Power, Justice and Citizenship: the Relationships of Power [1 ed.] 9781848882928, 9789004374256

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Power, Justice and Citizenship

Critical Issues Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board Karl Spracklen Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter S Ram Vemuri

Simon Bacon Stephen Morris John Parry Ana Borlescu Peter Twohig Kenneth Wilson John Hochheimer

A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ The Ethos Hub ‘Environmental Justice and Global Citizenship’

2014

Power, Justice and Citizenship: The Relationships of Power

Edited by

Darian McBain

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

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Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-292-8 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2014. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Sayuri Moodliar Part 1

Participation: Active Participation in Global Citizenship Individual Agency and Responsibility in Mitigating Climate Change Wouter Peeters, Andries De Smet and Sigrid Sterckx

3

Group Morality within the Voluntary and Community Sector and Implications for Ecological Citizenship Carmen Smith and Alan Lewis

19

Informal Seed Exchange Networks as Sustainable and Equitable Communities: Emerging Practices towards Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Justice Fulya Batur Can Common Property Regimes in Colombia Curb the Expansion of Coca Crops and the Deforestation? Alexander Rincón Ruiz Waste, Power and Justice: Towards a Socially and Environmentally Just Waste Management System in Sri Lanka Randika Jayasinghe and Caroline Baillie Part 2

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35

47

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Education: The Role of Education in Justice and Citizenship Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014 Alexander K. Lautensach and Sabina W. Lautensach

79

Young People as Co-Researchers: The Formation of a Sustainability and Citizenship Survey in Northern Ireland Jenny Wren River Banks

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Animal Welfare Education’s Role in Creating a Just Environment Roy Kareem

113

Part 3

Power: Society, Citizens and Governance A Non-Reductionist Defence of Global Citizenship Andries De Smet, Wouter Peeters and Sigrid Sterckx Civil Society in the Anthropocene: A Paradigm for Localised Ecological Citizenship Kartik Sameer Madiraju and Peter Gilbert Brown

123

135

Water as a Hazard in the Sudan Adil Mustafa Ahmad

149

Media and Ecological Consciousness Alessandro Bellafiore

161

Coltan: A Study of Environmental Justice and Global Supply Chains Darian McBain

173

Introduction Sayuri Moodliar The 12th Global Conference on Environmental Justice and Global Citizenship was held in July 2013. Papers were presented covering issues under themes such as the nature of community, ethics, green business, citizenship and democracy, international law, and education. The chapters in this volume constitute a selection of the papers presented. The term environmental justice refers to the equitable distribution of the burden of environmental risk, as well as equal treatment and protection of all groups of people under environmental laws, policies and practices. 1 Such a definition appears to centre the power with regard to bringing about environmental change in the hands of authorities like governments and formally constituted international organisations. However, the concept of citizenship adds a dimension of individual responsibility and accountability for such change. The role of actors other than formal authorities must be highlighted and examined in order to fully understand the impact of global citizenship on environmental justice. This type of interrogation reveals that there is a broad range of actors which influences environmental justice, including community organisations, corporations, the media, educators and individual citizens. Several factors have contributed to the elevated importance of global citizenship to environmental justice as a significant issue that requires urgent attention in the twenty-first century. These include the globalisation of the world in respect of economic enterprise, as well as socio-political and legal activities. The environmental hazards facing countries and the world can no longer be attributed to governments, who often have to accede to the will of multinational corporations, some of which wield economic power in excess of that held by many countries. 2 Several non-governmental organisations have also expanded their footprint and influence so that they are global in nature and not accountable to one or other national government. In addition, the international treaty process under the auspices of the United Nations has become a forum for political wrangling and protracted negotiations, much of which appears to ignore the core environmental problems facing the world. Countries engage in endless squabbling over the question of which of them should bear responsibility for the cost of environmental reparations and inevitably, these discussions end without resolution so that the world appears to be spiralling into an ever-increasing environmental crisis. What then is the role of global citizenship in contributing to the resolution of this crisis? Carter highlights the link between global citizenship and cosmopolitanism which, in the context of international relations theory, refers to a model of global politics where relations between individuals transcend state boundaries. 3 Instead of focusing on relations between states, the global citizenship or cosmopolitan model values individuals as autonomous beings whose

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__________________________________________________________________ relationships with each other are based on universal laws and institutions. 4 In the early to mid-twentieth century, global citizenship towards environmental justice bore connotations of cross-border humanitarianism which most commonly manifested itself in voluntary service in international organisations. More recently, however, the interconnectedness of human beings throughout the world has led to a concept of citizenship that is inherently global. Our identity as citizens of the world is not just a result of the ease of our economic, social and even physical connectivity to people in other countries and on other continents but, more importantly, also a result of the realisation that we are all in the same boat when it comes to the environmental risk facing our planet. With this increasingly global nature of citizenship in the twenty-first century, three themes emerge with regard to extending the concept of citizenship and the role that various actors play with regard to environmental justice. The first of these has to do with participation in global citizenship. Even an individual acting at a local level has a role to play in making a difference to what happens globally, and organisations which influence individual citizens are also held accountable for their role in enhancing or restricting environmental justice. This leads to the second theme, which has to do with the role of education in ensuring that individual citizens understand their rights and obligations. Individual citizens do not only include adult citizens. The realisation that the earth has limited natural resources which are fast diminishing has given rise to the concept of intergenerational environmental justice. The potential victims of the contemplated injustice (i.e. current generations using up environmental resources) are either children or not yet born. This highlights the importance of also educating children with regard to their role in environmental justice, both in respect of their rights as potential victims of injustice and their responsibilities as future citizens who will affect the environmental resources of other global citizens and of further generations. The third theme with regard to citizenship and environmental justice is that of power. The issue of who holds the power with regard to decision-making that affects environmental justice is linked to the concept of citizenship. The active participation of citizens in democratic governance structures extends the power of decision-making beyond formal government authorities, and places the power for change in the hands of citizens. But whether or not this happens in practice depends on the level of participation of citizens. The chapters in this volume highlight the emergence of these themes under the three headings of Participation, Education and Power. Part 1 considers the issue of active participation in global citizenship. In the chapter ‘Individual Agency and Responsibility in Mitigating Climate Change,’ Wouter Peeters, Andries De Smet and Sigrid Sterckx critically analyse Samuel Scheffler’s view that individual agents cannot effectively influence global dynamics, or be assumed to have any clear notion about the global implications of their personal behaviour. The authors

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__________________________________________________________________ postulate that such restrictions on individual responsibility are imposed by a common-sense morality dominated by those for whom it is advantageous to adopt a restrictive conception of responsibility instead of a morally salient global context. The chapter examines individual responsibility for harm involved in climate change, and the authors disagree with the common-sense morality view, arguing that instead that individuals are agents with causal powers on the global level and can therefore be held responsible for the harm their actions cause. In contrast to individual responsibility, the concept of group responsibility for environmental behaviour is explored by Carmen Smith and Alan Lewis in the chapter ‘Group Morality within the Voluntary and Community Sector and Implications for Ecological Citizenship.’ The authors argue that behaviour is not a result of individual choice in isolation but is influenced by collective social processes that construct group identity. Using data from interviews and observations of events and meetings, this chapter concludes that a subjective sense of belonging to a group is required in order to motivate people to take collective action as ecological citizens. The role of communal co-operation is highlighted in the next two chapters. In ‘Informal Seed Exchange Networks as Sustainable and Equitable Communities: Emerging Practices towards Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Justice,’ Fulya Batur examines the role of informal seed-saving and exchange networks among farmers in achieving sustainability and environmental justice. Using case studies of a selection of European associations, the author concludes that the participants in these informal networks actively contribute as global citizens not only to conserve and use genetic resources sustainably, but also to ensure distributional and participatory justice as embodied in formal international biodiversity instruments such as the Biodiversity Convention and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Alexander Rincón Ruiz continues this theme of how informal communal regimes can be more effective than formal structures in the chapter ‘Can Common Property Regimes in Colombia Curb the Expansion of Coca Crops and the Deforestation?’ The chapter highlights the importance of local communities in managing natural resources in Latin America in a case study which demonstrates that, while formal Community Councils were unsuccessful in slowing down the expansion of coca, the integrated initiatives developed by the community itself were effective and sustainable in eliminating illicit coca crops. The author concludes that strengthening community and encouraging self-organisation can help promote anti-drug policy and better management of natural resources. In ‘Waste, Power and Justice: Towards a Socially and Environmentally Just Waste Management System in Sri Lanka,’ Randika Jayasinghe and Caroline Baillie focus on the role of marginalised communities in influencing decisions that affect their livelihood. The authors use Foucauldian discourse analysis in a study of the power dynamics affecting informal waste pickers within the waste management

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__________________________________________________________________ regime in Western Province in Sri Lanka. The chapter concludes that decisionmakers within the dominant system may incorrectly assume what is important to marginalised groups, and that the active participation of these groups is therefore crucial in order to achieve meaningful transformation, and reduce environmental injustice. The chapters in Part 2 of this volume examine the role of education in justice and citizenship. In ‘Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014,’ Alexander K. Lautensach and Sabina W. Lautensach critically assess the United Nations initiative with regard to education for sustainability and stress the importance of sustainability education in dealing with current global environmental crises, including environmental injustice and socioeconomic inequities. The authors point out that, although the UN initiative has many shortcomings, its major accomplishment was to place education for sustainable development on the agenda of many countries. The chapter also highlights that it is essential to teach young learners to negotiate moral compromises for sustainability. Jenny Wren River Banks explores the role of children in ‘Young People as CoResearchers: The Formation of a Sustainability and Citizenship Survey in Northern Ireland.’ The chapter describes how to use strategies from a children’s rights-based approach in a project which aims to design a survey about young people’s attitudes towards citizenship and sustainability. The author sets out how to involve children as co-researchers in the project. She advocates their active participation in the research process, arguing not only that this level of involvement gives effect to their right to air their views on matters affecting them (and therefore may result in potentially more accurate results), but also that such participation is the right thing to do. Roy Kareem explores the links between empathy for animals and empathy for human beings in ‘Animal Welfare Education’s Role in Creating a Just Environment.’ This chapter considers the fact that animal welfare education promotes the conceptualisation of animals as sentient beings that are of intrinsic value, requiring us to act compassionately towards them. The author describes the First Concepts in Animal Welfare program run for five to sixteen year old children by the World Society for Protection of Animals, and postulates that the internal tools of self-reflection and application provided by robust forms of animal welfare education are the very tools required to transform the theoretical concept of a just global citizenship into reality. In Part 3 of this volume, the issue of power is explored in the context of society, citizens and governance. Who holds the power with regard to environmental justice and how does the concept of citizenship influence this? In ‘A Non-Reductionist Defence of Global Citizenship,’ Andries De Smet, Wouter Peeters and Sigrid Sterckx consider how individual responsibility conflicts with distributive justice. Starting with Samuel Scheffler’s concept of special

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__________________________________________________________________ responsibilities, the authors discuss what moral imperatives exist for individual responsibility and how this relates to global issues like climate change. The chapter critically analyses the views of various authorities on what constitutes reasons to value a relationship, and distinguish between obligations of charity and obligations of justice. The authors conclude that the concept of harm is the decisive benchmark that explains why global citizenship entails a special obligation of individual responsibility for the effects of climate change. Kartik Sameer Madiraju and Peter Gilbert Brown, in the chapter on ‘Civil Society in the Anthropocene: A Paradigm for Localised Ecological Citizenship,’ criticise the current attitude of citizens as passive consumers in representative democracies that are no longer subject to popular will but operate based on corporate lobbying. The authors apply a bioregionalist framework for conceptualising citizenship, and identify civic duties which are based on community self-sufficiency, diversity, and ecological boundaries. They propose that the current concept of civic duty which comprises wealth creation, consumption and political passivity should be replaced by a new citizenship paradigm which is inclusive of ecological civic duties. Under this paradigm, citizens would no longer be passive consumers but would consciously and deliberately champion the flourishing of the biosphere. In the chapter on ‘Water as a Hazard in the Sudan,’ Adil Mustafa Ahmad critically analyses the allocation of water rights in six projects in the Sudan and neighbouring countries. The author examines the government decision-making processes in the allocation of these rights and also raises questions about the ecological soundness of these decisions as well as the role of ‘global citizens’ in protecting the cultural and religious heritage of the region. Ahmad calls for the involvement and intervention of regional and international bodies, arguing that it is only active global citizenship that can bring about environmental justice in the region. The chapter by Alessandro Bellafiore on ‘Media and Ecological Consciousness’ considers the changing concept of citizenship in this era of ecological consciousness. The author emphasises the role of the media in aiding the evolution of public awareness in this regard, but criticises the fact that the media tend to focus only on catastrophic ecological events without emphasising the aspect of human responsibility. The chapter considers the extent of the media’s responsibility in influencing and informing the public, and whether state limitations on how this is done would be justified in view of the concept of freedom of speech. The chapter concludes by highlighting the paradox of expecting human beings to find a solution to ecological problems which they have caused without such a solution adversely affecting their social systems (including the media). In the final chapter, Darian McBain considers the role that consumers have to play in global supply chains with ‘Coltan: A Study of Environmental Justice and

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__________________________________________________________________ Global Supply Chains.’ The author examines social and environmental justice issues surrounding the mining of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through the use of quantitative input-output analysis and assessment of processes put in place to help the citizens of the DRC, this chapter explores the responsibility that citizens around the globe have to influence supply chains. By examining our society through a number of different lenses, Power, Justice and Citizenship: The Relationships of Power provides readers with thought provoking look at environmental justice and global citizenship in our time.

Notes 1

Chris Park, Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 150-151. 2 Much concern has been expressed about this state of affairs. See, for example, Philip Blumberg, ‘Accountability of Multinational Corporations: The Barriers Presented by Concepts of the Corporate Juridical Entity’, Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 24 (2000-1): 303, where the author expresses concern about the national and global economic dominance of large multinational corporations and argues that imposing adequate controls and achieving accountability by these groups for their conduct globally should be the major objective of every industrialised power. 3 April Carter, Political Theory of Global Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2013), 2. 4 Ibid.

Bibliography Blumberg, Philip. ‘Accountability of Multinational Corporations: The Barriers Presented by Concepts of the Corporate Juridical Entity’. Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 24 (2000/2001): 297. Carter, April. Political Theory of Global Citizenship. London: Routledge, 2013. Cotton, Matthew. ‘Deliberating Intergenerational Environmental Equity: A Pragmatic, Future Studies Approach’. Environmental Values 22, No. 3 (2013): 317–337. Park, Chris. Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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__________________________________________________________________ Sayuri Moodliar is a PhD student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has over twenty years’ consulting experience in legal, tax and sustainability risk management.

