectworld in another [transcendent] one’ (Dumont 1986, p. 55) underwent ametamorphosis; Western individualism and its subjective correlate modernartificialism emerged as central principles of societal reproduction. By contrastwith traditional ‘ideological holism’, individuals in modernising conditions –that is, as holders of ‘free’ labour in capitalistic markets where time and spaceare ‘liberated’ from myth and tradition as clock-time and empty space, forexample (Giddens 1990, pp. 17–19) – are called upon to identify the world withtheir own subjective wills.1 Modern artificialism is, thus, the application toworldly affairs of personal will-objectives that are, in effect, ‘the concentrationwithin individuals’ wills of objectively true reality’ (Dumont 1986, pp. 55–56).In short, modern artificialism is the radical dissimulation of Self from Worldand Others, the generalizing of which heralds the West’s Promethean moment(Dumont and Delacampagne 1981, p. 6). Such are the conditions for what MaxWeber (1958, p. 339) describes as a ‘subjectivist culture’, wherein morallyautonomous individuals inhabit a ‘disenchanted’ world of potentially know-able material dimensions existing objectively, devoid of ethico-moral encum-brances. In the context of cultural materialism, the generalising of modernartificialism belies the formation of an atomised subjectivity emphasising moralautonomy and personal exemplarity within an alienated and externaliseduniverse. While ‘in most other civilizations people consider themselves to bepart of a whole which both surrounds and goes beyond them’, in the West theindividual is seen as ‘an elementary particle of society’ (Supiot 2007, p. 14) andthe highest social value (Dumont 1986, p. 217).
Put differently, in modernising conditions the ‘biological instinct for self-preservation’ (Biro 2005, p. 159), hitherto constrained by an all-encompassingand explicit holism, is cut loose and individuals are effectively left to their owndevices amidst a nature that emanates objective, positively knowable laws. As theworld becomes the artifice of individual wills, binding holistic norms – includingmany of those associated with the inexorably inter-relational commonalities and
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continuities indispensable for social existence – manifest as limitations upon acreative and self-orienting subjectivity. Rather, that is, than as some or otherbinding totality that confirms subjectivity in relation to myth and tradition,history and the past. Persons, faced with adversity, are artificially set against anobjectified universe of material forces and must decide what to do as if forthemselves. In this argument, self-preservation is not necessarily identical withself-interest. Self-preservation implies the basic tendency for any biologicalorganism to seek to go on in a given context. By contrast, self-interest refers to thekinds of practices that self-preservation tends to involve in modernising Westernconditions. This is what political economists would come to see as the quint-essential modern condition: atomised individuals bound over to maximisepersonal utility amidst a natural field of matter, forces and energy.
Recognising the emergence of modern artificialism amidst Judaeo-Christianinsistence on equalitarianism between human souls is thus helpful for thinkingabout the paradoxical nature of a politics of citizenship instituted around idealsof individual liberty, interpersonal equality and unity of common interests.That is, such a view offers a means for understanding the emergence of liberalcitizenship norms in cultural and political terms.2 In modernising conditions,Western individuals’ lives came to be stretched across a competitive market-centred public arena, demanding personal detachment, professional skills,calculative and acquisitive dispositions and ‘a sphere of intimacy’ (Habermas1989, p. 28) emphasising human warmth and cultivation of an autonomoussubjectivity and self-expressive soul. That is, a peculiar cultural-ideologicalchiasmus characterised politics amidst the expansion of capitalistic markets,techno-scientific claims to ‘objective’ knowledge and national states exercisingabstract authority through codified law. The citizenship norms that wereinstituted by Western individuals came to be founded upon property ownershipand public engagement as well as on a ‘saturated and free interiority’ andpersonal creativity (Habermas 1989, p. 56). Citizens of liberal democracies areon the one hand property-owning individuals, while on the other hand they areindividual specimens of humanity in general.
