Commentary
Up to about 40 years ago, Western European governments governed through enacting legislation and expecting citizens to comply. The legitimacy of this approach was grounded in the democratic nature of the political system – if citizens didn’t like the legislation they could vote out the government and give another one a try. This model was called into question during the mid-1970s by the theoreticians of the New Right, undermining the post-war relationship between state, citizens and government. The market challenged the legitimacy of elected governments to set policy, and governments in return increasingly absented themselves from the policy space, transferring to markets ever greater scope and freedom.
The result is that in liberal-capitalist countries over the past 40 years, particularly European ones, governments have been increasingly reluctant to govern: they have abdicated responsibility for their country’s political, social and economic direction and stopped offering arguments for preferring that direction to others. Instead, the market is at one and the same time the constraint on, and opportunity and reference point for, policy-making. It is the reason why we cannot do things, why we must do things, and how we must do them. Two approaches to environmental policy-making in the UK are especially significant, because they illustrate key aspects of this new settlement: the pursuit of (a particular understanding of) self-interest on the one hand, and the avoidance of ideological debate on the other.
Fiscal incentives: Ways to change behaviour, but not principles
The first approach we want to look at is the use of fiscal incentives and disincentives to alter people’s environment-related behaviour. The logic is simple: people will want to avoid fiscal pain (fines) and embrace fiscal pleasure (rewards). So properly aligned incentives can alter people’s environmental behaviour. A benefit of this approach is that it can work very fast, often resulting in observable positive outcomes as soon as a charge is put in place (e.g. a congestion charge for vehicles).
But in the longer run this advantage can turn to disadvantage. For in this model, people respond to the fiscal prompt and not to the principles underlying it, so they are likely to relapse into their previous behaviour patterns once the incentive is removed. Car drivers, for example, drive less in cities with a congestion charge, but they do so because they want to avoid the fee, not in order to reduce carbon emissions. The behaviour change is a superficial response, rather than commitment to a particular principle. In removing all talk of values from the debate, the fiscal incentive approach encourages the idea that sustainability makes no moral or ethical demands on us.
[With fiscal incentives], people respond to the fiscal prompt and not to the principles underlying it, so they are likely to relapse into their previous behaviour patterns once the incentive is removed.
“Nudge”: Undemocratically obscuring discussion and debate
The second approach to environmental policy-making we want to consider is “nudge”, drawing on the eponymous book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein and deploying the insights of behavioural economics. Like fiscal incentives, nudging eschews normative debate – but it goes even further by hiding even itself from view. An environmental example of nudging (which appeared on the Nudge website not so long ago) is making recycling bins larger and general waste bins smaller in the expectation that people will begin to recycle more and throw away less. At the margins this kind of approach might well have some impact. But there are three reasons to be worried about the spread of nudging in the policy-making community and beyond.
First, nudge (like the fiscal incentive) offers no opportunity for “social learning”. Reasons for behaving “pro-environmentally” are explicitly not given in nudge regimes, so there is no possibility – by definition – of learning what pro-environmental behaviour is, and why it is a good thing. Second, Thaler and Sunstein call the manipulation of the contexts and environments in which choices are made “choice architecture”, and they refer to their theory as “libertarian paternalism”. It is libertarian because no one is explicitly being told what to do, and it is paternalistic because policy-makers work on the assumption that they know what is in our best interests. This is about as far from co-creation of policy as it is possible to get, and is fundamentally antidemocratic. Finally, the critique of the lack of explicit normativity in the fiscal incentive approach is even more relevant here. In thinking of sustainability as a matter of tweaking behaviour, nudgers commit what philosophers call a “category mistake”. Ethics, norms and values are not an optional extra in sustainability – they are constitutive of it.
Sustainability demands moral reflection by citizens and decision-makers
Sustainability demands serious moral reflection, which these approaches eliminate. There is a vast range of questions relating to the construction of a sustainable society. Are restrictions of personal freedom justified in the name of sustainability? Does greater equality lead to more sustainability? Is it right to argue that democracy and sustainability are incompatible? Fiscal incentives for sustainability habituate us against thinking in terms of morality and ethics. In deliberately bypassing the normative “why?” stage of the policy process, the fiscal incentive approach removes any possibility of social learning, and the nudge approach does not even give us the option of thinking about sustainability in any political sense.