Part 1 Participation: Active Participation in Global Citizenship

Individual Agency and Responsibility in Mitigating Climate Change Wouter Peeters, Andries De Smet and Sigrid Sterckx Abstract Although an appeal to human moral agency can motivate us to shoulder responsibility for our normative conduct, its phenomenological features have also been invoked to support certain restrictions on individual responsibility imposed by common-sense morality. Indeed, global dynamics such as climate change generate doubts about our practice of regarding the individual as the locus of responsibility, since, as noted by Samuel Scheffler, we tend to experience acts as having primacy over omissions, near effects as having primacy over remote effects, and individual effects as having primacy over group effects. At first sight, these phenomenological features of agency might appear to justify absolving the individual of her responsibility, but we will argue that in fact they can neither support nor justify a restrictive conception of individual responsibility. Individuals are agents with causal powers on the global level and therefore they can properly be held responsible for the harm their actions cause – however mediated the causal connection may be. In contrast to Scheffler, we will argue that the doubts about individual responsibility on the global level are generated by the context that gives rise to the so-called common-sense morality in which the vested interests of those who have a great deal to gain from a restrictive conception of responsibility and a great deal to lose from coming to see the global context as morally salient, are dominant. This context is shaped by a particular interpretation of the liberal political assumptions, which emphasises individual freedom and holds that the role of social and political institutions is to discharge as many responsibilities for citizens as possible. Key Words: Individual responsibility, agency, climate change, Samuel Scheffler. ***** 1. Introduction Human agency has been invoked as a justification and motivation for shouldering individual responsibility for one’s normative conduct in relation to others and choosing goals other than the advancement of one’s own well-being, for example as regards abating climate change. 1 Yet, at the same time, individual agency appears to be rather limited in such collective action problems. Scheffler argues that individual agents cannot effectively influence these global dynamics, or be assumed to have any clear notion about the global implications of his or her personal behaviour. 2 Therefore, he argues:

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Individual Agency and Responsibility in Mitigating Climate Change

__________________________________________________________________ the most immediate effect of coming to see the global perspective as morally salient may be, not to present us with a developed, non-restrictive conception of normative responsibility, but rather to generate doubts about our practice of treating the individual agent as the primary locus of such responsibility. 3 These doubts concern the common-sense conception of individual responsibility, which narrows the individual agent’s moral world to include only personal ties and immediate effects of conduct, and appears to be supported by a complex phenomenology of agency. 4 According to Scheffler, this characteristic way of experiencing ourselves as agents with causal powers consists of at least three features: acts having primacy over omissions, near effects having primacy over remote effects, and individual effects having primacy over group effects. 5 These features roughly coincide with the dimensions along which, according to Jamieson, climate change differs from a paradigm moral problem, since it is ‘not a matter of a clearly identifiable individual acting intentionally so as to inflict an identifiable harm on another identifiable individual, closely related in time and space.’ 6 This may explain why we fail to attach the moral severity of a paradigm moral problem to climate change and why it is not perceived as a problem of individual responsibility. 7 Yet, in this chapter we will argue that, even though the abovementioned phenomenology of agency at first appears to cast doubts on treating the individual agent as the primary bearer of responsibility in the case of climate change, invoking it to justify the restrictions imposed by common-sense morality is unconvincing. In our view, individual agency does hold in global dynamics: the individual agent can and should be treated as the locus of normative responsibility, albeit embedded within a social context and collective arrangements. In the following three sections we will discuss the three aforementioned features of the phenomenology of agency in the light of the climate case. Subsequently, we will restate the challenge posed by climate change with reference to common-sense morality itself and its relation with a particular interpretation of liberalism that has become dominant in affluent countries. 2. The Primacy of Acts over Omissions With respect to human agency, an omission can be described as the failure to provide a preventing cause that would prevent the successful completion of the casual process that has harmful consequences, by eliminating one or more of its necessary positive conditions. 8 Climate change is perceived as a matter of such omission, namely as the failure to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which would mitigate global warming by curtailing the further accumulation of GHGs in the atmosphere. However, as Scheffler rightly observes, ‘the primacy of acts over

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__________________________________________________________________ omissions means that whereas our acts are ordinarily experienced by us as acts, we experience our omissions as omissions only in special contexts.’ 9 Omissions require a background conviction about the obligation we fail to discharge or the norm we fail to comply with to be conceived as an omission, while acts are acts whether or not they violate any norms or expectations. On the one hand, the failure to reduce GHG emissions would only be perceived as an omission if one believes one has an obligation to reduce one’s GHG emissions in order to prevent climate change and its adverse effects from occurring. However, in March 2013 only 45% of American voters believed that global warming is primarily caused by human activity. 10 Jamieson states that these Americans are not culpable in their ignorance, since ‘prominent public figures are climate change deniers and science education is so obviously inadequate.’ 11 Yet, as much as this is true, it can also be argued that if we assume the agent to be rational, she could also be assumed to be capable of critical reflection, since this is commonly understood to be a central feature of rationality. Moreover, it might be questioned whether such ignorance can in fact remain excusable, as scientific evidence about the link between GHG emissions and climate change has been widely available for over twenty years now, and some have benefited greatly from their GHG emissions. 12 On the other hand, one can validly criticise the characterisation of climate change as an omission. Instead of referring to the failure to reduce emissions, GHG emitting activities themselves can be scrutinised as providing the positive causes of the process (global warming) that leads to a harm (the adverse effects of climate change), for which the agent should shoulder responsibility. Since acts have primacy over omissions in the phenomenology of agency, reference to the act of emitting GHGs would strengthen the focus on the individual agent as primary locus of responsibility in the climate case. However, it has been argued that agents do not intend to inflict harm on others in the climate case: they unintentionally contribute to the problem in the course of their daily lives, performing apparently innocent or not unusual acts, such as driving a car and eating meat. 13 From the perspective of individual agents, climate change is only an unwelcome by-product of their activities, not part of their purposes. 14 Sinnott-Armstrong therefore claims that condemnation should be reserved for the worst offenders: people should not be held responsible for harms, ‘when their acts are not at all unusual, assuming that they did not intend the harm.’ 15 Since joyrides, for example, are not unusual, he concludes that ‘we should not see my act of driving on a sunny Sunday afternoon as a cause of global warming or its harms,’ 16 and the agent should thus not be held responsible for it. It might nonetheless be questioned whether these acts are in fact ‘not at all unusual.’ 17 For example, the World Bank estimates that 2009 car ownership in the United Kingdom amounted to 457 passenger cars per 1000 citizens, while Indonesians only owned 37 cars per 1000 citizens. 18 The Belgian meat

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__________________________________________________________________ consumption in 2009 was 76.9 kilograms, almost double the world average of 41.9 kilograms, per capita. 19 Hence, activities such as car ownership and meat consumption (let alone pleasure rides on a Sunday) appear not at all that usual in a global context, especially not when past differences are taken into account. The claim that such acts are not at all unusual in reality only holds in the specific context of industrialised countries. Yet since climate change is a global problem, GHG emitting acts should be scrutinised with reference to the global background, rather than a specific geographical or economic context. A British car owner and a Belgian meat consumer should effectively be held responsible according to Sinnott-Armstrong’s own heuristic – contrary to his argument – because they are among the worst offenders in the global context. Moreover, there are many cases in which we hold agents responsible for an act that causes harm, even if they did not intend to cause the harm, and according to Shue, it is not unfair to hold people responsible for the damage that they have in fact done. 20 In sum, the primacy of acts over omissions has been invoked to justify the view that individuals only have limited agency in the climate case and hence should not be held responsible for the harm caused by the adverse effects of climate change. Yet, this justification fails to convince: since GHG emitting activities can be characterised as a positive cause for climate change and are not all that usual in the global context, individual agents can and should effectively be held responsible for them. 3. The Primacy of Near Effects over Remote Effects The second feature of our phenomenology of agency relates to the fact that we tend to experience our causal influence as inversely related to spatial and temporal distance, since the relevant causal connections are ‘easier to discern in our local surroundings in the present and near future and because we are more likely to witness the effects of our acts first-hand.’ 21 The causes and effects of climate change are indeed dispersed in space and in time. 22 On the spatial dimension, this dispersion is related to the inequity inherent in the climate case, with the rich causing most of the problem by emitting GHGs, and the poor initially suffering most of the consequences inter alia on health, food and water security. 23 As regards the inter-temporal dimension, climate change is a substantially deferred phenomenon, since emitted GHGs have a very long perturbation period and due to climate inertia, the cumulative effects of current GHG emissions will take a very long time to be fully realised. 24 These factors appear to reduce the moral severity of climate change: since the causal connection in climate change is not obviously discernable, individual agency seems to be implicated to a much lesser extent than in the agent’s direct influences on her local surroundings. 25

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__________________________________________________________________ It should be noted, however, that the adverse effects of climate change appear ‘to be the very long-distance but fully real infliction of physical harm on innocent strangers.’ 26 Causes and effects may be dispersed, but it can be questioned whether this factor is in any sense morally relevant in assigning responsibility. Moreover, although most of the emitting is still done in the industrialised countries, there are more high emitting individuals in some developing countries, such as China, than in some developed countries, such as New Zealand. 27 As regards the victims, climate change is already seriously affecting many people, including high emitting Europeans. 28 Hence, the causes and effects of climate change do not appear to be as remote in time and space as is often assumed. In sum, climate change adversely affects poor and rich people in the present and the future, and this increases the moral severity of our actions. 29 Since this inflicted harm is fully real, invoking the primacy of near over remote effects turns out to be a misguided strategy to justify a restrictive conception of individual responsibility in the climate case. 4. The Primacy of Individual Effects over Group Effects The third feature of our phenomenology of agency relates to the fact that: when an outcome is the joint result of the actions of a number of people, including ourselves, we tend to see our own agency as implicated to a much lesser extent than we do when we take an effect to have resulted solely from our own actions. 30 The adverse effects of climate change are the aggregate outcome of individual GHG emissions that are exceedingly small contributions to a large aggregate effect, and would be entirely faultless if not for the similar contributions of a sufficient number of others. 31 However, this characterisation involves at least one mistake of moral mathematics. Individual GHG emissions are perceived as entirely faultless, since they are, taken separately, neither necessary nor sufficient to cause climate change. 32 Yet, Parfit refutes this intuition by stating that ‘even if an act harms no one, this act may be wrong because it is one of a set of acts that together harm other people.’ 33 We should recognise that the false appearance of the individual GHG emissions having no effects arises out of the failure to disaggregate individual contributions from group-based harm. 34 In other words, the test for singular instances of causation should be stated without any reference to necessity or sufficiency. 35 A further complication is that individuals’ actions are tied together by structural facts about their economies and lifestyles: they are involved in complex social systems where individual choices are framed by others’ choices, which yield to us certain kinds of infrastructure and cultural expectations regarding energy use. 36

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Individual Agency and Responsibility in Mitigating Climate Change

__________________________________________________________________ Although we would not deny the causal significance of state policies, infrastructure, societal norms and cultural expectations for individual actions, citizens are nonetheless able to control (to some extent, at least) their individual contributions to the problem and so can be held responsible for them. 37 For example, individuals or households that can take the nine most immediate, lowest cost actions on Gardner and Stern’s list can potentially save up to about onequarter of their total direct energy consumption and a roughly comparable proportion of carbon emissions. 38 Thus, the primacy of individual effects over group effects does not provide support or justification for a restrictive conception of individual responsibility in the climate case. 5. The Liberal Roots of the Restrictive Conception of Individual Responsibility Jamieson rightly observes that in the climate case the core of what constitutes a moral problem remains: ‘some people have acted in a way that harms other people.’ 39 Since the phenomenological features of agency support the restrictions on individual agents’ responsibility imposed by common-sense morality and give rise to moral disengagement, 40 they should be deemed inadequate or even morally unacceptable to guide human actions on the global level. Our phenomenology of agency, i.e. our characteristic way of experiencing ourselves as agents with causal powers, appears to be an increasingly poor guide to human conduct, for any serious account of the most urgent problems as well as their solutions will need to refer ‘both to what people have done and to what they have not done – as individuals, in groups, and through social institutions – with consequences both near and far.’ 41 We have argued in the previous sections that the phenomenology of agency can neither support nor justify our current restrictive conception of individual responsibility. Individuals are agents with causal powers on the global level, hence they can and should be treated as the primary bearers of responsibility for the harm their actions cause – however mediated the causal connection may be. 42 If this is the case, then why is climate change still not perceived as a matter of individual responsibility? We agree with Jamieson that it is difficult for moral concepts such as responsibility and blame ‘to gain traction’ 43 in global dynamics, but not because of the reasons he identifies – namely, that the agents and victims or the causal connection between them would be difficult to define. Why, then, do these concepts fail to gain traction? In addition to pragmatic reasons for inaction, there is a more fundamental reason for this motivation gap. 44 The apparent naturalness of the restrictions imposed by common-sense morality is in fact supported by a conception of human relations as consisting primarily in small-scale interactions. 45 It is a specific cultural product:

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__________________________________________________________________ that has its deepest roots in those relatively affluent societies that have the most to gain from the widespread internalization of a doctrine that limits their responsibility to assist the members of less fortunate societies. 46 The climate case is not substantially different in this respect, since those with substantial political and economic power will resist the imperative to reduce GHG emissions, while efforts by them are precisely required first. 47 In contrast to Scheffler, we therefore believe that it is not the global developments as such that generate doubts about treating the individual as the locus of responsibility, since we have argued that individuals effectively do have agency in the climate case. Rather, these doubts are generated by the context that gives rise to so-called common-sense morality, in which the vested interests of those who have a great deal to gain from a restrictive conception of responsibility and a great deal to lose from coming to see the global context as morally salient, are dominant. More specifically, we believe that the internalisation of a doctrine of restrictive responsibility can be attributed to a particular interpretation of liberal political assumptions regarding the relation between citizens and society that are dominant in affluent societies. The theory and practice of liberalism have been developed before awareness arose of environmental constraints on economic activity and prior to any serious consideration of global, cosmopolitan politics. 48 This resulted in a certain vision of modern political justification, according to which: the role of social and political institutions is to discharge as many ethical responsibilities as possible for the citizenry, so that under an ideal system individuals would not have to worry at all about such responsibilities, but would instead be maximally free to engage in their own pursuits. 49 This vision often – implicitly or explicitly – forms the background against which the burdens resulting from such a discharging of responsibilities are passed onto the collective level: unmet responsibilities become ever larger. 50 The individual is unlikely to be willing to surrender her freedoms, although they are now increasingly questionable in light of the global developments. 6. Concluding Remarks Our take on global dynamics such as climate change thus diverges from Scheffler’s in two ways, although this should not be interpreted as an outright rejection of his – nor, for that matter, of Jamieson’s – view. First, we have argued that the phenomenology of agency should not be invoked to justify the restrictions on individual responsibility imposed by common-sense morality in the climate

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Individual Agency and Responsibility in Mitigating Climate Change

__________________________________________________________________ case. Second, we believe that the motivation gap can be attributed to an internalisation of increasingly questionable liberal political assumptions. At this point, we should like to mention two alternatives that predicate individual responsibility directly upon the harm involved in climate change, which seems to remain a solid basis for assigning responsibility, even in collective action problems such as climate change. The first appeals to the general duty to avoid harm, while the second approach predicates individual responsibility directly upon the harm, which, arguably, constitutes a reason to value the causal relation for the wrong-doer. Both might be promising starting points for the development of a nonrestrictive alternative to the common-sense conception of individual responsibility.

Notes 1

Stephen Gardiner, ‘Is No One Responsible for Global Environmental Tragedy? Climate Change as a Challenge to our Ethical Concepts’, in The Ethics of Global Climate Change, ed. Denis G. Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 56; Ortrud Leßmann, ‘Sustainability as a Challenge to the Capability Approach’, in Sustainable Development: Capabilities, Needs, and Well-Being, eds. Felix Rauschmayer, Ines Omann and Johannes Frühmann (New York: Routledge, 2011), 56; Amartya Sen, ‘Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984’, The Journal of Philosophy 82, No. 4 (1985): 203-204. 2 Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43. 3 Ibid., 44. 4 Ibid., 38-39. 5 Ibid., 39. 6 Dale Jamieson, ‘Climate Change, Responsibility, and Justice’, Science and Engineering Ethics 16 (2010): 437. 7 Gardiner, ‘Is No One Responsible’, 41; Jamieson, ‘Climate Change, Responsibility, and Justice’, 436. 8 See Richard R. Wright, ‘Acts and Omissions as Positive and Negative Causes’, in Emerging Issues in Tort Law, eds. Jason W. Neyers, Erika Chamberlain and Stephen G. A. Pitel (Portland: Hart Publishings, 2007), 290. 9 Scheffler, ‘Boundaries and Allegiances’, 39. 10 ‘Rasmussen Report: Environment Update’, last modified 2 March 2013, accessed 2 May 2013, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environm ent_energy/environment_update. 11 Jamieson, ‘Climate change, Responsibility, and Justice’, 437. 12 Simon Caney, ‘Justice and the Distribution of Greenhouse Gas Emissions’, Journal of Global Ethics 5, No. 2 (2009): 134; Simon Caney, ‘Climate Change and

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__________________________________________________________________ the Duties of the Advantaged’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, No. 1 (2010): 209; see also Judith Lichtenberg, ‘Negative Duties, Positive Duties, and the “New Harms”’, Ethics 120 (2010): 558. 13 Gardiner, ‘Is No One Responsible’, 45; Dale Jamieson, ‘Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming’, Science, Technology & Human Values 17, No. 2 (1992): 149; Lichtenberg, ‘Negative Duties, Positive Duties’, 559-560; Walter SinnottArmstrong, ‘It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations’, in Perspectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics, eds. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Richard B. Howarth (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 290. 14 Gardiner, ‘Is No One Responsible’, 45. 15 Sinnot-Armstrong, ‘It’s Not My Fault’, 290 (emphasis added). 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 World Bank, ‘Passenger Cars (per 1,000 People)’, last modified 15 April 2013, accessed 2 May 2013, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.VEH.PCAR.P3. 19 FAO, Food Supply, last modified 29 June 2012, accessed 2 May 2013, http://faostat.fao.org/site/610/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=610#ancor. 20 Henry Shue, ‘Global Environment and International Inequality’, International Affairs 75, No. 3 (1999): 535. For example, parking or stationing one’s car on a bicycle lane is punishable by law in Belgium, even though the driver did not intend to increase cyclist unsafety. This assignment of liability presupposes that the driver can be held responsible for the unintended harm. Some cases might provide an exception: a medical emergency might excuse a doctor parking on the bicycle lane. Therefore, following Shue and Vanderheiden, we would argue that a moral differentiation between subsistence and luxury emissions should be made in the case of climate change. We do not have the space here to discuss this issue more thoroughly, although it is very important to an account that substantiates individual responsibilities in climate change, since we would submit that agents should only be held responsible for their luxury emissions. See Henry Shue, ‘Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions’, Law and Policy 15, No. 1 (1993): 53-54; Henry Shue, ‘Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Trillionth Ton’, in The Ethics of Global Climate Change, ed. Denis G. Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 307; Steve Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 21 Scheffler, ‘Boundaries and Allegiances’, 39. 22 Stephen Gardiner, ‘A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Corruption’, Environmental Values 15 (2006): 397-413. 23 Anthony Costello et al., ‘Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change’, The Lancet 373 (2009): 1693-1733; Jamieson, ‘Climate Change, Responsibility, and