Seen in this way, the conditions that framed the political success of claimsfor ‘free and equal’ citizenship also supported a ‘counter-mandatory bourgeoisculture of arts and letters’. Such a counter-culture could assert an ‘inner-worldly’ sensuality opposed to the competitive rough and tumble of publicengagements, and an aestheticism that diverts moral autonomy into privatejudgements about ‘taste and authenticity’. While a mainstream sought to forcepolitical stasis based in Natural Law, its ‘non-conformist’ alternative heldproperty in disregard, and pursued disorder through immediate experiencesand sensory gratification (Habermas 1989, pp. 32–33, 35). In its mainstreamregister, an alien external world is overcome by means of self-discipline aimedat domination, appropriation and the establishing of hegemony throughexclusion and possession. The presumption is that norms are justified byNatural Law. In its countercultural register, a strongly felt aestheticism isoriented to achieving unity with an external natural order, from which the self
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is overtly alienated. The alternative presumption is that nature must bejustified, in its naturalness, in relation to social norms. As mainstream classicalliberal citizenship challenged aristocratic and ecclesiastic power in the West,such countercultural norms supported claims for rights to self-expression andcritical liberty that partially contradicted the property rights and rule of lawthat were established.
Otherwise unleashed by the dissolution of ideological holism however, the‘critical freedom’ (Habermas 1989, p. 28) afforded by liberal citizenship normsconsistently risks marginalisation as utopian romanticism, or ossification asparochial anddomesticatedmannerism.Fromwithin aperspective similar to thatdeveloped here, others have argued for an approach which recognises that ‘theprice paid by critique for being listened to, at least in part, is to see some of thevalues it has mobilized to oppose [a prevailing order] being placed at the service’(Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, p. 29) of historically embedded structures andinstitutions. Hence, the point is not so much that ‘liberalist interpretations of therole and functioning of the liberal-democratic state’ are inherently ‘reactionary’(Habermas 1989, p. 136). Rather, it is to argue that both mainstream emphasesupon ‘possessive individualism’, valuing productive engagement, progress andmodernisation as an end in itself (Macpherson 1962) and countercultural valuesof self-realisation, personal autonomy, authenticity and creativity manifestedunder societal principles of freedom (of choice), (formal) equality and (maximal)utility. In short, possibilities for confronting existing conditions as unjust areformalised with the instituting of liberal citizenship, yet these continually riskbeing subjugated to interests sustained by institutions that privilege (adminis-trative) efficiency and (economic) growth. The political terrain of liberaldemocracies in this sense appears geared to the defence of particular interestsagainst claims that some or other alternative represents holistic interests.Traversing often contradictory registers of value, liberal citizenship norms areheld in common as an unstable basis for ameliorating political tensions andsettling ethical contradictions in Western liberal democracies.
With this historical outline in mind, discussion now turns to examine,briefly, relatively recent historical shifts in prevailing ideas of citizenship,before taking up in detail the substantive discussion of stakeholder citizenshipand the ecological challenge. By the 1940s, Western liberal-democratic citizens’‘indignation at rampant exploitation and egoism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello2005, pp. 345–346) had challenged the prevalence of what is described here asclassical liberal citizenship. Instituted as a means for redistributing the materialwealth generated by modernisation, a form of social citizenship arose, partiallyto ameliorate some of modernisation’s worst excesses, at least within the West(Valdivielso 2005, p. 240). Classical liberal individual rights to equality weretransformed into social rights to material well-being, and the means to achieveit through education, healthcare and leisure consumption. Meanwhile, classicalliberal duties morphed to encompass social commitments to full-time work andparticipation within a productive, market-oriented nation-building state(Valdivielso 2005, pp. 241–242, Marshall 1965).