So fiscal-incentive and nudge approaches to sustainability policy-making fall short of what is needed because they eschew all talk of ethics, norms and values.
Sustainability citizenship addresses this problem
An alternative approach is sustainability citizenship. We define sustainability citizenship as “pro-sustainability behaviour, in public and in private, driven by a belief in fairness of the distribution of environmental goods, in participation, and in the co-creation of sustainability policy”. More particularly, the sustainability citizen:
- Believes that sustainability is a common good that will not be achieved by the pursuit of individual self-interest alone;
- Is moved by other-regarding motivations as well as self-interested ones;
- Believes that ethical and moral knowledge is as important as techno-scientific knowledge in the context of pro-sustainability behaviour change;
- Believes that other people’s sustainability rights engender environmental responsibilities which the sustainability citizen should redeem;
- Believes that these responsibilities are due not only to one’s neighbours or fellow nationals but also to distant strangers (distant in space and even in time);
- Has an awareness that private environment-related actions can have public environment-related impacts;
- Believes that market-based solutions alone will not bring about sustainability.
The sustainability citizen will therefore recommend social and public action. This is both a normative account of how people ought to behave and a description of how some people already do. This is because there is growing evidence that sustainability citizenship already exists. In 2004, for example, 4,000 Swedish householders were asked how they perceived different types of environmentally-friendly household behaviours (relating to waste and recycling, transport and the consumption of eco-labelled products) and about their opinions on a set of policy instruments that could encourage these activities. The report concluded that a significant share of survey respondents displayed values consistent with sustainability citizenship, by putting an emphasis on non-territorial altruism and social justice. Respondents were found to care about all people, regardless of their whereabouts. This led the report’s authors to conclude:
“The sometimes envisioned need to deal with individuals as rational consumers, promoting individual sustainability action through fiscal (dis)incentives and the promise of reciprocity, should not be taken for granted. As Swedes, according to our results, attribute a considerably higher importance to other-regarding values, this should be taken to reflect the likeliness for a positive formation of attitudes towards policies promoting a greater individual environmental responsibility on the basis of altruism and social justice”.
Sustainability citizenship draws on cosmopolitanism, civic republicanism and feminism. Derek Heater reminds us that as far as cosmopolitanism is concerned, in the original Greek sense “[a] person thus described [as a cosmopolitan] was … someone conscious of being part of the whole universe, the whole of life, the whole of nature, of which all human beings, let alone just the community of the person’s political state, were but tiny portions”. This sense of being part of a greater interdependent whole for which each of us is in some sense responsible is part of the civic republican mindset too.
Sustainability citizenship draws on cosmopolitanism, civic republicanism and feminism.
Sustainability citizenship is indeed a type of ecological republicanism. Patrick Curry, in “Redefining community: towards an ecological republicanism” writes:
“in so far as the common good of any human community is utterly dependent – not only ultimately but in many ways immediately – upon eco-systemic integrity (both biotic and abiotic), that integrity must surely assume pride of place in its definition. And it is only maintained by practices and duties of active ‘citizenship’, whose larger goal is the health not only of the human public sphere but of the natural world which encloses, sustains and constitutes it”.
Traditional conceptions of citizenship – cosmopolitanism and civic republicanism included – locate citizenly activity in the public sphere.
Sustainability issues, though, disrupt this public/private divide, for we know that in the sustainability context private actions can have public consequences. Sustainability citizenship therefore endorses the feminist critique of a conception of politics that confines it (politics) to the public sphere. Gilbert and Phillips’ paper “Practices of Urban Environmental Citizenships: Rights to the City and Rights to Nature in Toronto” is instructive here:
“along with the defiance of established State/government typologies, environmental citizenships confront traditional dichotomies between public/private and local/global. While the (re)creation of the public sphere is a major theme in citizenship literature, the division between private and public is more permeable than is usually accepted. Environmental citizenships endorse changes in consumption, disposal and character that are usually considered part of the private realm, but that are also publicly pursued, accountable, and have repercussions beyond the private. In this way, environmental citizenships endorse the common feminist assertion that ‘the personal is political’”.