12

Individual Agency and Responsibility in Mitigating Climate Change

__________________________________________________________________ Justice’, 438; Jonathan A. Patz et al., ‘Impact of Regional Climate Change on Human Health’, Nature 438 (2005): 310-317. 24 Gardiner, ‘A Perfect Moral Storm’, 402-403; David Archer and Victor Brovkin, ‘The Millennial Atmospheric Lifetime of Anthropogenic CO2’, Climatic Change 90 (2008): 284. 25 Robin Attfield, ‘Mediated Responsibilities, Global Warming, and the Scope of Ethics’, Journal of Social Philosophy 40, No. 2 (2009): 226-227; Jamieson, ‘Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming’, 149; Scheffler, ‘Boundaries and Allegiances’, 39. 26 Henry Shue, ‘Climate’, in A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, ed. Dale Jamieson (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 450. 27 Gardiner, ‘Is No One Responsible’, 48; Jamieson, ‘Climate Change, Responsibility, and Justice’, 439. 28 European Environmental Agency, Climate Change, Impacts and Vulnerability in Europe 2012: An Indicator-Based Report (Copenhagen: EEA, 2012), accessed 2 May 2013, http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/climate-impacts-and-vulnera bility-2012, 183; Global Humanitarian Forum, ‘The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis’, (Geneva: Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009), accessed 2 May 2013, http://www.ghf-ge.org/human-impact-report.pdf, 9. 29 Gardiner, ‘Is No One Responsible’, 46. 30 Scheffler, ‘Boundaries and Allegiances’, 39. 31 Attfield, ‘Mediated Responsibilities’, 227-228; Lichtenberg, ‘Negative Duties, Positive Duties’, 567; Vanderheiden, ‘Atmospheric Justice’, 162-163; Anne Schwenkenbecher, ‘Is There an Obligation to Reduce One’s Individual Carbon Footprint?’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2012), accessed 2 May 2013, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230.2012.692984#.UYa0EnPA pRg, 5. 32 Lichtenberg, ‘Negative Duties, Positive Duties’, 567; Sinnott-Armstrong, ‘It’s Not My Fault’, 289; Vanderheiden, ‘Atmospheric Justice’, 163; see also Wright, ‘Acts and Omissions’, 292-302. 33 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 70. 34 Vanderheiden, ‘Atmospheric Justice’, 164. 35 Wright, ‘Acts and Omissions’, 297. 36 Gardiner, ‘Is No One Responsible’, 46. 37 Vanderheiden, ‘Atmospheric Justice’, 178. 38 Gerald T. Gardner and Paul C. Stern, ‘The Short List: The Most Effective Actions U.S. Households Can Take to Curb Climate Change’, Environment 50, No. 5 (2008): 20-21.

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__________________________________________________________________ 39

Dale Jamieson, ‘The Moral and Political Challenges of Climate Change’, in Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, eds. Susanne C. Moser and Lisa Dilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 476. 40 See Albert Bandura et al., ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, No. 2 (1996): 365-366. 41 Scheffler, ‘Boundaries and Allegiances’, 40-41. 42 Attfield, ‘Mediated Responsibilities’, 226-227. 43 Jamieson, ‘Climate Change, Responsibility, and Justice’, 436. 44 These pragmatic reasons include most importantly the fear of free-riding and the claim that significant results in mitigation are more likely to be achieved by collective endeavours than by individuals acting in isolation. See Lichtenberg, ‘Negative Duties, Positive Duties’, 571; and Schwenkenbecher, ‘Is There an Obligation’, 15-16. 45 Scheffler, ‘Boundaries and Allegiances’, 39; see also Parfit, ‘Reasons and Persons’, 86. 46 Ibid., 41. 47 Gardiner, ‘A Perfect Moral Storm’, 401. 48 Tim Hayward, ‘International Political Theory and the Global Environment: Some Critical Questions for Liberal Cosmopolitans’, Journal of Social Philosophy 40, No. 2 (2009): 276. 49 Gardiner, ‘Is No One Responsible’, 54-55. 50 Indeed, Hayward for example states that the liberal emphasis on the value of freedom does not clearly or directly tend to promote the kind of collective restraint that global environmental justice would seem to require. Hayward, ‘International Political Theory’, 290.

Bibliography Archer, David, and Victor Brovkin. ‘The Millennial Atmospheric Lifetime of Anthropogenic CO2’. Climatic Change 90 (2008): 283–297. Attfield, Robin. ‘Mediated Responsibilities, Global Warming, and the Scope of Ethics’. Journal of Social Philosophy 40, No. 2 (2009): 225–236. Bandura, Albert, Claudio Barbaranelli, Gian Vitorrio Caprara, and Concetta Pastorelli. ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, No. 2 (1996): 364– 374.

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__________________________________________________________________ Caney, Simon. ‘Justice and the Distribution of Greenhouse Gas Emissions’. Journal of Global Ethics 5, No. 2 (2009): 124–146. —––. ‘Climate Change and the Duties of the Advantaged’. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, No. 1 (2010): 203–228. Costello, Anthony, Mustafa Abbas, Adriana Allen, Sarah Ball, Richard Bellamy, Sharon Friel, Nora Groce, Anne Johnson, Maria Kett, Maria Lee, Caren Levy, Mark Maslin, David McCoy, Bill McGuire, Hugh Montgomery, David Napier, Christina Pagel, Jineh Patel, Jose Antonio Puppim de Oliveira, Nanneke Redclift, Hannah Rees, Daniel Rogger, Joanne Scott, Judith Stephenson, John Twigg, Jonathan Wolff, and Craig Patterson. ‘Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change’. The Lancet 373 (2009): 1693–1733. European Environmental Agency. Climate Change, Impacts and Vulnerability in Europe 2012: An Indicator-Based Report. Copenhagen: EEA, 2012. Accessed 2 May 2013. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/climate-impacts-and-vulnerability-2012. FAO. ‘Food Supply’. Last modified 29 June 2012. Accessed 2 May 2013. http://faostat.fao.org/site/610/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=610#ancor. Gardiner, Stephen. ‘A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Corruption’. Environmental Values 15 (2006): 397–413. —––. ‘Is No One Responsible for Global Environmental Tragedy? Climate Change as a Challenge to our Ethical Concepts’. In The Ethics of Global Climate Change, edited by Denis G. Arnold, 38–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Gardner, Gerald T., and Paul C. Stern. ‘The Short List: The Most Effective Actions U.S. Households Can Take to Curb Climate Change’. Environment 50, No. 5 (2008): 12–25. Global Humanitarian Forum. The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis. Geneva: Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009. Accessed 2 May 2013. http://www.ghf-ge.org/humanimpact-report.pdf. Hayward, Tim. ‘International Political Theory and the Global Environment: Some Critical Questions for Liberal Cosmopolitans’. Journal of Social Philosophy 40, No. 2 (2009): 276–295.

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__________________________________________________________________ Jamieson, Dale. ‘Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming’. Science, Technology & Human Values 17, No. 2 (1992): 139–153. —––. ‘The Moral and Political Challenges of Climate Change’. In Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change & Facilitating Social Change, edited by Susanne C. Moser, and Lisa Dilling, 475–482. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. —––. ‘Climate Change, Responsibility, and Justice’. Science and Engineering Ethics 16 (2010): 437. Leßmann, Ortrud. ‘Sustainability as a Challenge to the Capability Approach’. In Sustainable Development: Capabilities, Needs, and Well-being, edited by Felix Rauschmayer, Ines Omann, and Johannes Frühmann, 43–61. New York: Routledge, 2011. Lichtenberg, Judith. ‘Negative Duties, Positive Duties, and the “New Harms”’. Ethics 120 (2010): 557–578. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Patz, Jonathan A., Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, Tracey Holloway, and Jonathan A. Foley. ‘Impact of Regional Climate Change on Human Health’. Nature 438 (2005): 310–317. Rasmussen Report. ‘Environment Update’. Last modified 2 March 2012. Accessed 2 May 2013. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environm ent_energy/environment_update. Sen, Amartya. ‘Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984’. The Journal of Philosophy 82, No. 4 (1985): 203–204. Scheffler, Samuel. Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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__________________________________________________________________ Schwenkenbecher, Anne. ‘Is There an Obligation to Reduce One’s Individual Carbon Footprint?’. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2012). Accessed 2 May 2013. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230.2012.692984#.UYa0EnPA pRg. Shue, Henry. ‘Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions’. Law and policy 15, No. 1 (1993): 39–59 —––. ‘Global Environment and International Inequality’. International Affairs 75, No. 3 (1999): 531–545. —––. ‘Climate’. In A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, edited by Dale Jamieson, 449–459. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. —––. ‘Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Trillionth Ton’. In The Ethics of Global Climate Change, edited by Denis G. Arnold, 292–314. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. ‘It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations’. In Perspectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics, edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Richard B. Howarth, 285–307. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005. Vanderheiden, Steve. Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. World Bank. ‘Passenger Cars (per 1,000 People)’. Last modified 15 April 2013. Accessed 2 May 2013. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.VEH.PCAR.P3. Wright, Richard R. ‘Acts and Omissions as Positive and Negative Causes’. In Emerging Issues in Tort Law, edited by Jason W. Neyers, Erika Chamberlain, and Stephen G. A. Pitel, 287–307. Portland: Hart Publishings, 2007. Wouter Peeters is a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of the Free University of Brussels (VUB). His doctoral research project focuses on political philosophical and ethical issues regarding climate governance, social justice and environmental sustainability.

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__________________________________________________________________ Andries De Smet is a Junior Research Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science of Ghent University. His doctoral research project focuses on cosmopolitanism and global justice. Sigrid Sterckx is a Professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of Ghent University and a part-time Professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her current research focuses on environmental ethics and ethical issues regarding biobanking, organ transplantation, patenting, human enhancement and medical decision-making at the end of life.

Group Morality within the Voluntary and Community Sector and Implications for Ecological Citizenship Carmen Smith and Alan Lewis Abstract The majority of interventions aimed at promoting pro-environmental behaviour are based on economic models. These have been largely ineffective in promoting true citizenship behaviour as they fail to facilitate deeper moral changes in our attitudes towards the environment; ones in which our place in the natural world is understood through notions of justice and moral obligation. The transformation to a sustainable society necessitates the development of an ecological morality at an individual as well as at an organisational and institutional level. Here we look to Ecological or Environmental Citizenship, a justice-based theory founded on moral principles of reciprocity within the social and natural world. The current chapter diverges from mainstream behavioural psychology by taking a collective approach to pro-environmental behaviour change. We suggest that behaviour is influenced by social processes that construct group identity and not by individual choice in isolation. Our focus of analysis is therefore on the collective processes that lead to the existence of concepts, values and behaviours supporting ecological citizenship within groups. We conducted eight in-depth case study investigations of voluntary sector organisations in Wiltshire. Data was generated from semi-structured interviews with voluntary group members and community members, as well as observations of group events and meetings. A discursive analysis of the interview data was conducted. The initial part of the analysis involved a comparison between all eight VCS groups, where the most pervasive discursive repertoire was of ‘Reciprocity.’ A close analysis of the three environmental groups also revealed the social process of ‘Collective Reconnection.’ Key Words: Ecological citizenship, voluntary sector, sustainability, morality, community, identity, reciprocity, collective. ***** 1. Introduction Developed by Andrew Dobson, 1 Ecological Citizenship is a justice-based theory, founded on moral principles of reciprocity within the social and natural world. It is based on the notion that citizens ‘sometimes choose to do good for other reasons than fear of punishment or desire for reward. People sometimes do good because they want to be virtuous.’ 2 Despite the need for extensive research on this topic, the practical policy options and implications of facilitating ecological citizenship within civil society remain under-theorised. 3

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__________________________________________________________________ Economic models, based on rationality and self-interest assumptions usually result in fiscal incentive or disincentive policies. More recently, psychological models of behaviour change (e.g. MINDSPACE) and Nudge initiatives, which paternalistically manipulate a choice architecture to encourage individuals to do the right thing, have become influential. 4 However, interventions based on economic models (or Nudge policies) are unlikely to be effective in promoting true citizenship behaviour as they fail to facilitate deeper moral changes in our attitudes towards the environment; ones in which our place in the natural world is understood through notions of justice and moral obligation. 5 The transformation to a sustainable society necessitates the development of an ecological morality at an individual as well as at an organisational and institutional level. Arguably, it is the omission of moral discourses on the environment within the global political sphere that perhaps accounts for the inadequate social dimension within the sustainability agenda. This chapter follows a divergent approach which suggests that behaviour is influenced by group identity and not by individual choice in isolation. Stemming from a theoretical critique of current formulations of ecological citizenship that over-emphasise the role of the individual i.e. where sustainability is perceived as emerging through an ‘inner revolution,’ 6 our focus of analysis is rather on the collective processes that lead to the existence of concepts, values and behaviours supporting ecological citizenship within groups. The following sections will briefly investigate the psychology of group morality and the role of the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) before outlining our empirical findings and their implications for ecological citizenship. 1.1 The Moral Psychology of Individuals in a Group While researchers have found no strong relationship between advanced moral reasoning and moral behaviour, 7 evidence suggests that one’s moral identity (a self-schema organised around a set of moral traits) is more likely to affect behaviour than adherence to external moral principles. Indeed, moral identity predicted volunteering and donations to a local food bank 8 and willingness to donate time instead of money to pro-social organizations.9 As with other aspects of identity; people are motivated to act in a manner that is consistent with their selfview, lest they violate their self-concept. 10 Identity theory is therefore an important theoretical contributor to the study of Ecological Citizenship within groups. In identity theory, 11 when individuals think others in the group have interpreted their moral behaviour in the same way they intended, they feel good. When individuals think that others have interpreted their behaviour differently (more or less moral) than how it was intended, this identity non-verification leads to negative cognitive dissonance. 12 If people repeatedly experience identity non-verification, they may modify their behaviour (output) or their self-perception (input) to achieve verification.