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Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, an ‘artistic critique’ arose to challenge socialcitizenship norms as sources of psychic repression and conformity. Confrontedby expectations of full-time employment and stultifying bureaucracy, thiscounter-culturally grounded challenge sought to raise the value of autonomy andalterity. However, such calls for heightened valuation of personal creativity andauthenticity at work, and less homogeneity and conformity in social life alsocoincidedwith employer demands for greaterworkforce flexibility and the partialexhaustion of mass-produced personal use commodities markets (Frank 1997).Thesemore recent transformations inWestern citizenship can thus beunderstoodin terms of the post-industrialisation that has demanded relatively well-educatedand flexible workforces, as well as offered relatively greater individual creativechoice in personal-use commodity consumption, amongst other things. In thisargument,Western political andbusiness leaders, by turns perplexed andworriedamidst a deep-seated ‘legitimation crisis’ (Habermas 1975), slowly took toembracing an increasingly popular ‘rejection of all forms of disciplinaryregulation’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, p. 419). In this sense, what emergedby the 1990s were highly deregulated employment markets and a ‘consumerculture’ oriented to creating individual opportunities for authenticity ofexperience and creative self-expression (Frank 2000, Bauman 2008). Putsuccinctly by Axel Honneth (2004, p. 474), ‘The individualism of self-realization,gradually emergent over the course of the past fifty years, has since beentransmuted – having become an instrument of economic development . . . into anemotionally fossilized set of demands under whose consequences individualstoday seem more likely to suffer than to prosper.’
Not just the warm, fuzzy feeling you get from buying free-range eggs . . .
From within this perspective, current political party and business presentationsto stakeholder citizens raise a particular order of problems for advocatinggreen politics. Although major Western parties differ in important ways, theyall now seem to compound classical liberal appeals to citizens as bearers ofrights and duties and social calls to citizens as productive consumers with callsto stakeholders: holders of personal capabilities and responsibilities. Suchappeals present the state, businesses, localised communities and individuals asself-orienting competitors in an irresistible, juggernaut-like globalising‘stakeholder capitalism’ (Callinicos 2000, Burkitt and Ashton 1996). It ispurported that ‘Individuals well endowed with economic and social capabilitieswill be more productive [and] companies that draw on the experience of all oftheir stakeholders will be more efficient’, while the ‘social cohesion’ thisproduces is ‘require[d] for international competitiveness’ (Kelly et al. 1997, p.244). Such ideas portray government support for economic and personalgrowth as the sole condition for creating and distributing social goods, such assustainability. Indeed, its proponents define stakeholder citizenship as ‘theethical and human capital development of the self organized around thepossession of stakes’ (Prabhakar 2003, p. 347).
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In this sense, participating in creating social goods is represented as aninstrumental benefit: available through the exercise of preferences, madepossible through individual achievements in the pursuit of aspirational goals.Sustainability is proffered as if solutions to socially created problems werealways synonymous with expedience in the private realm of autonomoussovereign choice: the product of individuals embracing creative opportunitiesand imagination-driven initiatives. Sustainability in these ways emerges as theproduct of governmental management of markets in ways that channel thetrickle-down of stakeholder opportunities to develop capacities and participatein the economy through employment and training, consumption and investingor ‘community participation’ (Clarke 2007). This ‘synthesis of the free-marketrevolution and the welfarism that preceded it’ (Freedland 2006, p. 13)addresses stakeholders as deeply individuated, autonomous and creativeagents, engaged in maximising personal utility through efforts to enhanceprivate capacities and discharge individual responsibilities in reflexive andworldly-aware ways.
This emphasis upon atomistic voluntarism and personal-use commodityconsumption compromises many of the normative frameworks through whichpeople in the West might act to ameliorate some of the political tensions thatthe ecological challenge raises. To reiterate the article’s central argument, theprevalence of such norms make it difficult to implement key green politicalideas. These stakeholder norms compromise, amongst other things, justifica-tion for calls to move away from anthropocentric instrumentalism, a supply-chain anchored solely in consumers’ revealed preferences, or for regulatory orquasi-regulatory spokespersons or environmental defender’s offices (Dobson1996, p. 165, Eckersley 2000, p. 130). By creating and extending conditions forenlightened personal autonomy and consumer choice, such policymakingengages citizens as atomistic individuals, exercising self-reflexivity withoutreference to meanings beyond those of self-empowerment to maximise utility.