The differences between fiscal incentives, nudge and sustainability citizenship in terms of freedom of choice/enforcement and participation/paternalism can be summarised as follows: both nudge and fiscal incentives are paternalist in the sense that the architecture that promotes them is imposed rather than debated. Nudge is strongly paternalist in that “choice architecture” is deliberately hidden from view, while fiscal incentive policy is weakly paternalist in that norms and values are hidden and undebated. It is probably overgenerous to regard nudge as involving freedom of choice.
Even assuming there is something to be said for nudging and fiscal incentives in terms of freedom as the absence of coercion, neither of them have anything to do with freedom as the co-production of policy – or what we used to call “democracy”. This is at the heart of sustainability citizenship, though. In this sense “freedom of choice” and “participation” are two sides of the same coin in the theory and practice of sustainability citizenship: each is exercised through the other. As policy tools, fiscal incentives and nudge make sustainability less rather than more likely. First, this is because they deliberately avoid engaging the public in debates around ethics, norms and values – yet the deployment and internalisation of this language is essential if we are to debate a) what sustainability is, and b) what we need to do to achieve it. Second, long-term sustainability policy success requires the sort of buy-in that can only be achieved through citizen participation and the co-creation of policy. So one of the biggest obstacles to the realisation of sustainability citizenship is the abdication of government from governing. It is not simply a matter of rolling back the state and expecting citizens in the guise of the Big Society to take over. Sustainability citizenship is a tender plant that needs nurturing by public agencies – just those agencies that are under attack from the market fundamentalists of the present Coalition government. For government has a key role to play in sustainability citizenship. The trade-off between state and society is not a zero-sum game; less state will not automatically mean more society.
Government can help by providing greater opportunities for citizens to participate in environmental policy-making, and for making clear the ethical and normative questions at stake. It can provide more support for grassroots initiatives and create more opportunities for civic engagement. Government can provide appropriate funding streams and build social capital. But above all, government must reconsider its overall role. Is it the hands-tied agent of the market’s bidding, or is it the catalyst for democratic change originating in civil society?
Sustainability citizenship invites government to recover its nerve, to govern once again, to engage citizens in the cut-and-thrust of ethical and normative debate, to resist the temptation to bypass politics in the name of an easy life. That way lies infantilisation, disillusion and a
vacuum where politics ought to be, filled with nudges and financial inducements. Our way treats us as grown-ups, engaged and capable of ethical debate and social learning. Aristotle was surely right: “man is a political animal … [since] … humans alone have perception of good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. And it is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household or a city.”
An example from my own life
As Sesame Street’s Kermit the Frog once said, “It isn’t that easy being green”. And it is no easier being a sustainability citizen. So much conspires against us reducing the size of our ecological footprint, such as the constant injunctions to buy this rather than conserve that, to travel there rather than stay here, and to transform a speculative want into a must-have need. It is also true that there is a limit to the amount that any one individual can do if the “infrastructure of life” sometimes makes it hard to do the right thing, even if we want to. I remember an exchange student from Sweden coming to my University a few years ago. She had been brought up to recycle, to the extent that it was second nature to her. She was appalled at the lack of recycling facilities at my University in those days, which meant that even though she wanted to do the right thing she was not able to do so. (I am glad to say that the recycling facilities at Keele University are now excellent).
There are choices to make, and the sustainability citizen will try to make the right ones
Not so long ago I was invited to the USA to give a paper at a conference. Having played around with a number of carbon footprint calculators on the Internet, I am aware that a return trip by aeroplane to the USA uses up something near to my sustainable per annum carbon allowance. So I offered to give the paper by video link instead. It went fine – the audience could hear and see me, I could hear and see them, and the question-and-answer session went off without a hitch. As it happens, there was someone in the audience I knew, and he piped up, “hey Andy, you should have come over to see us – the plane took off anyway!” Of course in a way he was right – in the face of the enormous challenge represented by climate change, my gesture was futile (and while the lecture might have gone okay, I missed out on the chance of a beer with some good American friends). But on the other hand, if 350 other people had found alternative ways of doing their business, then the plane would not have taken off. What this goes to show is that sustainability citizenship must ultimately be a collective citizenship. The sustainability challenge is a collective challenge, which no amount of individualised incentivisation will meet.