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__________________________________________________________________ Because identities exist in group contexts with each member attempting to verify the identity of the other, 13 immoral behaviour by one person will not only lead to feelings of guilt or shame but also negative feelings in other group members, such as anger or contempt for the violator. 14 The role of other group members is therefore important in defining a situation or group’s moral meanings i.e. whether interactions are framed in moral or non-moral terms. The moral meanings within social groups are therefore crucial in determining the social norm and moral behaviour of group members. 1.2 The Voluntary and Community Sector In line with the UK Coalition Government‘s vision for a Big Society, the recent drive towards localism, community empowerment and civic action is evidenced in two of the nine key behaviours identified in the Sustainable Lifestyles Framework report (2011): 15 (1) being part of the environment and (2) setting up and using resources in your community. This move is further emphasised in the latest DEFRA report Getting the Message Across (2012), 16 where evidence is provided for the crucial role of social enterprises in civil society. This follows a growing literature emphasising that government efforts to promote environmental citizenship may be most effective, not through top-down approaches but through ‘governance’ that works with civil society. 17 The VCS represents the only sector that is non-profit based and therefore embodies the core ethos of sustainability i.e. to maintain, support or endure (rather than to grow). 18 Its aim is not to generally promote economic progression but to protect and sustain a healthy society and ecosystem. Consequently, it represents the values of reciprocity, trust and the mutual co-existence of all members of society. Furthermore, the participatory nature of the VCS inherently empowers civil society through the promotion of social and political freedom, especially from the constraints of consumer culture. 19 However, increased dependence on the voluntary sector to achieve sustainability would inherently involve risks and policy challenges. A major risk is the transfer of too many services to the VCS. Taylor 20 found that under these conditions groups cannot maintain flexible networks due to the pressure to deliver services. Furthermore, in areas where services have been hastily transferred to voluntary groups, accountability to users was found to be low. 21 The operation of voluntary groups within complex inter-agency networks of provision (comprising many small, diverse and interdependent groups) must be taken into account in making policy recommendations. 2. Method and Procedure The study adopts a ‘comparative case study’ design. Data was generated from eight in-depth case study investigations, involving semi-structured interviews with VCS group members and community members, as well as observations of group

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__________________________________________________________________ events and meetings. A sample of Wiltshire-based VCS groups was selected in consultation with the Wiltshire Council with the aim of achieving a representative cross section of the most pertinent voluntary sector activity within Wiltshire, both urban and rural locations, differing organisational tiers and group sizes. The sample is shown below. Table 1: The Sample of Voluntary Groups and Data Collection per Group. Group

Interviewees

St Michael’s Over Sixty’s Lunch Club, Salisbury

4 members

2 hour meeting including a talk given by 2 community support workers

Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, Devizes (WWT) Amesbury Stroke Club

2 volunteers

-

3 members

The South Wiltshire Credit Union (SWCU) Trowbridge Community Sensory Garden (TCSG)

2 volunteers

2 hour meeting including a talk given by local ergonomist -

2 volunteers, 2 community members

Tour of the garden and coffee with volunteers

GROW Community Support (Salisbury Cluster Networking Event) The Friends of Oakfrith Wood (FOW)

-

11 short talks given by VCS group representatives, participation in networking activity Partook in wood maintenance work followed by attendance at Barbeque/ networking event

Bishopdown Baptist Church, Salisbury

1 member

4 volunteers

Observations

Attendance at 2 hour church group social including lunch

A discursive analysis of the interview data was conducted. 22 This involved the identification of discourses within each line of text. 23 These were grouped into broad themes. The analysis of discourses within group interaction also explores the potential for social change in collective and collaborative meaning construction. 24 3. Findings The discursive themes identified in the data represent the social processes that might enable the values and practices of ecological citizenship. The initial part of the analysis involved a comparison between all eight VCS groups, where the most

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__________________________________________________________________ pervasive discursive repertoire was Reciprocity. Its unanimous use within groups serving vastly different functions suggests that it reflects an intrinsic VCS process. A close analysis of the three environmental groups also revealed the social process of Collective Reconnection. These are discussed briefly in turn. 3.1 Reciprocity In social psychology, reciprocity refers to the rewarding of actions in kind e.g. responding to a positive action with another positive action. 25 On an individual level, it epitomises the ethos of both volunteers and VCS members alike, and is often expressed as giving something back to society, sometimes as the expression of gratitude for the relief of suffering and illness offered by the voluntary group. For example, a recovering stroke victim at the Amesbury Stroke Club now helps more severe sufferers in their homes. He states that: I’ve got a lot to say thank you for to the Stroke Association and the people who’ve helped me in hospital as well. I’ve got to give something back and that’s what I try and do. Reciprocity also provides a motivation to do volunteering, as one Wiltshire Wildlife Trust (WWT) volunteer comments: I’ve had an interesting life so far and I’d like to give back to the community what I’ve received over the years. On an organisational level, Reciprocity is engrained into the structure and dealings of the VCS with the public sector. For example, hospital and library spaces are provided free to the South Wiltshire Credit Union (SWCU) in exchange for their services to the community. The Fire Service also rent rooms to the VCS and removed a dangerous tree branch for the Trowbridge Community Sensory Garden (TCSG) as a fire training exercise. Charitable relations based on reciprocity are thus inspired by the VCS. While reciprocal practices are clear within the VCS, they are seen as lacking elsewhere in society, where instead, economic logic is widespread. Indeed, the incompatibility between reciprocity and economic logic is a fundamental paradox that runs throughout the data. This is highlighted by one volunteer: I think everybody has got too much. And that’s what really hurts me, because its until people come in here and they realise there is another world to the one out there and they realise you don’t need the best of this and that and you can make do and mend which is really what we’ve tried to do here. This anti-consumer ethos appears to inspire not only volunteers but also members of the community and even the commercial sector, i.e. people are less likely to drop litter in the presence of volunteers at the TCSG, and people donate

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__________________________________________________________________ things to the TCSG, including some plants that Marks and Spencer’s were throwing out because they hadn’t sold them. The major positive impact of voluntary sector organisations is that they provide an alternative to the economic relations determining so many other areas of our lives. 3.2 Collective Reconnection The three environmental groups sampled each aim to overcome our worrying disconnect from the environment. The social process of collective reconnection was observed during a FOW meeting, where a collective interest in the environment, e.g. naming and discussing species, was related to an appreciation and awareness of natural surroundings and to a sentimental attachment to the natural world. Merely being in a natural environment, and particularly the joint observation of wildlife, was seen among environmental volunteers to bring great joy, elation and personal satisfaction. Within the FOW community group, extensive conversation on the topic of vegetable growing and the exchange of information not only appeared to improve growers’ horticultural techniques, but was a source of enjoyment, inspiration and identity construction, contributing to a collective process of re-connection to the natural world. The following excerpt of conversation between two FOW members provides an example of such an exchange: R: The organic slug pellets, you know the ones based on ferric phosphates, they’re organically certified but they haven’t got any meth-aldehyde or anything like that. J: I’ve had to resort to blue ones this year and just scattered, but the amount that was there, I was gob-smacked! And I did the whole tunnel with them and they still went up to plant. And they’re not small. R: I had a good crop of broad beans. But mine got chocolate spot disease, through the damp. J: And I had mice at mine. R: I raised mine in a greenhouse, little pots; I put out twelve to start and decided I’d start another lot in case that lot got taken by the frost or something. The natural vulnerability of growers’ crops to pests, frosts and ‘torrential rain,’ appears to alter their psychological relationship to the natural world. The recognition of vulnerability and our reciprocal relationship to nature is reinforced

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__________________________________________________________________ socially. One volunteer also explains that allotment work is very therapeutic after a hard day at work and I will always come back with something to eat, or I’ve eaten it up there. The pleasure of eating food directly from the ground is contrasted to the abstraction of grocery shopping, as another member comments, It’s too easy to go and buy something from the supermarket. Thus, rather than viewing food consumption purely through an economic lens, a more natural and connected view is shared between members, evident in a comment by one member that: It’s a food chain, and fortunately we’re on top of the food chain. The social and cultural practice of growing vegetables within the group also enables the practice of reciprocity to develop. For example, one FOW member and Chairman of the Allotment Association states that: I grow courgettes and just offloaded loads at the pub, to get rid of some. I think we all grow some of our own. I might get a bowl of soup for it. As well as demonstrating a connection to natural world, a clear anti-consumer ethos is practiced here through the act of reciprocity. 4. Discussion Social identity theory posits that group members incorporate the group into their self-concept, resulting in a shift ‘towards the perception of the self as an interchangeable exemplar of some social category.’ 26 This shift increases people’s perceived similarity to their group members. 27 In groups that embody an anticonsumer ethos and a culture of reciprocity, members develop a moral identity based on these principals, and this is mutually verified between group members during interaction. 28 Moral identity expression was evident in the moral discourses drawn upon by both members and volunteers, e.g. around anti-consumerism and thrift practices. According to Kennedy, 29 expressions of Ecological Citizenship do not result solely from a commitment to the environment, but also through a sense of responsibility to an informal neighbourhood network. In her research, the positive feedback loops or virtuous circles created by such networks were found to strengthen both the network and the neighbourhood through the mutual expectation of morally virtuous behaviour and the enactment of a green identity. 30 These findings are corroborated in the present study. According to intergroup emotions theory, group identification has significant affective consequences for individuals, 31 and emotions play an important role in facilitating the socialization of group moral values. 32 This was evident in the sadness expressed by VCS members at the negative effects of runaway consumerism as well as the guilt felt by members who were not able to reciprocate with kindness due to ill health. Group members forged strong emotional ties, trust-

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__________________________________________________________________ based relationships, and a sentimental attachment to their group. Indeed, VCS structures are actively constructed through shared sentiment, collective emotion, the feeling of closeness and adherence to a common ethos. 33 Emotional attachment and obligation to a group are thus considered to be important drivers towards sustainability and towards a more connected civil society. An additional process that was found to contribute towards collective ecological citizenship was joint attention in the shared experience of nature. While primates exhibit a correspondence of mental states, humans uniquely exhibit a mutual awareness of this correspondence. 34 This social process of joint attention is important in group identity construction as it allows individuals to start from a common ground, with shared representations of objects and events. Within the environmental groups the joint observation and experience of wildlife provided a particularly joyful, satisfying and sentimental experience. This bonding process exemplified a collective reconnection to nature as well as to one another. Among the FOW, the collective practice of vegetable growing and the verbal exchange of knowledge on the subject provides a tangible means by which group members enact the values and principals of ecological citizenship, and the role of specialised language is particularly pertinent here in allowing shared intentionality to take place. In humans, this is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals, 35 which is particularly important for the bottom-up instantiation of ecological citizenship through community groups. Sharing expertise also allows members to express and mutually verify their moral identity, not only as an ecological citizen, but one that is knowledgeable within the group. 36 This identity affirmation leads to feelings of pride, increased self-esteem and feelings of belonging. Furthermore, the language used by environmental group members provides a tool with which to express and mutually reinforce a collective mentality that is more connected to the rhythms of nature. The opportunity to socially reinforce this alternative moral ideology is perhaps particularly important to members who are surrounded by more mainstream discourses on a daily basis, thus highlighting the importance of VCS group membership. 5. Conclusion According to Collins, 37 who extends Goffman’s 38 analyses of ritual interaction, vegetable growing may also function as a symbolic representation of the common ecological focus of the group. As ritual activity continues during interaction, aroused emotions produce positive and moral feelings that generate group solidarity. This was certainly evident in the animated discussions observed during the FOW meeting. Conversations embedded with moral precedents evidently worked to reaffirm those moral meanings within the group, and this consequently reinforced group identity and group solidarity around a common moral ethos.

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__________________________________________________________________ In considering why people sometimes do not take collective action even if the conditions call for it, Kesebir 39 suggests that political coalescing requires more than objective membership in a demographic category, but also requires a subjective sense of belonging to a group. Sentimental group attachment not only allows individuals to adopt group-level goals and become mobilised as Ecological Citizens, but as the present study shows, also allows the moral values supporting Ecological Citizenship to emerge.

Notes 1

Andrew Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Andrew Dobson, ‘Environmental Citizenship and Pro-Environmental Behaviour: Rapid Research and Evidence Review’, Sustainable Development Research Network (2010), accessed 6 February 2014, http://www.sd-research.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/SDRN%20Environm ental%20Citizenship%20and%20Pro-Environmental%20Full%20Report_0.pdf. 2 Ludvig Beckman, ‘Virtue, Sustainability and Liberal Values’, in Sustaining Liberal Democracy: Ecological Challenges and Opportunities, eds. John Barry and Marcel Wissenburg (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 179. 3 Andrew Dobson and A. Valencia Sais, ‘Introduction’, Environmental Politics 14 (2005): 157-162; Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment; Sherilyn MacGregor, ‘No Sustainability without Justice: A Feminist Critique of Environmental Citizenship’, in Environmental Citizenship, eds. Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 101-126; Hartley Dean, ‘Green Citizenship’, Social Policy and Administration 35, No. 5 (2001): 490-505. 4 Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale: University Press, 2008). 5 Dobson and Sais, ‘Introduction’, 157-162; Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell, Environmental Citizenship (Cambridge, MA :MIT Press: Cambridge, 2006), 1-4. 6 Alex Latta, ‘Locating Democratic Politics in Ecological Citizenship’, Environmental Politics 16 (2007): 380. 7 Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981); Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: Free Press, 1965 [1932]); Augusto Blasi, ‘Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of the Literature’, Psychological Bulletin 88 (1980): 145. 8 Karl Aquino and Americas Reed, ‘The Self-Importance of Moral Identity’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (2002): 1423-1440. 9 Karl Aquino et al., ‘Testing a Social-Cognitive Model of Moral Behavior: The Interactive Influence of Situations and Moral Identity Centrality’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97 (2007): 123-141.

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__________________________________________________________________ 10

Blasi, ‘Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of the Literature’, 1-45. 11 Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets, Identity Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 12 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). 13 Burke and Stets, Identity Theory. 14 Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Moral Emotions’, in Handbook of Affective Sciences, eds. Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer and H. Hill Goldsmith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 852-870; Jan E. Stets and Michael J. Carter, ‘A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality’, American Sociological Review 77 (2012): 120. 15 Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs, ‘A Framework for Sustainable Lifestyles’, 2011, accessed 6 February 2014, http://archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/economy/documents/sustainable-life-fram ework.pdf, 15. 16 Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs, ‘Getting the Message Across: the Role of Social Enterprises as Inspirers of Sustainable Living’, 2012, accessed 6 February 2014, http://sd.defra.gov.uk/documents/Defra-SESP-Gettingthe-message-across-Sep2012.pdf. 17 Christer Berglund and Simon Matti, ‘Citizen and Consumer: The Dual Role of Individuals in Environmental Policy’, Environmental Politics 15, No. 4 (2006): 550-571; David L. Uzzell, ‘Collective Solutions to a Global Problem’, The Psychologist 23 (2011): 880-883. 18 Charles Onions, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 2095. 19 Gill Seyfang, ‘Ecological Citizenship and Sustainable Consumption: Examining Local Organic Food Networks’, Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006): 383-395. 20 Marilyn Taylor, ‘Between Public and Private: Accountability in Voluntary Organisations’, Policy and Politics 24, No. 1 (1996): 57-72. 21 Paul Robson, Michael Locke and Jonathan Dawson, Consumerism or Democracy? User Involvement in the Control of Voluntary Organisations (Bristol: The Polity Press, 1997); Satish Kumar, Accountability Relationships between Voluntary Sector ‘Providers’, Local Government ‘Purchasers’ and Service Users in the Contracting State (York: York Publishing Services, 1997). 22 Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, Discursive Psychology (London: Sage, 1992); James Potter and Margaret Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour (London: Sage, 1987). 23 Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell, ‘Men’s Constructions of Feminism and Feminists’, Feminism and Psychology 11, No. 4 (2001): 441.

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__________________________________________________________________ 24

Vivian Burr, Social Constructionism (London: Routledge, 1995); Robert Cotter et al., Experiential Learning Exercises in Social Construction: A Field Book for Creating Change (Ohio: Taos Institute Publications, 2004). 25 Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, ‘Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, No. 3 (2000): 159-181. 26 John Turner et al., Re-Discovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 27 Bernd Simon, Giuseppe Pantaleo and Amelie Mummendey, ‘Unique Individual or Interchangeable Group Member? Accentuation of Intragroup Differences versus Similarities as an Indicator of the Individual versus the Collective Self’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (1995): 106-119. 28 Burke and Stets, Identity Theory. 29 Emily H. Kennedy, ‘Rethinking Ecological Citizenship: The Role of Neighbourhood Networks in Cultural Change’, Environmental Politics 20, No. 6 (2011): 843-860. 30 Ibid. 31 Diane M. Mackie, Thierry Devos and Eliot R. Smith, ‘Intergroup Emotions: Explaining Offensive Action Tendencies in an Intergroup Context’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000): 602-616; Eliot R. Smith, Susan Coats and Dustin Walling, ‘Overlapping Mental Representations of Self, In-Group, and Partner: Further Response Time Evidence and a Connectionist Model’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (1999): 873-882. 32 Stets and Carter, ‘A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality’, 120. 33 Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, trans. D. Smith (London: Sage, 1996). 34 Chris Moore and Phillip J. Dunham, Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995). 35 Martin Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Martin Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne and Henrike Moll, ‘Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 675-691. 36 Stets and Carter, ‘A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality’, 120. 37 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 38 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). 39 Selin Kesebir, ‘The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality: How and When Human Groups Are Like Beehives’, Personality and Social Psychology Review 16 (2011): 233.

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__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography Aquino, Karl, Dan Freeman, Americus Reed, Vivien Lim, and Will Felps. ‘Testing a Social-Cognitive Model of Moral Behaviour: The Interactive Influence of Situations and Moral Identity Centrality’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97 (2009): 123–141. Aquino, Karl, and Americus Reed. ‘The Self-Importance of Moral Identity’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (2002): 1423–1440. Beckman, Ludvig. ‘Virtue, Sustainability and Liberal Values’. In Sustaining Liberal Democracy: Ecological Challenges and Opportunities edited by John Barry, and Marcel Wissenburg, 179–191. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001. Blasi, Augusto. ‘Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of the Literature’. Psychological Bulletin 88 (1980): 1–45. Berglund, Christer, and Simon Matti. ‘Citizen and Consumer: The Dual Role of Individuals in Environmental Policy’. Environmental Politics 15, No. 4 (2006): 550–571. Burr, Vivian. Social Constructionism. London: Routledge, 1995. Burke, Peter J., and Jan E. Stets. Identity Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Cotter, Robert, A. Asher, J. Levin, and C. Weiser. Experiential Learning Exercises in Social Construction: A Field Book for Creating Change. Ohio: Taos Institute Publications, 2004. Dean, Hartley. ‘Green Citizenship’. Social Policy and Administration 35, No. 5 (2001): 490–505 . Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs. ‘A Framework for Sustainable Lifestyles’. 2011. Accessed 6 February 2014,. http://archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/economy/documents/sustainable-life-fram ework.pdf.