Subtle shifts in the meaning of sustainability have indeed coincided with theembrace by global business of stakeholder citizenship. While the ‘term‘‘sustainable consumption’’ entered the international policy arena at Rio . . . itsdefinition narrowed as it became a policy goal’, such that ‘market failures’ arenow understood ‘as the prime cause of unsustainability’ (Seyfang 2005,pp. 292–293, Zarsky 2002, p. 15). Meanwhile, concerns with smaller scales andeconomic entities have become the mainstay of business concerns with theenvironment (Atkinson 2000, pp. 235–236). In this sense, emphases uponstakeholders in ‘corporate sustainability initiatives’ combine neoliberalemphasis on laissez-faire with a voluntarism that ‘make[s] doing well, doinggood’ (Lazonick and O’Sullivan 2000, p. 14; and see Benioff and Southwick2003):
Sustainability is not just the warm, fuzzy feeling you get from buying free-rangeeggs. It’s a management philosophy. [It] takes in a broader base – thestakeholders . . . not just a company’s investors but also its employees, customers,
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suppliers, and the community at large. Where in the past they would not havegiven a flying forethought to sustainable development, today’s global consumersnot only know what’s happening across the ocean some two to 12 thousand milesaway – they also care. (Haddock 1999, p. 24–25)
As do the political proponents of stakeholder citizenship, those promotingcorporate sustainability urge a global order based in ‘caring, sharing corpora-tions’, and actively pursue a ‘new era of capitalism’wherein ‘stakeholders unite ina shared purpose’ to achieve ‘social and environmental responsibility’ (Elkington2001, Knoepfel 2001). This new era is said to supplant a failed and substantivelydifferent antecedent. The ‘new era of capitalism’, and its ‘new social realities’,unleashes a nature-like tendency for high-technology, finance and consumption-centred service industries to engender opportunities for imaginativeness,creativity and regeneration (Lagan 2003, p. 23, Clarke 2007). Indeed, top-down management, full-time workforces and big government restrain ‘goodcorporate citizens’ and limit stakeholders to regulated, oppressive andconformity-driven heavy industry (Healy 2004, p. 293).
Of course, the unsustainability, and the oppressive and often exploitativenature of the work in heavy industrial settings lay beyond dispute. However, bytying degradation of the ecosphere to claims that these offered little in the wayof creative opportunities for self-orienting individuals, stakeholder citizenshipemphasises self-responsibility and atomistic voluntarism as if these weresufficient for a society to come to grips with the ecological problem.Represented as the way of life natural to creative or knowledge societies,stakeholder citizenship de-emphasises the environmental consequences of post-industrialisation, precisely at a time when citizens are more likely to recogniseenvironmental issues in general. Stakeholder-oriented reforms extend market-like conditions into everyday life on the assumption that these always generatea spill-over that will affect the social shaping of natural environments insustainable ways.
These aspects of stakeholder citizenship are thus also problematic inrelation to the contemporary workplace. ‘Compassionate organizations’currently offer stakeholder-employees ‘an exciting, fulfilling place to work’,where ‘blended selves may fail to distinguish between work and play, and theirsearch for meaningful experiences may cause them to gravitate towardsactivities that are stimulating emotionally as well as intellectually’ (Hill andStephens 2003, p. 339). For Shoshanna Zuboff (2004, p. 97), ‘compassionateorganizations’ unleash greater stakeholder freedom of choice and ‘creativeenergy’ that facilitates well-being and sustainability. In Linda Gratton’s view,‘democratic enterprises are renewing democracy’, because encouraging‘negotiation over creating lives of meaning: the purpose and destiny of thecompany is also [stakeholders’] purpose and destiny’ (cited in Caulkin 2004,p. 5). That such emphasis upon creativity and flexibility thinly veils heightenedlevels of dismay and anxiety with the new world of work is a moot point(Ehrenreich 2006, Sennett 2005). However, when business ‘goes beyond
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financial obligations to shareholders’ and ‘care[s] for people and theenvironment’ (Gilding 2002, p. 54), claims that work practices might beexploitative or polluting are difficult to sustain. What remains are opportunitiesto exercise personal flexibility through ‘individual autonomy’ and ‘reciprocalobligations’ (Gratton in Caulkin 2004, p. 5).