Tags:
Commentary
Sustainability citizenship
Commentary
Up to about 40 years ago, Western European governments governed through enacting legislation and expecting citizens to comply. The legitimacy of this approach was grounded in the democratic nature of the political system – if citizens didn’t like the legislation they could vote out the government and give another one a try. This model was called into question during the mid-1970s by the theoreticians of the New Right, undermining the post-war relationship between state, citizens and government. The market challenged the legitimacy of elected governments to set policy, and governments in return increasingly absented themselves from the policy space, transferring to markets ever greater scope and freedom.
The result is that in liberal-capitalist countries over the past 40 years, particularly European ones, governments have been increasingly reluctant to govern: they have abdicated responsibility for their country’s political, social and economic direction and stopped offering arguments for preferring that direction to others. Instead, the market is at one and the same time the constraint on, and opportunity and reference point for, policy-making. It is the reason why we cannot do things, why we must do things, and how we must do them. Two approaches to environmental policy-making in the UK are especially significant, because they illustrate key aspects of this new settlement: the pursuit of (a particular understanding of) self-interest on the one hand, and the avoidance of ideological debate on the other.
Fiscal incentives: Ways to change behaviour, but not principles
The first approach we want to look at is the use of fiscal incentives and disincentives to alter people’s environment-related behaviour. The logic is simple: people will want to avoid fiscal pain (fines) and embrace fiscal pleasure (rewards). So properly aligned incentives can alter people’s environmental behaviour. A benefit of this approach is that it can work very fast, often resulting in observable positive outcomes as soon as a charge is put in place (e.g. a congestion charge for vehicles).
But in the longer run this advantage can turn to disadvantage. For in this model, people respond to the fiscal prompt and not to the principles underlying it, so they are likely to relapse into their previous behaviour patterns once the incentive is removed. Car drivers, for example, drive less in cities with a congestion charge, but they do so because they want to avoid the fee, not in order to reduce carbon emissions. The behaviour change is a superficial response, rather than commitment to a particular principle. In removing all talk of values from the debate, the fiscal incentive approach encourages the idea that sustainability makes no moral or ethical demands on us.
[With fiscal incentives], people respond to the fiscal prompt and not to the principles underlying it, so they are likely to relapse into their previous behaviour patterns once the incentive is removed.
“Nudge”: Undemocratically obscuring discussion and debate
The second approach to environmental policy-making we want to consider is “nudge”, drawing on the eponymous book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein and deploying the insights of behavioural economics. Like fiscal incentives, nudging eschews normative debate – but it goes even further by hiding even itself from view. An environmental example of nudging (which appeared on the Nudge website not so long ago) is making recycling bins larger and general waste bins smaller in the expectation that people will begin to recycle more and throw away less. At the margins this kind of approach might well have some impact. But there are three reasons to be worried about the spread of nudging in the policy-making community and beyond.
First, nudge (like the fiscal incentive) offers no opportunity for “social learning”. Reasons for behaving “pro-environmentally” are explicitly not given in nudge regimes, so there is no possibility – by definition – of learning what pro-environmental behaviour is, and why it is a good thing. Second, Thaler and Sunstein call the manipulation of the contexts and environments in which choices are made “choice architecture”, and they refer to their theory as “libertarian paternalism”. It is libertarian because no one is explicitly being told what to do, and it is paternalistic because policy-makers work on the assumption that they know what is in our best interests. This is about as far from co-creation of policy as it is possible to get, and is fundamentally antidemocratic. Finally, the critique of the lack of explicit normativity in the fiscal incentive approach is even more relevant here. In thinking of sustainability as a matter of tweaking behaviour, nudgers commit what philosophers call a “category mistake”. Ethics, norms and values are not an optional extra in sustainability – they are constitutive of it.