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__________________________________________________________________ Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs. ‘Getting the Message Across: The Role of Social Enterprises as Inspirers of Sustainable Living’. 2012. Accessed 6 February 2014. http://sd.defra.gov.uk/documents/Defra-SESP-Getting-the-message-across-Sep20 12.pdf. Dobson Andrew. Citizenship and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. —––. ‘Environmental Citizenship and Pro-Environmental Behaviour: Rapid Research and Evidence Review’. Sustainable Development Research Network, 2010. Accessed 6 February 2014. http://www.sd-research.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/SDRN%20Environm ental%20Citizenship%20and%20Pro-Environmental%20Full%20Report_0.pdf. Dobson, Andrew, and Derek Bell. Environmental Citizenship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Dobson, Andrew, and A. Valencia Sais. ‘Introduction’. Environmental Politics 14 (2005): 157–162. Edley, Nigel, and Margaret Wetherell. ‘Men’s Constructions of Feminism and Feminists’. Feminism and Psychology 11, No. 4 (2001): 439–457. Edwards, Derek, and Jonathan Potter. Discursive Psychology. London: Sage, 1992. Fehr, Ernst, and Simon Gächter. ‘Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity’. Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, No. 3 (2000): 159–181. Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957. Haidt, Jonathan. ‘The Moral Emotions’. In Handbook of Affective Sciences, edited by Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. Hill Goldsmith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Harre, Rom, and Grant Gillett. The Discursive Mind. London: Sage, 1994.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kennedy, Emilia H. ‘Rethinking Ecological Citizenship: The Role of Neighbourhood Networks in Cultural Change’. Environmental Politics 20, No. 6 (2011): 843–860. Kesebir, Selin. ‘The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality: How and When Human Groups Are Like Beehives’. Personality and Social Psychology Review 16 (2011): 233. Kohlberg, Lawrence. The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981. Kumar, Satish. Accountability Relationships between Voluntary Sector ‘Providers’, Local Government ‘Purchasers’ and Service Users in the Contracting State. York: York Publishing Services, 1997. Latta, Alex. ‘Locating Democratic Politics Environmental Politics 16 (2007): 377–393.

in

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Citizenship’.

MacGregor, Sherilyn. ‘No Sustainability without Justice: A Feminist Critique of Environmental Citizenship’. In Environmental Citizenship, edited by Andrew Dobson, and Derek Bell, 101–126. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. Mackie, Diane M., Thierry Devos, and Eliot R. Smith. ‘Intergroup Emotions: Explaining Offensive Action Tendencies in an Intergroup Context’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000): 602–616. Maffesoli, Michel. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage, 1996. Melo-Escrihuela, Carme. ‘Promoting Ecological Citizenship: Rights, Duties and Political Agency’. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7, No. 2 (2008): 113–134. Moore, Chris, and Phillip J. Dunham. Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Onions, Charles. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1964. Piaget, Jean. The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: Free Press 1965 [1932].

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__________________________________________________________________ Potter, James, and Margaret Wetherell. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage, 1987. Robson, Paul, Michael Locke, and Jonathan Dawson. Consumerism or Democracy? User Involvement in the Control of Voluntary Organisations. Bristol: The Polity Press, 1997. Seyfang, Gill. ‘Ecological Citizenship and Sustainable Consumption: Examining Local Organic Food Networks’. Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006): 383–395 Simon, Bernd, Giuseppe Pantaleo, and Amelie Mummendey. ‘Unique Individual or Interchangeable Group Member? Accentuation of Intragroup Differences versus Similarities as an Indicator of the Individual versus the Collective Self’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (1995): 106–119. Smith, Eliot R., Susan Coats, and Dustin Walling. ‘Overlapping Mental Representations of Self, In-Group, and Partner: Further Response Time Evidence and a Connectionist Model’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (1999): 873–882. Stets, Jan E., and Michael J. Carter. ‘A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality’. American Sociological Review 77 (2012): 120–140. Taylor, Marilyn. ‘Between Public and Private: Accountability in Voluntary Organisations’. Policy and Politics 24, No. 1 (1996): 57–72. Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’. Yale: University Press, 2008. Tomasello, Martin. Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Tomasello, Martin, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrinke Moll. ‘Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 675–691. Turner, John C., Michael A. Hogg, Penelope S. Oakes, Stephen Reicher, and Margaret S. Wetherell. Re-Discovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

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__________________________________________________________________ Uzzell, David L. ‘Collective Solutions to a Global Problem’. The Psychologist 23 (2011): 880–883. Carmen Smith is a graduate student at the Department of Psychology at Bath University, in the United Kingdom. She is currently completing her PhD in ‘Environment, Energy and Resilience’ with a particular focus on the Voluntary Sector. Alan Lewis is a professor at the Department of Psychology at Bath University in the United Kingdom. He is the author of numerous books, papers, book chapters and other contributions in the field of applied Social Psychology.

Informal Seed Exchange Networks as Sustainable and Equitable Communities: Emerging Practices towards Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Justice Fulya Batur Abstract Innovative endeavours relying on the use of agricultural biodiversity differ widely in their actors, institutional structures and corresponding economic realities. Farmers have been selecting and improving plant varieties for more than ten thousand years, relying on opportunities for saving and freely exchanging seeds at local or regional levels, and developing locally-adapted and genetically diverse landraces. These varieties have in parallel been conserved and exchanged between eager gardeners, who have at times regulated their exchanges through institutionalised seed exchange networks. Seed-saving and exchange mechanisms that are observed either in traditional and organic farming communities or in gardener-oriented initiatives aim to preserve agricultural biodiversity on farm, maintain an age-old plant improvement model alive and all the while endorse notions of distributional equity and participatory justice. Drawing from casestudies of associations such as Kokopelli, the Seed Savers Exchange, or the Real Seed Catalogue amongst others, we shall highlight emerging practices that try to overcome regulatory shortcomings or political unwillingness to promote informal markets oriented towards biodiversity conservation, especially in Europe. By establishing themselves as seed distribution and knowledge dissemination networks, launching heritage farms, advocating legal change and fighting litigation, 21st century seed savers and emerge as sustainable and equitable communities striving to achieve the disengaged principles of sustainability and environmental justice embedded in international biodiversity instruments such as the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2004 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.   Key Words: Biological diversity, international environmental law, informal seed exchange, rural communities, sustainability, equity. ***** 1. Introduction The diversity of life is primordial to all societies. Agricultural plant biodiversity is the foundation of undoubtedly the most critical human right of all, that of food, as seeds are the paramount input for cultivation. It is also the foundation of all plant improvement endeavours, which attempt to respond to nutritional needs but also to ever-greater biotic and abiotic stresses, mostly stemming from the growing pressure put on land by a soaring human population and changing climate. In this

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__________________________________________________________________ context, the diversity of all actors relying on, improving and using living organisms is primordial to all sustainable but also democratic societies. The first ever actors having been concerned with both the cultivation and the improvement of seeds are farmers, who relied on socio-cultural ties and seed exchange practices to build better performing seed stocks. In parallel, networks solely concerned with seed saving exchange were concomitantly constituted especially in the 1990’s between gardeners in developed countries. We argue that these networks, through their practices, reclaim and instigate both sustainability and environmental justice principles embedded in international biodiversity agreements such as the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2004 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. 2. Farmers’ Innovation and Seed Exchange Networks A large proportion of the seed planted worldwide is either saved by farmers or exchanged on a farmer-to-farmer basis. In the mid-1980s, farmer-saved seed accounted for an estimated 35 per cent (or 18 billion USD) of the total estimated value of 50 billion USD for all agricultural seed used worldwide, proprietary or not. 1 In developing countries, the importance of seed exchange networks and reuse is seemingly even more enhanced, as an estimated 80 per cent of the seed used in the early 1980s was farmer-saved seed. 2 Seed saving and exchange practices lie at the heart of the age-old innovation system coined mass selection, which is a traditionally holistic approach to crop improvement based on little-constrained seed exchanges. The key process of traditional farming systems relies on the repeated local reproduction of seed, where farmers influence such reproduction by choosing varieties and selecting interesting individuals. 3 The pool of genetic variation maintained by farmers is primarily determined by the existence and strength of social networks providing access to seeds, and the individual’s status within these networks and the community in general. 4 The wide range of channels used by farmers to acquire seeds and information reveals the influence of different institutions, such as farmers’ organisations, weekly foodstuff markets and other social networks. The seed exchanges and community norms built around farmer mass selection have led to the unequivocal recognition, especially in social sciences, ethnobotany or geography, of a farmer-based seed system, coined informal. 5 While formal seed markets function on the basis of regulation pertaining to approval and promotion, with quality insurance and guarantee as to the identity of purchased seeds, informal material exchanges are rather governed by cultural norms and ad hoc rules determined solely by the participants to the exchange, without regulatory intervention. 6 In developed countries, seed exchange networks are also governed by cultural and ad hoc norms and articulated around seed swaps. They nonetheless tend to be more institutionalised than those exchanges carried out by so-called ‘subsistence’ or smaller farmers of developing nations. Most of them are organised around non-governmental organisations or private clubs. These

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__________________________________________________________________ coalitions usually set up heirloom, heritage seeds catalogues and provide them to members for cultivation and saving. Examples include the United States of America based Seed Savers Exchange, set up in 1975 with several different catalogues, but also Arche Noah, an Austria based Central European Seed Savers Association set up in 1990, managing the largest private seed collection in Europe with 6000 varieties. 3. Sustainability and Environmental Justice in International Biodiversity Law Arguably building on the heritage of the 1960’s civil liberties movement and the 1987 Brundtland report, international regulatory instruments directed towards the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, and more specifically genetic resources, have given international normative stance to both sustainability and environmental justice, in its distributive and participatory expressions to break the cycle of ‘green developmentalism.’ 7 Adopted in 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) primary aim was set as the comprehensive preservation of biodiversity, both in situ and ex situ (articles 8 and 9) along with the ‘sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources’ (article 1). In that sense, the Convention strives away from the ‘classical conservationist design’ 8 as it incorporates a wider range of socio-economics concerns, and a desire to use these resources for developmental purposes. 9 The sustainable use of biodiversity advocated for the CBD highlights the need to: ...protect and encourage customary use of biological resources in accordance with traditional cultural practices that are compatible with conservation or sustainable use requirements; [and] support local populations to develop and implement remedial action in degraded areas where biological diversity has been reduced [in order to avoid or minimise] adverse impacts on biological diversity (Article 10 of the CBD). In parallel, article 8(j) of the Convention states that: .,.each contracting Party shall, as far as possible and as appropriate: subject to national legislation, respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. The legal basis of traditional knowledge has notably led to negotiations within the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Intergovernmental Committee on

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__________________________________________________________________ Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, towards a binding international agreement on the extent of awarded rights. Genetic resources have been receiving their fair share of attention within the CBD system, not only as a biodiversity layer to be conserved, but also in a distributive justice perspective. The principles of bilateral access and benefit-sharing (ABS) were set out in article 15 of the Convention and epitomised by the adoption of the dedicated Nagoya Protocol in 2012. 10 In this regard, the salvation to the phenomenon of biopiracy 11 stems from a ‘fair and equitable’ ABS regime based on sovereignty prerequisites and checkpoints verifying prior informed consent and mutually agreed terms when warranted by the national legislation of the country of origin. With specific regard to biodiversity used for agriculture, access to a number of plant genetic resources fall within the Multilateral System set up by the 2004 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). The objectives of the Treaty are: ... the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of their use, in harmony with the Convention on Biological Diversity, for sustainable agriculture and food security. 12 In its conservation angle, it advocates an ‘integrated approach to the exploration, conservation and sustainable use’ of agrobiodiversity, where both in situ and ex situ efforts are acknowledged, just as the ‘promotion or support, as appropriate, farmers and local communities’ efforts to manage and conserve onfarm their plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.’ 13 The Treaty in parallel proclaims the so-called farmers’ rights in its Article 9, as a bundle of socio-economic rights including those related to seeds, as, amongst other rationales, a response to the evolution of the farmers’ privilege to save and exchange protected seeds into a clear exception to the exclusive rights of breeders, rather than an array of acts considered outside the scope of the intellectual property title in itself. 14 Linking their protection to traditional knowledge and insisting on participatory aspects, the article however conditions farmers’ rights to save or exchange seeds to national law and the appropriateness of the measures. Indeed, the Treaty states that ‘nothing in this Article shall be interpreted to limit any rights that farmers have to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed/propagating material, subject to national law and as appropriate’ (Article 9, paragraph 3 of the ITPGRFA). With regards to the fair and equitable benefit sharing angle, consensus was almost spontaneously reached on the impracticality of CBD-like bilateralism for agricultural germplasm. It would impose heavy burdens into the initial stages of research and development, and also would often times be impossible to trace back the origin of genetic material. 15 The idea of a multilateral system for access and

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__________________________________________________________________ benefit sharing was therefore espoused in an attempt to create a genetic resources commons. 16 4. Emerging Practices of Seed Exchange Networks First and foremost, seed exchange networks encourage the conservation and the sustainable use of agrobiodiversity. The desire of seed savers and exchangers to preserve agricultural biodiversity and revive old lost varieties is self-evident, as it is the core norm that brings participants together. Indeed ‘seed saving is a set of practices valued by growers and consumers interested in supporting more sustainable socio-natural systems.’ 17 The preservation of genetic resources lies at the heart of the practice of seed saving and exchanges. These practices’ contribution to biodiversity conservation is loudly advocated for by certain initiatives, especially in Europe, where seed exchanges are organised as ‘planned activities with the explicit aim of preserving agrobiodiversity.’ 18 These organisations are numerous, from Arche Noah, Kokopelli, Pro Specie Rara, Red de Semillas, Reseau Semences Paysannes to Rete Semi Rurali, amongst others. The conservation aspect is also present in networks that provide seeds for free or for relatively low prices that are only meant to incur maintenance costs, as the French Biau Germe farmers’ group established in 1981, which provides seeds with an extremely clear purpose of preserving biodiversity and fighting genetic erosion. Most of the larger networks and organisations tend to go one step further and set up local seed banks and farms where the material is multiplied in designated fields or maintained in gene banks through formal agreements with institutes possessing the technical capacity to do so. Perhaps the widest and oldest seed exchange networks, the United States of America based Seed Savers Exchange was established to preserve their garden heritage through the collection and distribution of thousands of samples of rare garden seeds to other gardeners. They have since then set up an 890-acre Heritage Farm in Iowa. Quite interestingly, they also store their varieties in back-up locations through so-called black box deposits, where the property of seeds remains with the donator, especially before the USDA Seed Bank, but also more recently and more controversially to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. The notion of sustainable biodiversity use has been defined by the CBD system through fourteen operational principles, the Addis Ababa Principles and Guidelines for the Sustainable use of Biodiversity, which largely put emphasis on the ecological and socio-economic scales of resource use and its impacts. In this context, maintaining or creating seed exchanges is in itself a means to create an alternative to the globalisation-led ‘destruction of the local environment, culture and sustainable ways of living,’ against the annihilation of a livelihood and different communities’ ways of life. 19 It is a means to sustain traditional farming which relies on informal seed exchange mechanisms, and which undisputedly puts little pressure on soil, water and ecosystems notably by using fewer chemicals