The nexus of stakeholder citizenship and corporate sustainability does notso much as nullify possibilities that the world might be problematic forstakeholders. Rather, it occludes possibilities for resolving problems on termsother than those of augmenting individual autonomy and personal sovereignty.What is occluded or obscured are possibilities that prevailing criteria for valuemight be negotiated beyond expectations that stakeholder-citizens or stake-holder-communities always benefit from ever-increasing growth and efficiency.Stakeholders demand only consultation over how these ends may best beachieved. The normative premise instantiated here is that stakeholders alwaysaim to maximise utility ‘by performing at [their] best on the playing field of theworkplace’ (Stevens 2004, p. 40). Stakeholder negotiation and consultationstands in for commitments to legitimating criteria for value on holistic terms.This tends to subjugate interests held in common to efficiency and growthcriteria. Indeed, acting in concert to regulate or diminish stakeholder choice orflexibility would reduce opportunities. Hence, stakeholder citizenship effec-tively mutes a particular order of challenges to exploitative or pollutingpractices. These marginalise, without silencing, claims that government orcorporate efforts can and do often fall short of sustainable and so, just andreasonable objectives.
For example, Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum consistentlyemphasise good stakeholder relations, and represent themselves as greenbusinesses engaged in stakeholder consultations to achieve sustainability (Shell2008, BP 2008).3 However, both firms have recently reduced by relatively largesums their efforts to develop sustainable practices, and redirected funds intomore lucrative but also more polluting industries, such as the Canadian tarsands (Macalister 2008). The widely disseminated green public profile of suchfirms does not so much make it more difficult to criticise them, although thismay be the case. Rather, the point made here is that the emphasis of such firmson stakeholder interests, and corporate actions to address these, recastscriticism of them as contrarian griping. When a firm that goes ‘beyondpetroleum’, or one that ‘is integrating social and environmental concerns intoour decision-making’ (Shell 2008, BP 2008), reduces its spending on renewableenergy sources, even considerably, claims that this is a problem appear extremeor uncompromising. This is especially the case when environmental groups‘encourage industry innovation by naming the laggards and promoting theinnovators’ (Richter 2002, p. 32). Stakeholder values, such as the sharedpurpose and endless rounds of stakeholder consultations and engagementsencourage a delimited form of managed criticism.
By the late the 1990s and into the 2000s, increasing numbers of businessesacross a range of industries, often supported by governments and civil
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organisations, distributed goods and services offering ‘social messages’(Campbell 2002, p. 22). These combine appeals to consumers’ sovereigndesires with social or environmental issues. Such offers coincide with anemphasis within the discourses of stakeholder citizenship upon self-creativityand pro-activeness. Green messaging campaigns, and green consumerism itself,appear mobilised by citizens’ expressions of concern over environmental issues.Indeed, it has been suggested that scientists’ calls for ‘fundamental changes inlifestyle and consumption patterns’ in the 1980s prompted ‘a wave of greenconsumerism [that] was thereafter quickly established as an essential ingredientof the business culture’s plan to save the planet’. And, that the ‘popular mediafell over each other in the rush to [use scientific knowledges to] inform thepublic about their new responsibility to consume with green discrimination’(Gosden 1995, p. 35, Grayson 1989, p. 27). While public green awareness hasemerged as a target market for the purveyors of consumer items, citizensthemselves are called upon to pro-actively participate in personal usecommodities markets as a way of engaging in ‘democracy through the wallet’(Rayner et al. 2002).