Sustainability demands moral reflection by citizens and decision-makers
Sustainability demands serious moral reflection, which these approaches eliminate. There is a vast range of questions relating to the construction of a sustainable society. Are restrictions of personal freedom justified in the name of sustainability? Does greater equality lead to more sustainability? Is it right to argue that democracy and sustainability are incompatible? Fiscal incentives for sustainability habituate us against thinking in terms of morality and ethics. In deliberately bypassing the normative “why?” stage of the policy process, the fiscal incentive approach removes any possibility of social learning, and the nudge approach does not even give us the option of thinking about sustainability in any political sense.
So fiscal-incentive and nudge approaches to sustainability policy-making fall short of what is needed because they eschew all talk of ethics, norms and values.
Sustainability citizenship addresses this problem
An alternative approach is sustainability citizenship. We define sustainability citizenship as “pro-sustainability behaviour, in public and in private, driven by a belief in fairness of the distribution of environmental goods, in participation, and in the co-creation of sustainability policy”. More particularly, the sustainability citizen:
The sustainability citizen will therefore recommend social and public action. This is both a normative account of how people ought to behave and a description of how some people already do. This is because there is growing evidence that sustainability citizenship already exists. In 2004, for example, 4,000 Swedish householders were asked how they perceived different types of environmentally-friendly household behaviours (relating to waste and recycling, transport and the consumption of eco-labelled products) and about their opinions on a set of policy instruments that could encourage these activities. The report concluded that a significant share of survey respondents displayed values consistent with sustainability citizenship, by putting an emphasis on non-territorial altruism and social justice. Respondents were found to care about all people, regardless of their whereabouts. This led the report’s authors to conclude:
“The sometimes envisioned need to deal with individuals as rational consumers, promoting individual sustainability action through fiscal (dis)incentives and the promise of reciprocity, should not be taken for granted. As Swedes, according to our results, attribute a considerably higher importance to other-regarding values, this should be taken to reflect the likeliness for a positive formation of attitudes towards policies promoting a greater individual environmental responsibility on the basis of altruism and social justice”.
Sustainability citizenship draws on cosmopolitanism, civic republicanism and feminism. Derek Heater reminds us that as far as cosmopolitanism is concerned, in the original Greek sense “[a] person thus described [as a cosmopolitan] was … someone conscious of being part of the whole universe, the whole of life, the whole of nature, of which all human beings, let alone just the community of the person’s political state, were but tiny portions”. This sense of being part of a greater interdependent whole for which each of us is in some sense responsible is part of the civic republican mindset too.
Sustainability citizenship draws on cosmopolitanism, civic republicanism and feminism.
Sustainability citizenship is indeed a type of ecological republicanism. Patrick Curry, in “Redefining community: towards an ecological republicanism” writes:
“in so far as the common good of any human community is utterly dependent – not only ultimately but in many ways immediately – upon eco-systemic integrity (both biotic and abiotic), that integrity must surely assume pride of place in its definition. And it is only maintained by practices and duties of active ‘citizenship’, whose larger goal is the health not only of the human public sphere but of the natural world which encloses, sustains and constitutes it”.
Traditional conceptions of citizenship – cosmopolitanism and civic republicanism included – locate citizenly activity in the public sphere.
Sustainability issues, though, disrupt this public/private divide, for we know that in the sustainability context private actions can have public consequences. Sustainability citizenship therefore endorses the feminist critique of a conception of politics that confines it (politics) to the public sphere. Gilbert and Phillips’ paper “Practices of Urban Environmental Citizenships: Rights to the City and Rights to Nature in Toronto” is instructive here:
“along with the defiance of established State/government typologies, environmental citizenships confront traditional dichotomies between public/private and local/global. While the (re)creation of the public sphere is a major theme in citizenship literature, the division between private and public is more permeable than is usually accepted. Environmental citizenships endorse changes in consumption, disposal and character that are usually considered part of the private realm, but that are also publicly pursued, accountable, and have repercussions beyond the private. In this way, environmental citizenships endorse the common feminist assertion that ‘the personal is political’”.