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__________________________________________________________________ because of cost, access or other intrinsic motivations. Farmers or gardeners who mostly produce crops for their own subsistence or to exchange on local markets and other social networks ‘are more likely to maintain a genetically diverse spectrum of plant species and varieties because it is more affordable and less risky to do so,’ as their practices are not dictated by the global market that prefers uniform harvests. 20 The notion of sustainable use also craves consideration for future generations, it asks for biodiversity to be used through the lens of intergenerational equity and social stewardship. Most, if not all seed exchange networks put an emphasis on the need to preserve biodiversity, socio-cultural conventions and traditional knowledge for the sake of future generations. In this regard, the notion of heritage is heavily heralded by numerous initiatives. The Central European Seed Savers Association is meaningfully baptised ‘Arche Noah,’ while the infamous SSE’s farm and language heavily insist on the preservation of their garden heritage. Aside from the agrobiodiversity conservation angle, seed exchange networks also appraise distributional and participatory environmental justice. Traditional approaches to environmental justice in biodiversity issues remain attached to its distributive and equity-ridden aspects. Doctrinal thought is nonetheless increasingly putting emphasis on the more-encompassing nature of environmental justice, highlighting a conception that would go beyond ‘equity in the distribution of environmental risk,’ by also ‘recognising the diversity of the participants and experiences in affected communities, and participation in the political processes which create and manage environmental policy.’ 21 Building on the recognition of traditional knowledge, benefit-sharing obligations and farmers’ rights, seed exchange networks and related farmer communities are vital actors for the success of distributive equity goals that aim to correct the ‘ecological debt’ of follow-on resource users. They not only fight against misappropriation, but also adopt an open innovation stance that fulfils benefit-sharing obligations. Fuelled by impressive figures, 22 biopiracy and misappropriation claims have found an important echo in contemporary international law, and also in seed exchange networks. These not only actively fight against the misappropriation of their products and knowledge, but also advocate benefit-sharing. Biopiracy campaigns were for instance led by the Indian Navdanya 23 against patents granted by the European Patent Office for the fungicidal properties of the neem tree, several characteristics and breeding methods for basmati rice and the traditional Indian Nap Hal wheat variety. These campaigns have infamously led the Office to revoke or make serious amendments to these prior-art violating patents respectively in 2000, 2001 and 2004. The distributional impulses of seed exchange networks reflect in different activities, whether in patent follow-up and opposition procedures or the establishment of traditional knowledge logs. Furthermore, several (if not all) projects also aim at disseminating knowledge on seed saving techniques and experiences, much reminiscent of early public agricultural research

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__________________________________________________________________ initiatives, without the latter’s colossal budget. Most organisations produce technical leaflets, frequently asked questions and other factsheets to disseminate knowledge. In a parallel fashion, networks also distribute their seeds to either the participants to the exchange, their customers and mainly to everyone that asks for their seeds. The French Kokopelli association for instance has a special programme focusing on ‘seeds without borders,’ which disseminates their seeds to the poorest rural communities in countries that are assassinated by the West through starvation. The benefit-sharing that is clearly provided for by seed exchange networks is non-monetary or in kind, i.e. in the access to the genetic resources and attached knowledge, but it also brings in the participatory feature of fairness, equity and justice. The push to include traditional farming communities and seed exchange networks into decision-making operates on different fronts. First and foremost, these networks remain open to everyone who wishes to contribute to the exchange and preservation efforts. In more institutionalised networks, seed donations are always and unequivocally welcomed, although a number of initiatives have been obliged to change their structure into private clubs so as to avoid infringing on third party intellectual property rights or on stringent seed legislation. The Real Seeds UK initiative has for instance been morphed into a not-for-profit company relying on membership to ship heirloom seeds listed in their catalogue or accept new stocks. By charging a single penny of the first order for a year’s membership, they avoid selling their seeds to the public. The issue is a little trickier for more traditional exchanges operating around local seed markets, especially in developing countries, even though the request itself of the seed cannot be refused in most cases. Several case studies have highlighted that the decision to take part in seed exchanges or to accept an individual to the ‘free-handover of seed’ is heavily influenced by the presence of relatives and socio-cultural ties between the farmers. 24 Alongside such desire to actively push for local community participation into the exchange, the more traditional front of building participatory environmental justice is concerned with the inclusion of these networks and communities in political decision-making. They indeed at times also act as more traditional advocacy groups with clear political lobbying components, directly advocating changes to both seed marketing and intellectual property legislation. The language favoured in pamphlets and official documents translate the strong presence of such a traditional politically active citizenship stance. Arche Noah members indeed ‘can contribute to more diversity through cultivation of threatened varieties in your garden, through shopping awareness and political commitment.’ 25 Kokopelli clearly advocates the liberation of seeds. The Réseau Semences Paysannes has a legal watchgroup which follows legislative developments and issues detailed statements. Twenty-four organisations, including several European informal seed networks have recently gathered around a Joint Statement on the Proposal on legislation about plant reproductive material, i.e. the new European

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Informal Seed Exchange Networks, Sustainability and Equity

__________________________________________________________________ seed laws, asking ‘farmers and gardeners to be able and allowed to produce and exchange their own seeds and propagating material.’ 26 Aside from such political participation in its conventional sense, farming communities, local seed banks and exchange networks are also increasingly included in crop development and environmental management projects. The rather new but promising approach of participatory plant breeding not only recognises the role of these communities in biodiversity conservation, it also appoints them back into the plant improvement landscape and biodiversity management policies. 5. Conclusions Corroborated by the regime shifting operated through international biodiversity law instruments, informal seed exchange networks that operate within traditional farming or gardening communities, in both developed and developing countries, re-appropriate sustainability and justice objectives. The emerging practices of these networks seem to grow stronger, more numerous and more inventive every day. They experiment. They adapt to their national, regional and local conditions and needs. They fulfil not only ecological but also important socio-cultural and economic requisites. They actively contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of genetic resources, but also ensure distributional and participatory justice. It is in this sense that their participants will pave the way for an adjustment of the property and commodity paradigm that dominates seed supply today, as global citizens.

Notes 1

Ton Groosman, Anita R. Linnemann and Holke S. M. Wierema, Technology Development and Changing Seed Supply Systems: Seminar Proceedings, 22-23 June 1988 (Development Research Institute (IVO), 1988). 2 Carl Pray and Bbarat Ramaswami, A Framework for Seed Policy Analysis in Developing Countries (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1991). 3 Conny J. M. Almekinders, Niels Louwaars and G. H. De Bruijn, ‘Local Seed Systems and Their Importance for an Improved Seed Supply in Developing Countries’, Euphytica 78 (1994): 208. 4 David A. Cleveland, Daniela Soleri and Stephen Smith, ‘Farmer Plant Breeding from a Biological Perspective: Implications for Collaborative Plant Breeding’, in Economics Working Paper 99-10 (Mexico: CIMMYT, 1999), 15. 5 Latha Nagarajan and Melinda Smale, ‘Community Seed Systems and the Biodiversity of Millet Crops in Southern India’, in Valuing Crop Diversity: On Farm Genetic Resources and Economic Change, ed. Melinda Smale (CAB International, 2006), 212.

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__________________________________________________________________ 6

Louise Sperling, H. David Cooper and Tom Remington, ‘Moving toward More Effective Seed Aid’, Journal of Development Studies 44, No. 4 (2008): 586-612; and also Leslie Lipper, C. Leigh Anderson and Timothy J. Dalton, Seed Trade in Rural Markets: Implications for Crop Diversity and Agricultural Development (London: Earthscan, 2009), 19-21. 7 Kathleen McAfee, ‘Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism’, Environment and Planning 17 (1999): 133-154. 8 Regine Andersen, Governing Agrobiodiversity, Global Environmental Governance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 120. 9 Susan Bragdon, Kathryn Garforth and John Haapala, ‘Safeguarding Biodiversity: The Convention on Biological Diversity’, in The Future Control of Food: A Guide to International Negotiations and Rules on Intellectual Property, Biodiversity and Food Security, eds. Geoff Tansey and Tasmin Rajotte (London: Earthscan, 2008), 84-85. 10 The Protocol is at the time of writing not yet in force, awaiting the deposit of the fiftieth ratification instrument in accordance with its article 33. 11 Rules ensuring that scientific communities ‘gave back’ to indigenous communities have triggered language focused on ‘facilitated access’ and ‘fair and equitable benefit sharing;’ see Kabir Bavikatte and Daniel F. Robinson, ‘Towards a People’s History of the Law: Biocultural Jurisprudence and the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing’, Law, Environment and Development Journal 7, No. 1 (2011): 35-51. 12 Article 1.1 of the ITPGRFA. 13 Article 5.1.c of the ITPGRFA. 14 Wilhemina R. Pelegrina and Renato Salazar, ‘Farmers’ Communities: A Reflection on the Treaty from Small Farmers’ Perspectives’, in Plant Genetic Resources and Food Security: Stakeholder Perspectives on the International Treaty of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, eds. Christine Frison, Francisco Lopez and Jose T. Esquinas-Alcazar (London: Earthscan, 2011), 175-182. 15 Cary Fowler, Melinda Smale and Samy Gaiji, ‘Unequal Exchange? Recent Transfers of Agricultural Resources and Their Implications for Developing Countries’, Development Policy Review 19, No. 2 (2001): 181-204; Andersen, Governing Agrobiodiversity, 97. 16 Michael Halewood and Kent Nnadozie, ‘Giving Priority to the Commons: The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture’, in The Future Control of Food: A Guide to International Negotiations and Rules on Intellectual Property, Biodiversity and Food Security, eds. Geoff Tansey and Tasmin Rajotte (London: Earthscan, 2008).

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__________________________________________________________________ 17

Catherine Phillips, ‘Cultivating Practices: Saving Seed as Green Citizenship?’, Environments 33, No. 3 (2005): 37-49. 18 M. Pautasso et al., ‘Seed Exchange Networks for Agrobiodiversity Conservation. A Review’, Agronomy for Sustainable Development 33, No. 1 (2013): 156. 19 David Schlosberg, ‘Reconceiving Environmental Justice: Global Movements and Political Theories’, Environmental Politics 13, No. 3 (2004): 525. 20 McAfee, ‘Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism’, 138. 21 Schlosberg, ‘Reconceiving Environmental Justice: Global Movements and Political Theories’, 517. 22 Turkish wheat landraces, which have been developed and maintained through informal seed exchanges, have for instance supplied genes for stem nematode, bunt and hessian fly resistance; a contribution that was estimated to amount to 50 million USD a year to the United States seed industry, Jack Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492-2000 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 23 Navdanya was assisted by its parent organisation, the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), but also other non-governmental organisations and associations, See http://navdanya.org/campaigns/biopiracy. 24 A. C. Zeven, ‘The Traditional Inexplicable Replacement of Seed and Seed Ware of Landraces and Cultivars: A Review’, Euphytica 110 (1999): 187. 25 See http://www.arche-noah.at/etomite/index.php?id=271. 26 See http://www.seed-sovereignty.org/EN/.

Bibliography Almekinders, Conny J. M., Niels Louwaars, and G. H. De Bruijn. ‘Local Seed Systems and Their Importance for an Improved Seed Supply in Developing Countries’. Euphytica 78 (1994): 207–216. Andersen, Regine. Governing Agrobiodiversity. Governance. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Global

Environmental

Bavikatte, Kabir, and Daniel F. Robinson. ‘Towards a People’s History of the Law: Biocultural Jurisprudence and the Nagoya Protocol on Access and BenefitSharing’. Law, Environment and Development Journal 7, No. 1 (2011): 35–51.

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__________________________________________________________________ Bragdon, Susan, Kathryn Garforth, and John Haapala. ‘Safeguarding Biodiversity: The Convention on Biological Diversity’. In The Future Control of Food: A Guide to International Negotiations and Rules on Intellectual Property, Biodiversity and Food Security, edited by Geoff Tansey, and Tasmin Rajotte, 82–114. London: Earthscan, 2008. Cleveland, David A., Daniela Soleri, and Stephen Smith. ‘Farmer Plant Breeding from a Biological Perspective: Implications for Collaborative Plant Breeding’. In Economics Working Paper 99-10. Mexico: CIMMYT, 1999. Fowler, Cary, Melinda Smale, and Samy Gaiji. ‘Unequal Exchange? Recent Transfers of Agricultural Resources and Their Implications for Developing Countries’. Development Policy Review 19, No. 2 (2001): 181–204. Groosman, Ton, Anita R. Linnemann, and Holke S. M. Wierema. Technology Development and Changing Seed Supply Systems: Seminar Proceedings, 22-23 June 1988. Development Research Institute (IVO), 1988. Halewood, Michael, and Kent Nnadozie. ‘Giving Priority to the Commons: The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture’. In The Future Control of Food: A Guide to International Negotiations and Rules on Intellectual Property, Biodiversity and Food Security, edited by Geoff Tansey, and Tasmin Rajotte, 115–140. London: Earthscan, 2008. Kloppenburg, Jack. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492-2000. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Lipper, Leslie, C. Leigh Anderson, and Timothy J. Dalton. Seed Trade in Rural Markets: Implications for Crop Diversity and Agricultural Development. London: Earthscan, 2009. McAfee, Kathleen. ‘Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism’. Environment and Planning 17 (1999): 133–154. Nagarajan, Latha, and Melinda Smale. ‘Community Seed Systems and the Biodiversity of Millet Crops in Southern India’. In Valuing Crop Diversity: On Farm Genetic Resources and Economic Change, edited by Melinda Smale, 211– 232. CAB International, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ Pautasso, Marco, Guntra Aistara, Adeline Barnaud, Sophie Caillon, Pascal Clouvel, Oliver T. Coomes, Marc Delêtre, et al. ‘Seed Exchange Networks for Agrobiodiversity Conservation. A Review’. Agronomy for Sustainable Development 33, No. 1 (2013): 151–175. Pelegrina, Wilhemina R., and Renato Salazar. ‘Farmers’ Communities: A Reflection on the Treaty from Small Farmers’ Perspectives’. In Plant Genetic Resources and Food Security: Stakeholder Perspectives on the International Treaty of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, edited by Christine Frison, Francisco Lopez, and Jose T. Esquinas-Alcazar, 175–182. London: Earthscan, 2011. Phillips, Catherine. ‘Cultivating Practices: Saving Seed as Green Citizenship?’. Environments 33, No. 3 (2005): 37–49. Pray, Carl, and Bbarat Ramaswami. A Framework for Seed Policy Analysis in Developing Countries. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1991. Schlosberg, David. ‘Reconceiving Environmental Justice: Global Movements and Political Theories’. Environmental Politics 13, No. 3 (2004): 525–540. Sperling, Louise, H. David Cooper, and Tom Remington. ‘Moving toward More Effective Seed Aid’. Journal of Development Studies 44, No. 4 (2008): 586–612. Zeven, A. C. ‘The Traditional Inexplicable Replacement of Seed and Seed Ware of Landraces and Cultivars: A Review’. Euphytica 110 (1999): 181–191. Fulya Batur is a research fellow affiliated with the Biodiversity Governance Unit of the Centre for the Philosophy of Law at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. She holds an LLB in law and an LLM in public international law. Her research interests lie in the study of intellectual property regimes relevant to biodiversity and genetic resource governance.

Can Common Property Regimes in Colombia Curb the Expansion of Coca Crops and the Deforestation? Alexander Rincón Ruiz Abstract The beginning of the 2000s saw the extension of a policy of forced eradication of coca crops (for illicit use) in Colombia, based principally on fumigation and manual eradication; this policy generated a displacement of the crops to other zones, such as the Pacific region. The creation of collective territories in this region started in the 1990s and expanded in the 2000s, 1 and put forward the hypothesis that such territories (considered by Ostrom 2 to be one of the first steps in the establishment of robust, sustainable, self-governing bodies), could be a factor in the curbing of the expansion of coca crops in the region, an area which is of great cultural and environmental importance. In our investigation, we show that this is not the case, and demonstrate that in fact, the cultivation of illicit crops has led to fragmentation in the collective territories through the increase in violence and forced displacement of people, all of which may have impeded the establishment of these collective territories. With one case study, however, we show that under another type of anti-drug policy based on strengthening of the community and encouraging self-organisation, collective territories can indeed impede the expansion of coca cultivation. Key Words: Collective territories, coca crops, Colombia, commons, AfroColombian. ***** 1. Introduction Since Ostrom’s work, 3 there has been more and more evidence of the importance of the role of local communities in the appropriate management of natural resources, beginning with the strengthening of local government. 4 This is very important in the case of Latin America, where communities possess 25% of the forest, and 8% has been legally allocated for their use. 5 By means of a case study in one department of the Colombian Pacific region, 6 identified the creation of collective territories of Afro-Colombian communities (Community Council – CC) as a fundamental step in the establishment of a form of government that can ensure the sustainability of its own resources. With the establishment of the CC, advances were made in the assignment of property rights and the exclusion of non-members from these communities. In this chapter it is established how the creation of CCs (despite the presence of favorable circumstances for the generation of self-government that should ensure an adequate management of common resources), unfortunately do not stop the expansion of coca crops and the degradation of natural ecosystems, and that in

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Can Common Property Regimes in Colombia Curb the Expansion...?