Seen in this way, stakeholder norms deepen the individuation of ethicalreflection while de-politicising the production–consumption chains that, inpractice, remain sources of the ethical dilemmas that green consumption is set toresolving. Although many such campaigns go some way to alerting consumers ofthe politics of global consumption–production regimes, the point remains thatpersonal acts of consumption stand-in for citizens’ ethico-political commitments.In the place of engaging in a regulating body-politic, individual citizens arecalled upon to take initiatives and shoulder responsibilities themselves.Governments and business now ‘do’ commitments for citizens, who merelyenact stakeholder capacities or responsibilities in nation-states that are ‘going forgreen’ (Collins 2003, p. 202) or when working or shopping for the products of‘responsible’ firms (Stoney and Winstanley 2001, p. 609). In this sense, theethico-political consequences of personal actions are effectively subsumed bydemands that citizens exercise self-interest as green consumers. Citizens’ ethicalcommitments within the ecosphere are deferred onto activist organisationssupporting green business that are, in the absence of green regulation, subjectedto pressure from uninvolved or ‘greenwashing’ competitors. What emerges is akind of artificial ethics-lite, whereby abstract and mediated consumer choicesexpress commitment to an externalised environment.
Alongside the liberalisation of finance and trade, the global reach ofWesterncitizens’ demand for green products in this sense contributes to an emergent‘world market for norms’ (Supiot 2006), while responsibility for conditions thatare in large part created bymarkets come to rest in individual choices.Where ‘thecreation of professional conditions for people [is] such that . . . their capabilitiesand economic needs are sufficiently assured to allow them to take initiatives andshoulder responsibilities’ (Supiot 2006, p. 109), enlightened stakeholder-citizensare called upon to bear a burden for the lives of distant others. The sheercomplexity of globalising production–consumption chains, combined with the
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vicissitudes of the market and availability of information and counter-information, often raises doubts about the veracity of green consumptionnetworks’ ability to effect substantive change. This is said to increase ‘eco-anxiety’ (Mol and Spaargaren 1993, pp. 443–444). Such are conditions in which,across almost all socio-economic classes, ‘neurotic citizens’ must self-authornarratives of resolution to pressing existential problems. Seen alongside risingemphases upon stakeholder well-being, for example, green consumerismresponds to perceived needs for ‘soothing, appeasing, tranquillising, and, aboveall, [self-]managing anxieties and insecurities’ (Isin 2004, p. 226). In these respects,criticism of stakeholder citizenship norms relates most clearly to broadersociological concerns with increased individuation, whereby ‘the problem ofchoice is now solved increasingly by the individual, whose capacity to act iscoming to rest more andmore on a reflexive relationship between experience andcultural options’, and less on collectively ordained knowledges (Delanty 2000,p. 161). In short, both relatively well-educated and articulate individuals andthose on the margins are being asked to autonomously and creatively self-orient(Beck and Beck-Gernscheim 2002, Giddens 1991, Joas 1996), with a result that‘identity is in the process of being redefined as pure self-reflexive capacity or self-awareness’ (Melucci 1996, p. 36).
The norms described here as currently prevailing in Western liberaldemocracies privilege autonomous individuals subjectively agonising overquestions of personal capacity and responsibility (James and Scerri 2006). Thatis, stakeholder-citizens are asked to orient themselves in ways that do notinvolve reflecting upon questions of how personal actions, in the sense thatthese represent practices in common, sustain or challenge the structuring ofcriteria for value in society. Seen in this way, stakeholder citizenship normsreturn the ethico-political consequences of engaging in social life as theremnants of reflexive sovereign choice over how to maximise utility. In thecontext of widespread but uneven affluence, individuated ethical reflectionsreadily gain expression as choices to consume ‘green’ products or aspirations tobuild personal capacities. The emphasis of stakeholder citizenship uponeconomic and personal growth tends to frame the ethical considerations thatprovide motives for political action as gradations of quality in the realm ofpersonal-use commodity consumption. That is, green political problemsbecome aestheticised as creative decisions.