The differences between fiscal incentives, nudge and sustainability citizenship in terms of freedom of choice/enforcement and participation/paternalism can be summarised as follows: both nudge and fiscal incentives are paternalist in the sense that the architecture that promotes them is imposed rather than debated. Nudge is strongly paternalist in that “choice architecture” is deliberately hidden from view, while fiscal incentive policy is weakly paternalist in that norms and values are hidden and undebated. It is probably overgenerous to regard nudge as involving freedom of choice.
Even assuming there is something to be said for nudging and fiscal incentives in terms of freedom as the absence of coercion, neither of them have anything to do with freedom as the co-production of policy – or what we used to call “democracy”. This is at the heart of sustainability citizenship, though. In this sense “freedom of choice” and “participation” are two sides of the same coin in the theory and practice of sustainability citizenship: each is exercised through the other. As policy tools, fiscal incentives and nudge make sustainability less rather than more likely. First, this is because they deliberately avoid engaging the public in debates around ethics, norms and values – yet the deployment and internalisation of this language is essential if we are to debate a) what sustainability is, and b) what we need to do to achieve it. Second, long-term sustainability policy success requires the sort of buy-in that can only be achieved through citizen participation and the co-creation of policy. So one of the biggest obstacles to the realisation of sustainability citizenship is the abdication of government from governing. It is not simply a matter of rolling back the state and expecting citizens in the guise of the Big Society to take over. Sustainability citizenship is a tender plant that needs nurturing by public agencies – just those agencies that are under attack from the market fundamentalists of the present Coalition government. For government has a key role to play in sustainability citizenship. The trade-off between state and society is not a zero-sum game; less state will not automatically mean more society.
Government can help by providing greater opportunities for citizens to participate in environmental policy-making, and for making clear the ethical and normative questions at stake. It can provide more support for grassroots initiatives and create more opportunities for civic engagement. Government can provide appropriate funding streams and build social capital. But above all, government must reconsider its overall role. Is it the hands-tied agent of the market’s bidding, or is it the catalyst for democratic change originating in civil society?
Sustainability citizenship invites government to recover its nerve, to govern once again, to engage citizens in the cut-and-thrust of ethical and normative debate, to resist the temptation to bypass politics in the name of an easy life. That way lies infantilisation, disillusion and a
vacuum where politics ought to be, filled with nudges and financial inducements. Our way treats us as grown-ups, engaged and capable of ethical debate and social learning. Aristotle was surely right: “man is a political animal … [since] … humans alone have perception of good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. And it is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household or a city.”
An example from my own life
As Sesame Street’s Kermit the Frog once said, “It isn’t that easy being green”. And it is no easier being a sustainability citizen. So much conspires against us reducing the size of our ecological footprint, such as the constant injunctions to buy this rather than conserve that, to travel there rather than stay here, and to transform a speculative want into a must-have need. It is also true that there is a limit to the amount that any one individual can do if the “infrastructure of life” sometimes makes it hard to do the right thing, even if we want to. I remember an exchange student from Sweden coming to my University a few years ago. She had been brought up to recycle, to the extent that it was second nature to her. She was appalled at the lack of recycling facilities at my University in those days, which meant that even though she wanted to do the right thing she was not able to do so. (I am glad to say that the recycling facilities at Keele University are now excellent).
There are choices to make, and the sustainability citizen will try to make the right ones
Not so long ago I was invited to the USA to give a paper at a conference. Having played around with a number of carbon footprint calculators on the Internet, I am aware that a return trip by aeroplane to the USA uses up something near to my sustainable per annum carbon allowance. So I offered to give the paper by video link instead. It went fine – the audience could hear and see me, I could hear and see them, and the question-and-answer session went off without a hitch. As it happens, there was someone in the audience I knew, and he piped up, “hey Andy, you should have come over to see us – the plane took off anyway!” Of course in a way he was right – in the face of the enormous challenge represented by climate change, my gesture was futile (and while the lecture might have gone okay, I missed out on the chance of a beer with some good American friends). But on the other hand, if 350 other people had found alternative ways of doing their business, then the plane would not have taken off. What this goes to show is that sustainability citizenship must ultimately be a collective citizenship. The sustainability challenge is a collective challenge, which no amount of individualised incentivisation will meet.
Tags: Commentary