__________________________________________________________________ addition, the increase in cultivation generated violence 7 and forced displacement in the collective territories, which could have been a factor in their failure to become properly established. At the end of the investigation, we analysed a particular case study, unique in being the only CC that has successfully eradicated illicit crops by abandoning the traditional anti-drug policy (the only example where anti-drug policy was not applied in the same way as in the rest of the country), and showed how using another type of integrated anti-drug policy, robust and sustainable territories could be established despite the expansion of illicit crops in the region. 1.1 The Colombian Pacific Region The Colombian Pacific region is a geographical unit and a natural region located in western Colombia and stretching between the borders of Panama and Ecuador. It has an area of over 116,000 km2 and contains four departments: Chocó, Valle del Cauca (Buenaventura), Cauca and Nariño (see Image 1). The whole territory shares certain characteristics: forest vegetation and drainage basins over wide and sometimes swampy valleys from which emerge the Baudó Mountains in the Department of Chocó and the Andes in the Departments of Cauca and Nariño. Three fundamental characteristics converge in the Pacific region of Colombia: a) it is one of the poorest regions in the country; b) it is one of the most environmentally important areas in the country; and c) most of the population is Afro-Colombian.

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__________________________________________________________________

Image 1: Departments of the Pacific Region of Colombia. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. 2. Methodological Aspects 2.1 Data and Association Analysis We constructed a database at the municipal level, including data for 137 municipalities in the four departments (Nariño, Choco, Cauca and Valle) that make up the Pacific region of Colombia (see Image 1) and containing variables concerning coca crops, fumigations and aspects such as violence and forced displacement (Table 1) that, according to the literature, are associated with the expansion of coca crops. 8

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Can Common Property Regimes in Colombia Curb the Expansion...?

__________________________________________________________________ Table 1: Variables Selected for the Analysis of the Municipalities of the Colombian Pacific Region. Name

Variable Name

Years

Source

Unit

Presidency of the Republic of Colombia - Presidential Agency for Number of displaced people Social Action and International Cooperation

FDP

Forced displacement of population

2001 - 2008

VAIA

Number of violent acts by illegal armed groups

2001 - 2007

Los Andes University, Bogotá and the Colombian Ministry of Defense

Number of violent acts

2001 - 2007

Colombian National Police

Number of homicides by illegal armed groups

2000

Colombia Ecosystem map (Shape) - Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies of Colombia (IDEAM: Instituto de Hidrología, Meteorología y Estudios Ambientales de Colombia) - Estimation by the author

Percentage

MIAG Number of murders by illegal armed groups

PPF

Percentage of primary forest area

Description Number of people forcibly displaced by violence and conflict. This information is taken from the National System of Attention to Displaced People ("Sistema Nacional de Atención Integral a la Población Desplazada"). Number of violent acts by Illegal Armed Groups (FARC, AUC, ELN) per municipality, including terrorist acts, assaults, attacks, roadblocks, ambushes, harassment, and attacks on the population. Homicides committed by common criminals are not taken into account. Hectares of primary forest as percentage of the total area of the municipality.

PCOCA

Percentage of coca area

2001 - 2008

Coca maps (Shape) - Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System (SIMCI: Sistema Integrado de cultivos ilicitos)

Percentage

NCOMP

Number of complaints to the Ombudsman by citizens concerning aerial spraying

2001 - 2008

Local and National Ombudsman's Office

Number of complaints

AF

Aerial fumigation

National Narcotics Bureau (DNE: Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes) National Narcotics Bureau (DNE: Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes) Maps of black communities (Shape) - Geographic Institute Agustín Codazzi

Number of hectares

Total area fumigated between 2001 and 2008.

Number of hectares

Number of hectares under legal status of black communities (ABC).

AF01-08 Area fumigated between 2001 and 2008

2001 - 2008 Total 2001 - 2008

Number of hectares

Hectares of cultivated coca as percentage of the total area of the municipality. Number of complaints to the Ombudsman by citizens concerning aerial fumigation. Number of fumigated hectares per municipality.

BC

Area of the municipality belonging to black communities

2001 - 2008

AECO

Area of natural cover and natural ecosystems at a municipal level

2000

Colombia Ecosystem map (Shape) - Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies of Colombia (IDEAM: Instituto de Hidrología, Meteorología y Estudios Ambientales de Colombia) - Estimation by the author

Number of hectares

Hectares of natural cover of a certain ecosystem type within the municipality.

MUNCC

Presence of community councils (AfroColombian communities) by municipality

2008

Maps of Afro-Colombian communities - Geographic Institute Agustín Codazzi

0 or 1

0 if there are no community councils in the municipality; 1 if there are community councils in the municipality.

PERC_CC

Percentage of area in community councils (Afro-Colombian communities) by municipality

2008

Maps of Afro-Colombian communities - Geographic Institute Agustín Codazzi

Percentage

Percentage of area in community councils (Afro-Colombian communities) by municipality

CALS

Area cultivated with coca in black communities

2000 - 2008

Coca maps (Shape) - Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System (SIMCI: Sistema Integrado de Cultivos Ilicitos) and maps of black communities' territories - Geographic Institute Agustín Codazzi

Number of hectares with coca in black communities by year

Number of hectares with coca crops in Afro-Colombian territories.

With this information, we were able to carry out an initial analysis of the association between the percentage of the area of each municipality producing coca and the variables of violence, forced displacement and aerial fumigations, considered to be three key factors offering evidence for the association between the expansion of illicit crops and social destabilisation in the region. Community councils were present in 38 of the 137 municipalities analysed, and in 69 municipalities we found presence of coca production for at least one year between 2001 and 2008. 2.2 Fieldwork: Case Study As part of the investigation, we decided to analyse and document what could be considered the only case in which coca crops were successfully eliminated in a voluntary manner, based on an integrated approach that was very different from the standard anti-drug policy implemented at a national level throughout Colombia. The case occurred in Las Varas Community (located in the municipality of Tumaco in the Department of Nariño (see Image 2). Las Varas has an area of around 15,000 hectares and a population of 5,948. 9 In order to document this process, fieldwork was carried out in the area, interviews were conducted and dialogue held with community leaders and members, experts on the subject and local authorities, with the aim of finding out

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__________________________________________________________________ how successful the initiative had been. In total, four Las Varas CC leaders, five members of the community, and the coordinators of the Las Varas Sí, se Puede (‘Yes, We Can’) programme were interviewed. Las Varas CC was visited to learn about the various initiatives developed by the community within the Sí, se Puede programme, photographic and video material was gathered and the majority of the interviews were recorded. The interviews focused on 1) learning about the expansion of coca cultivation in Las Varas; 2) understanding what the Sí, se Puede programme consisted of; 3) determining how the elimination of the illicit cops was achieved through this programme and 4) finding out what future challenges lie ahead for the community. All of the audio, photographic and video material was analysed and described in the results, showing how the Las Varas CC succeeded in virtually eliminating the coca crops through the Sí, se Puede programme. In addition, we used spatial information on coca cultivation from Las Varas CC, Tumaco Municipality and the Department of Nariño for the years 2007, 2008 and 2009. This information was provided by SIMCI and proved to be fundamental in the estimation of coca crop trends before and after the Sí, se Puede programme.

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Can Common Property Regimes in Colombia Curb the Expansion...?

__________________________________________________________________

Image 2: Collective Territories of Afro-Colombian Communities and Community Council Rescate – Las Varas. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. 3. Results 3.1 Failure of Anti-Drug Policy: Expansion of Illicit Crops to Collective Territories of Afro-Colombian Communities and an Increase in Deforestation During the first decade of the 2000s, the total area used for coca production in Colombia decreased from 163,000 ha in 2000 to 80,948 in 2008, 10 principally as a consequence of the anti-drug policy implemented by the government, which was based on aerial fumigations with glyphosate, manual eradication and voluntary substitution. 11 This reduction generated a displacement of coca crops from the zones in which they had been concentrated (mainly in the north of the Department

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__________________________________________________________________ of Amazonas) to other areas of great environmental importance, such as the Pacific region (Image 3). So while the cultivation was decreasing in absolute terms, the deforested area due to the coca crops continued to increase in areas such as the Pacific region.

Image 3: Annual Average Growth of Coca (2001-2008) ha. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. According to studies that have been carried out, it has been estimated that within the 49,649 km2 occupied by collective territories of Afro-Colombian communities, there were 3,429 hectares of coca in the year 2000. Over the next few years this area grew, reaching 15,032 ha in 2008, signifying an increase of more than 300%.

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Can Common Property Regimes in Colombia Curb the Expansion...?

__________________________________________________________________ By performing correlation, it was found that the municipalities with the largest areas of coca in the Pacific region tended to be in the parts with the most natural cover and that in turn; the areas with the most natural cover were significantly associated with municipalities containing community councils. 3.2 Coca Crops, an Increase in Violence, Forced Displacement and Fumigation in Community Councils in the Pacific Region The association analyses carried out in Pacific region municipalities show a difference between 2001 and 2008; in the year 2008 a direct and significant association was found to exist between the percentage of area used for growing coca and forced displacement; as well as between the former and variables associated with violence (total homicides, number of violent acts). However, in 2001 these associations were not significant. These results demonstrate how the expansion of illicit crops that began in the Pacific region in 2000 has been accompanied by an increase in the levels of violence and forced displacement. 3.3 A Successful Case Study amidst Increasing Coca Cultivation: An Integrated Policy in the Community Council Rescate – Las Varas A process of interviews and dialogue with the leaders of the Las Varas community, confirmed what had previously been shown with statistics: There had been a process of expansion of illicit crops and violence to the communities in the Pacific region as a consequence of failed anti-drug policy in the country that had generated a displacement of coca crops. Before the arrival of coca crops, Las Varas had been a united community, albeit a poor one that was deficient in basic services such as health, education and sewerage. Although it was officially named a collective territory in 2006, for many years it had traditionally been a united and collective community. However, it had never felt supported by the national government, had never received social investment and felt abandoned by the State. Shortly after the formation of Las Varas CC, according to the leaders, something tragic and unfortunate occurred: the arrival of coca to the territory (see Image 4). Partly due to the poverty and the absence of the state, the conditions were appropriate for the cultivation of coca. The crops came with outsiders, people who were not from the territory. After the arrival of coca, the community fragmented and a focus on easy money developed, generating a new culture in which it was more important to have money than to help others; violence increased and material possessions started to become more important than the tradition of being part of a community. As the situation deteriorated, things that had previously been done voluntarily and selflessly were now charged for, and internal levels of trust fell. In general, the mentality of the population changed and a culture arose in which people wanted to have more at any cost. Furthermore, the national anti-drug policy, based principally on aerial fumigation, affected much of the community, since the herbicide not only killed

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__________________________________________________________________ coca plants but also legal crops that were growing, generating more poverty and exacerbating the loss of trust in the national government. Faced with violence, expanding coca crops, and aerial fumigation, the leaders of Las Varas CC took a proposal to the provincial government of Nariño. They proposed strengthening the community through financial support and projects that would restore trust and traditional community values and move away from the cultivation of coca. The Community Council’s proposal was heard by the provincial government and was formally established as the Las Varas Sí, se Puede programme whose primary objectives were the organisational development of the community, the restoration of trust and the creation of alternatives to enable the community to abandon the illicit crops in a voluntary manner; in addition, it was deliberately set apart from traditional anti-drug policy that focused on aerial fumigation. The programme began in 2008 and was financially maintained by international cooperation (USAID) until 2011. With the initiative, the community managed to move away from illicit crops and return to a culture of legality, to working together, sometimes in exchange for food, thereby achieving something unique in Colombia: the almost total elimination of coca crops from the territory (which had previously been showing trends of increasing coca) in a voluntary manner, within a year and without any aerial fumigation. According to estimates based on coca censuses carried out by SIMCI, in 2007 there were 50 ha of coca in Las Varas, a figure which rose to 80 ha in 2008 and then fell sharply by 86% to 11 ha in 2009 (see Image 4), despite a growing background of violence. But how was this reduction achieved? Next, we shall expound upon the principal factors found in this investigation from interviews with the community and its leaders.

Image 4: Coca Crop Area in the Community Council Rescate – Las Varas 20072009. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author.

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Can Common Property Regimes in Colombia Curb the Expansion...?

__________________________________________________________________ 3.4 How Was the Reduction of Coca Crops Achieved with the Sí, se Puede Programme? a) Talk of substitution, rather than elimination of coca crops: Unlike traditional policy which is based on forced manual eradication and aerial fumigation, the community organised and carried out a process which they called voluntary substitution of illicit crops. Whereas in other areas forced manual eradication had caused confrontation between the community and the State, in Las Varas this was permitted by the community without confrontation; as they themselves say, it was a voluntary process. Although at the start of the process not all of the districts had accepted the agreement, a few months into the programme all 15 of the districts had signed up to the voluntary elimination of illicit crops. b) Restoration of internal trust within the community: The projects undertaken by the programme restored internal trust within the community, the construction of a sports centre aided social integration and projects such as Painted House, which consisted of friends and neighbours painting the neighbouring house, restored a spirit of fraternity amongst the population. Projects such as a food security programme generated confidence in a better future away from violence and illicit crops. A soccer field was installed where young people from the various districts constantly interacted. All of the projects originated from the community itself, which increased the levels of trust in as well as the appreciation for what was being carried out. The Sí, se Puede programme succeeded in restoring trust in the community since it was not a policy imposed by the State, but one agreed upon by the community itself. This led to the people caring for the project as something of their own. c) Social investment for the whole territory: One component of traditional antidrug policy consisted of making payments to coca growers to stop them from producing. This measure excludes the remainder of the population – the people that do not grow coca – fostering unrest and sending the wrong message: to receive monetary support, one should grow coca. The Sí, se Puede programme overcame this problem by being a plan for the whole territory. The projects and investment offered something for everybody: infrastructure, roads, footbridges, sewers, education, a food security programme and productive projects such as cocoa farming. d) No to fumigations: One maxim was repeatedly used by the community and its leaders: We are not friends of coca but we are enemies of fumigation. Fumigation generates unrest and loss of trust in the government and does not result in a genuine elimination of coca but a displacement of crops to other zones. Forced (as opposed to voluntary) policies, i.e. eradication and fumigation, lead to loss of trust in the government and malaise in the communities which continue to grow coca in any case. In addition, fumigation damages legal crops, threatening the municipality’s food security. With the Sí, se Puede programme, an agreement was

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__________________________________________________________________ reached with national governmental institutions; with the international community present to witness and monitor the proceedings, it was agreed that there would be no fumigation in the territory of Las Varas Community. e) Governmental restructuring and social organisation: The Sí, se Puede programme allowed the community to organise itself internally, resulting in a governmental structure in which the community could trust. This self-organisation, though a complex process, was easier than in other areas as the community had a tradition of internal dialogue and community character, something which had started a long time ago (yet had not been well documented). The governance of the territory was planned on a bottom-up basis and began with restoring the tradition of dialogue and cooperation. Almost everybody who was interviewed agreed that this self-organisation was the source of the power needed to replace the coca crops, only the joint action undertaken as a community and the consequent generation of trust were able to raise the strength required to rid the territory of coca crops. This self-organisation was established between 2008 and 2011, the period in which the program existed. Most of the community associated with the structural organisation of the community council did not receive monetary compensation for their work; it was carried out on a voluntary basis. f) An initiative born and developed within the community: Sí, se Puede – Las Varas is a proposal developed on a bottom-up basis which was combined with traditional state policy later on (in February, 2010), but preserving respect for the initial rules which originated from the community. This locally conceived initiative was removed from standard anti-drug policy that was a part of Plan Colombia and came from a national mandate. Despite having been formed within the community, the initiative was supported by the government via a team of professionals that helped the local people. g) Coordination between the community and regional and international authorities: Although the Sí, se Puede programme was a local initiative, it managed to coordinate regional, national and international cooperation. The first clear detail that arose from the communities was that the success to date was the product of a long internal process, and not a result of the Consolidation Plan or any nationally ordered directive. The Las Varas CC Assembly was the internal organisation that allowed national and international cooperation to operate within the territory in an organised fashion. 4. Conclusions During the first decade of the 2000s, there was a displacement of coca cultivation towards the Pacific region, principally areas rich in natural forest and where there were collective territories of Afro-Colombian communities. Along with the expansion of illicit crops came a rise in the levels of deforestation as well as increases in the levels of violence, forced displacement and fumigation policy in the region. This combination of phenomena made conditions difficult for the