Such conditions make it difficult to act upon ethical commitments becauseobfuscating connections between private moral choices and the collectivejustification of reasons for acting. Efforts to organise a life in common are inthis way subsumed by the collectively organised privileging of privatiseddesires. Stakeholder citizenship belies state and market efforts to assuageenvironmental problems, while citizen pressure upon them to take resoluteactions is diluted. This decreases possibilities for acting upon recognition thatthe values made manifest in everyday practices can be sources of unsustain-ability. These, instead, are managed on behalf of stakeholders who are left tonegotiate their own ways amidst an often attractive yet sometimes disorienting
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array of desire options. In the contemporary West, possibilities for achievingsustainability fall foul of a way of life that, while free to exercise sovereignchoices over a plethora of opportunities, is increasingly cut-off from political –that is, value- and so power-laden – commitments to inhabiting the ecosphereon ethical terms.
Conclusion
Increased societal individuation, and the resulting pressure to self-orientreflexively, leaves stakeholders to grapple with worldly dilemmas on atomisticterms. While a certain vitality may accompany the uncertainty of contempor-ary employment markets, or the feeling of being well-informed about furthernews of climate change, acting upon these coincides with recognition thatpossibilities for contributing to resolving them on terms other than as personalproblems appear remote. In these respects, stakeholder citizenship normscreate possibilities for negotiating over subjective situatedness within society(Elliott and Lemert 2006). Indeed, such possibilities are central to the principlesof liberty, equality and common interest that anchor and impel sociality in theWest. However, stakeholder citizenship atomises the means by which personslegitimate particular social practices: as has been argued, citizenship is lived asthe held-in-common ‘grounding’ for ameliorating political tensions in Westernliberal democracies. Widely supported by government, business and, increas-ingly, civil organisations engaged in ‘promoting the innovators’ (Richter 2002,p. 32), stakeholder citizenship leaves persons to work out, on their own, waysof addressing ethical and political problems.
Amidst the initial flush of green political activity in the 1970s and 1980s itwas said that ‘the protest against the disruption of natural equilibriums has forthe first time in public opinion placed a check on modern artificialism’(Dumont 1986, p. 217). Relatively increased and sustained awareness ofenvironmental problems since then suggests that implementing such a checkremains a pressing issue for many in the West. Paradoxically, citizen demandsfor a check upon modern social practices that privilege objectifying anexternalised reality have transformed, and have largely become commensuratewith institutionalised demands for self-improvement. The argument of thepresent article has been that, alongside the defusing of protest at environmentaldamage, actions aimed at placing a check on modern artificialism now supportmany of the conditions that exacerbate it. That is, stakeholder citizenshipnorms represent a metamorphosis in possibilities for putting environmentalawareness into practice. On the one hand, relatively generalised increases ineducation imply raised awareness that there is something drastically wrongwith the ecosphere, and that Western citizens are contributing to this. An arrayof countercultural challenges to mainstream modernist culture, and its inherentartificialism, has fostered such protest. On the other hand, the rise topredominance of stakeholder citizenship norms represents the partialincorporating of such challenges into the structures and institutions of the
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globalising West. Hitherto countercultural claims – said here to seek to justifynature in relation to social norms – readily gain expression as atomistic self-emendation or leisure consumption: in conditions that privilege stakeholdercitizenship, the challenge to modern artificialism of such claims is no longer agiven.
What this discussion has found is that links between private (ecological)morality and public (ecological) reasons or justifications are deeply proble-matic in the contemporary West. In relation to problems of green politicaladvocacy, my argument here has been that stakeholder citizenship norms makeit difficult to put sustainability into practice, while placing the unsustainabilityof much social activity beyond question. In terms of changing citizenshipnorms over time, this argument implies communicating the ecologicalchallenge as a political problem. That is, addressing ecological issues in theWest might in this view be seen to involve making explicit how value- andpower-laden relations affect negotiating over possible solutions to them. Eventhe best of intentions are confuted in consultations that ignore the influence ofefficiency and growth criteria. In micro-sociological terms, this understandingof stakeholder citizenship norms highlights a need for emphasising ethical overmoral arguments for change. The moral arguments have been made and, ashigh levels of environmental awareness across the population show, by andlarge won by greens. In this sense, implicit throughout the argument presentedhere has been a claim that the task of putting public awareness ofenvironmental issues into practice is inseparable from that of working toenhance political solidarity. The pressing need within the West is for a politicsof shared and not personal responsibility. The point is that, largely, citizensrecognise hard science knowledges that the ecological challenge is pressing. Thegreater problem lay in communicating social and political science under-standings of how citizens, as the embodied practitioners of a particular way oflife, create and reproduce the commonalities and continuities out of which areconstituted the values by which they live.
On this view, the personal dimensions of the ecological challenge remainimportant: citizenship is thus seen as a ‘cultural learning condition’ (Delanty2003). While concepts of ‘critical sustainability citizenship’ are not new (see, forexample Barry 2006), recognising the predominance of stakeholder citizenshipnorms in the West raises a need for understanding personal virtues ascommitments, and as the products of a social existence. Of course, foradvocates of green politics, these centre upon the very difficult tasks of realisingshared political will, and applying it to changing human actions within theecosphere. Moreover, this is not to argue for advocating collectivism orcommunalism, although in many cases this may be desirable. Rather, it raises aneed for reframing citizenship norms. This may take the form of calls forregulation of market activities, the regularisation of sustainable and so fairtrade practices or for green education, for example. Such examples mayproduce and reproduce conditions in which citizens are called upon to exerciserights and duties as expressions of held-in-common commitments to improving
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social and personal capacities, and fulfilling collective and private responsi-bilities. While calls for legal protection for individual ‘green whistleblowers’ areimportant, my argument also raises a need for greens to advocate laws thatsupport a greening of, and support for green action by, trades unions and civilgroups in exposing polluting businesses or unsustainable state agencies. Othercalls, for increased public transport, or the privileging of locally-orientedproduction–consumption networks and cooperatives or wilderness preserves,for example, may help to produce and reproduce such commitments byexample. Green political advocates might point to efforts such as these asexamples of ways that a society, constituted by citizens acting in common, isfacing the ecological challenge. Greens may need to be more cautious aboutinvolvement in advocating representations of citizenship as atomism directedat emending the self.
Acknowledgements
I thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, Dr Anne McNevinfor her insightful remarks on early versions of this article and Prof. Paul James for hisenthusiastic support of my work and ideas.
Notes
1. The concept of ‘modern artificialism’ in this sense constitutes the cultural-ideological enframing for what environmental philosophers, such as Val Plumwood,Arne Naess or Arran Gare, explain as the distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’(Plumwood 1991, Naess 1973, Gare 1995).
2. In this sense, the objective of the present article is to draw attention to some of theparticularities of the ecological challenge, as manifested within the Western liberaldemocracies over historical time. The conceptual framework outlined by the articletherefore highlights a distinct historical situation or ‘framing’ of a much wider anddeeper problem. Although beyond the ambit of the present article, it may besuggested that increased consumption and the relative flexibility of production–consumption practices that globalisation brings mean that the ecological challengeis posed on different terms in non-Western societies. Indeed, the task of advocatinga shift in citizenship practices towards sustainability confronts a different set ofobstacles in China or India, for example, wherein citizenship might not beunderstood in terms of individualist cultural or liberal political ideologies.Moreover, the present article also recognises the spectral prospect that some ofthe most pressing barriers to implementing global sustainability, such as the macro-scale problems of biodiversity loss and climate change, necessitate geopoliticalsolutions and as such, may render any citizenship ideal largely irrelevant.
3. References to ‘stakeholders’ appear 766 and to ‘stakeholder consultation’ 336 timeson the Shell website and 957 and 102 times on the BP website (Shell 2008, BP 2008).Interestingly, ExxonMobil, which strongly resists attempts to ‘foist green initiatives’upon it by activists and its shareholders (Clark 2008), does not referencestakeholders on its website (ExxonMobil 2008).
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