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__________________________________________________________________ Community Councils to achieve their objective of generating robust, sustainable self-government. Although the expansion of coca crops to the Pacific region marred the establishment of the Community Councils (due to anti-drug policy based on aerial fumigation and manual eradication that generated a movement of coca cultivation rather than a genuine reduction), it was found that community councils can be an institution fundamental to the creation of robust, sustainable self-government, and even the reduction and elimination of illicit crops, provided that traditional antidrug policy is avoided and locally based, integrated policies are used that promote the idea of collective, community territory. This idea is based on the successful case of the Las Varas CC in the Department of Nariño. The process that was followed in this case could be an important role model, and one to be replicated in other regions. It can also be concluded that the expansion of coca cultivation to the Pacific region took place regardless of the presence of Community Councils in the municipality, which answers the question posed by Vélez 12 about whether the existence of Community Councils had prevented a greater expansion of illicit crops. Correlation analysis shows that this prevention did not occur. From this it can be concluded that the existence of Community Councils, although fundamental in guaranteeing a territory for the community, is not sufficient; it is essential that these Councils have economic resources available in order to enable the community to organise itself, plan and carry out projects. The most important conclusion of this investigation is that although we have seen that Community Councils have not managed to slow the expansion of coca, we have shown how support of integrated initiatives developed by the community itself constitutes a far more effective and sustainable policy regarding the elimination of illicit crops than the traditional anti-drug policy that has been operating in Colombia for over a decade. 13

Notes 1

Astrid Aristizabal, ‘Efectos del Monocultivo de la Palma de Aceite en los Medios de Vida de las Comunidades Campesinas: El Caso de Simití – Sur de Bolívar’ (Master Thesis, Bogota: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Colombia: 2009); María Vélez, ‘Sistemas Complejos de Gobierno Local: Reflexiones Sobre la Titulación Colectiva en el Pacífico Vallecaucano’, Revista de Estudios Sociales 32 (2009): 74-84. 2 Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity (Princeton, NY: Princeton University, 2005), 11-36. 3 Ibid.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4

Michael Richards, ‘Common Property Resource Institutions and Forest Management in Latin America’, Development and Change 28 (1997): 95-117, doi:10.1111/1467-7660.00036; Alexander Rincón-Ruiz and Giorgos Kallis, ‘Caught in the Middle, Colombia’s War on Drugs and Its Effects on Forest and People’, Geoforum 46 (2013): 60-78, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.12.009. 5 Anne Larson, Deborah Barry and Ganga Ram Dahal, ‘New Rights for ForestBased Communities? Understanding Processes of Forest Tenure Reform’, International Forestry Review (2010): 78-96, doi:10.1505/ifor.12.1.78. 6 Aristizabal, ‘Efectos del Monocultivo de la Palma de Aceite’; Vélez, ‘Sistemas Complejos de Gobierno Local’, 74-84. 7 Jennifer S. Holmes and Sheila Gutierrez, ‘The Illegal Drug Industry, Violence and the Colombian Economy: A Department Level Analysis’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 25 (2006): 104-118, doi:10.1111/j.0261-3050.2006.00155.x. 8 Ana M. Díaz and Fabio Sánchez, A Geography of Illicit Crops (Coca Leaf) and Armed Conflict in Colombia (Center of Studies for Economic Development, Department of Economics, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia: 2004), accessed 12 September 2011, http://www.crisisstates.com/Publications/publications.htm; Mauricio Rubio, ‘Illegal Armed Groups and Local Politics in Colombia’, Journal of Drug Issues 35 (2005): 107-130, doi:10.1177/002204260503500105, accessed 21 August 2011, http://jod.sagepub.com/content/35/1/107.full.pdf+html. 9 Diócesis de Tumaco, Que Nadie Diga que no Pasa Nada! Una Mirada Desde la Región del Pacífico Nariñense (Nariño – Colombia, 2009), accessed 4 March 2011, http://www.nocheyniebla.org/files/tumaco/que_no_diga.pdf. 10 United Nations Office on Drugs, Crime, y Vienna International Ctr, World Drug Report 2008 (United Nations Publications, 2008), accessed 5 September 2011, http://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?id=245210; United Nations Office on Drugs, Crime, World Drug Report 2010 (United Nations Publications, 2010), accessed 23 October 2011, http://www.odc.gov.co/docs/publicaciones_nacionales/ODC_2010-2009.pdf. 11 Ministerio del Interior y de la Justicia, Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes, Observatorio de Drogas de Colombia: Acciones y Resultados (Bogotá, Colombia: Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes, 2006). 12 Vélez, ‘Sistemas Complejos de Gobierno Local’, 74-84.

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Bibliography Aristizabal, Astrid. ‘Efectos del Monocultivo de la Palma de Aceite en los Medios de Vida de las Comunidades Campesinas: El Caso de Simití – Sur de Bolívar’. Master of Rural Development. Master Thesis, Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Colombia, 2009. Armenteras, Dolors, Rudas Guillermo, Rodriguez Nelly, Sua Sonia, and Romero Milton. ‘Patterns and Causes of Deforestation in the Colombian Amazon’. Ecological Indicators 6 (2006): 353–368. CODHES, 2011. Campesinos e Indígenas de Cumaribo Estarían en Peligro de Desplazamiento por Fumigaciones Aéreas. Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (CODHES), Bogotá. http://www.codhes.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=111. Defensoria del Pueblo. Informe Defensorial Sobre la Situación de Derechos Humanos y Derecho Internacional Humanitario del Pueblo Indigena AWA Departamento de Nariño. Colombia. Bogotá: Defensoria del Pueblo, República de Colombia, 2007. Díaz, Ana M., and Sánchez Fabio. Geography of Illicit Crops (Coca Leaf) and Armed Conflict in Colombia. Center of Studies for Economic Development, Department of Economics. Universidad de los Andes 2004. http://www.crisisstates.com/Publications/publications.htm. Diócesis de Tumaco. Que Nadie Diga que no Pasa Nada! Una Mirada desde la Región del Pacífico Nariñense. Nariño – Colombia, 2009. http://www.nocheyniebla.org/files/tumaco/que_no_diga.pdf. Holmes, Jennifer S., and Gutierrez Sheila. ‘The Illegal Drug Industry, Violence and the Colombian Economy: A Department Level Analysis’. Bulletin of Latin American Research 25 (2006): 104–118. Larson, Anne M., Barry Deborah, and Ram Dahal Ganga. ‘New Rights for ForestBased Communities? Understanding Processes of Forest Tenure Reform’. International Forestry Review (2010): 78–96. Doi:10.1505/ifor.12.1.78.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ministerio del Interior y de la Justicia, Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes. Observatorio de Drogas de Colombia: Acciones y Resultados. Bogotá, Colombia: Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes, 2006. Oslender, Ulrich. Fumigaciones en el Área de Guapi, Costa Caucana – Un Crimen contra la Humanidad y la Biodiversidad: Letter Addressed to the President of Colombia (Alvaro Uribe), Demand an Immediate Stop to the Fumigations. The Signers are Dr. Ulrich Oslender and othe 50 academics that have worked in the Colombian Pacific Region. Ostrom, Elinor. Understanding Institutional Diversity, 11–36. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2005. Richards, Michael. ‘Common Property Resource Institutions and Forest Management in Latin America’. Development and Change 28 (1997): 95–117. Doi:10.1111/1467-7660.00036. Rincón-Ruiz, Alexander, and Giorgos Kallis. ‘Caught in the Middle, Colombia’s War on Drugs and Its Effects on Forest and People’. Geoforum 46 (2013): 60–78. Doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.12.009. Rubio, Mauricio. ‘Illegal Armed Groups and Local Politics in Colombia’. Journal of Drug Issues 35 (2005): 107–130. Doi:10.1177/002204260503500105. United Nations Office on Drugs, Crime. World Drug Report 2008. Vienna, Austria: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – UNODC, 2008. Accessed 5 September 2011. http://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?id=245210. —––. World Drug Report 2010. Vienna, Austria: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – UNODC, 2010. Accessed 23 October 2011. http://www.odc.gov.co/docs/publicaciones_nacionales/ODC_2010-2009.pdf. Vélez, María A. ‘Sistemas Complejos de Gobierno Local: Reflexiones Sobre la Titulación Colectiva en el Pacífico Vallecaucano’. Revista de Estudios Sociales 32, No. 1 (2009): 74–85. Alexander Rincón Ruiz is an economist, holds a PhD in Ecological Economics, is a researcher of socio-environmental conflicts and researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Institute in Colombia.

Waste, Power and Justice: Towards a Socially and Environmentally Just Waste Management System in Sri Lanka Randika Jayasinghe and Caroline Baillie Abstract Marginalised people have the greatest need for improved waste management services. However, much like other public services, waste management services benefit the affluent and the people in power, leaving areas where poor and marginalised people live with inadequate services or sometimes no services at all. This, despite the fact that it is they who serve the city, clean and sweep streets, collect and sort recyclables. Authorities, professionals and experts perceive waste as a problem and construct what needs to be done from a distance. Hence, solutions and action plans are not constructed based on the experience of working with waste, but from a distance based on theories, reports, literature and technical knowledge. Reality is much more complex and messy and the solutions more difficult to achieve. This chapter uses a Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) to explore the complex power dynamics of the waste management system in the Western Province of Sri Lanka. The goal of FDA is to reveal the hegemonic patterns of power that govern dominant discourse. We conducted interviews with different stakeholders in waste management; formal and informal waste collectors, recyclers, community based organisations, government officials, private companies, professionals, NGOs, environmental groups and households. We then analysed the transcripts for instances of power relations and their impact on waste management practices and on the marginalised waste workers in the community. What matters to most poor and marginalised groups often differs from what the society assumes. Measures to reduce environmental injustice and poverty should first come from the marginalised groups dealing with waste in their day-today lives, not directly from the politicians, authorities, experts and professionals. We conclude that, by listening to their needs, giving an opportunity to voice their opinions in project planning and providing space for active participation, marginalised groups working in waste management will be able to make a real transformation in their lives resulting in a more sustainable waste management system in the country. Key Words: Waste management, power relations, marginalised groups, justice, Foucauldian discourse analysis. *****

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__________________________________________________________________ 1. Waste Management: A Major Challenge for Local Governance in Sri Lanka This chapter will report on a critical examination of power relations in waste management within the Western Province of Sri Lanka. After a 30-year war, it is the government’s goal to transform Sri Lanka into a ‘strategically important economic centre of the world, serving as the key link between East and West.’ 1 In a context where it is believed that, cleaner cities attract people and investments, solid waste management and related issues have come to be matters of great importance. The Western Province is under particular pressure to show the new attractiveness of Sri Lanka. However, waste management lags behind as the service with the least satisfaction amongst residents in the province. The total municipal solid waste generation in Sri Lanka is estimated at 6,400 tons per day with a per capita per day waste generation average of 0.85kg in Colombo Municipal Council, 0.75kg in other Municipal Councils, 0.60kg in Urban Councils and 0.40kg in Divisional Secretariats. 2 Less than 50% of the solid waste generated each day gets collected, of which 59% comes from the Western Province. 3 In the absence of adequate waste management facilities, waste is dumped haphazardly posing great health risks. 4 Media often report on unattended waste dumps, public protests against landfills and the inconveniences attached to these. What these reports rarely document is the diversity of experiences that is attached to waste. Waste is a problem to both rich and poor alike. However, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds suffer most from the unfavourable conditions arising from waste 5 as seen in the recent case of the Meethotamulla dumpsite protest. 6 Exposure to waste is a highly unequal experience; an experience which is embedded in social relations of power. Particular actors are exposed to waste more than others, and decision–making is not equitable. Waste management can therefore be conceptualised as a system of power as we go on to explain in the subsequent sections. We started our research with the aim of implementing a waste-based composite project for marginalised sectors working with waste in the Western Province of Sri Lanka. This innovative project, which couples waste management with poverty reducing strategies, was developed by a not-for-profit organisation called Waste for Life (WfL). 7 It is a loosely joined network of people across the world working together to develop poverty reducing solutions to environmental and social problems. Before embarking on such a project, we knew we had to do much background work. The exploratory phase of the project required conducting a feasibility study and a Social Impact Assessment (SIA). Understanding power relations was deemed to be important for these studies.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. A Critical Theory Approach to Justice Riley, in her book on Engineering and Social Justice, maintains that applying critical thinking helps to understand the ‘institutional nature of prejudice, the connectedness of oppression, and the notion of intersectionality.’ 8 Hence, by using the tools provided by critical social theorists, we can dissect power relations and identify oppression in social processes around us. As Foucault points out; .

All my books are if you like, little tool-boxes. If people want to open them, use a sentence, an idea, an analysis as a screwdriver or a spanner in order to short-circuit, disqualify and break systems of power, including if need be, those which have given rise to my own books, well, so much the better !! 9 Our goal too, is to reveal the hegemonic patterns of power that govern dominant discourse in waste management within the Western Province of Sri Lanka. A. Discourse, Power and Knowledge: A Foucauldian Approach An important factor to keep in mind when considering waste management and decision-making is that, while the existence of problems and issues related to waste management have been acknowledged and discussed extensively, the relation between decision-making and power has been relatively neglected. Hence, waste management literature fails to theorise power relations in–depth. 10 To answer this challenge, we have used the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault on power and knowledge. 11 Foucault’s work on power and knowledge is useful for understanding why and how certain forms of knowledge are considered legitimate, while others are not. Foucauldian theory examines the influence of power on knowledge production and the ways in which relations of power shape the production, marginalisation or valorisation of different forms of knowledge. 12 According to Foucault, 13 discourses reinforce and legitimise certain regimes of truth, meaning and knowledge. Power can also be defined by what it represses or silences. Foucault’s work thus offers strong tools of analysis to examine the relations of power/knowledge in waste management related decision-making in a developing context. Knowledge possessed by marginalised sectors is often regarded as unreliable and contributes little or no valid evidence to the development of proper waste management systems. We have used Foucault’s work 14 to explore why contributions from these groups are devalued and to pose broader questions about what kind of evidence or knowledge is considered legitimate when making decisions.

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__________________________________________________________________ Looking at power relationships allow us to put questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ as focal points of our analysis. In our case, ‘how is waste managed in the Western Province?’ and ‘why is it managed that way?’ are vital questions. Based on this theoretical framework, the following questions have been chosen to facilitate the main questions and guide the analysis of this chapter: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Who has power to make decisions? How do they decide what needs to be done? Who are excluded from the decision making process? What kind of decisions are made? Who benefits, who pays?

Through its focus on waste management and power relations, this chapter aims to produce insights that broadens the understanding of power and justice in the context of waste management in developing countries more generally. 3. Research Approach A. Fieldwork and Data Collection One of the authors 15 visited Sri Lanka three times during 2011-2013 to conduct fieldwork. Data gathering included interviews, focus group discussions, and ethnographic fieldwork. In our interviews, we adopted an open-ended approach, being more interested in listening to people’s stories, rather than searching for concrete answers to structured questionnaires. We conducted interviews with a range of stakeholders; formal and informal waste collectors, recyclers, community based organisations, government officials, private companies, professionals, NGOs, environmental groups and households. Interviews were held in Sinhala, or a mixture of Sinhala and English depending on the respondents’ choice. Interviews were audio and/or video recorded and photographs were taken with the prior consent of the participants. We also noted down observations in the form of field notes. We analysed the transcripts for instances of power relations and their impact on waste management practices and on the marginalised sectors working with waste. We also analysed a variety of texts, including documents, official publications, published papers etc. The complex debate around the waste management practices has produced a large amount of text in a variety of formats. This makes the waste management system in the Western province an ideal candidate for a Foucauldian discourse analysis. B. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) Drawing on the work of Foucault, social theorists tend to view discourse analysis in a broader fashion to refer to the frameworks of ideas that structure both knowledge and social practice. According to Willig, ‘from a Foucauldian point of

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__________________________________________________________________ view, discourses facilitate and limit, enable and constrain what can be said, by whom, where and when.’ 16 It is important to note at the outset, however, that researchers have rarely explained in detail their discourse analytic method. Berg 17 argues that social scientists have inherited this from Foucault. As pointed out by Berg, ‘some of this reticence comes from Foucault’s own distaste for outlining his methods, but it also comes from a post-positivist sensibility that is itself wary of the idea of a simple list of methods that can be applied to discourse analysis.’ 18 Others seek to explain their methodology in more detail, and allow greater accessibility to the processes, for those unused to epistemologies and approaches very different from their own. Foucauldian discourse analysis is based on two analytical strategies – archaeology and genealogy. While genealogy analyses the development of discourse over time, archaeology looks at how power constraints discourse in a given period. 19 In the next section, we present an analysis of discourses on waste management in the Western province using Foucault’s archaeology. Our approach has drawn from Fairclough’s three-stage approach, 20 Parker’s twenty steps in the analysis of discourse dynamics, 21 Jäger’s discourse toolbox, 22 and Willig’s FDA approach. 23 We have also studied the key methodological issues summarised by Berg. 24 4. Exploring the Power Relations in Waste Management In our study, we focused on the relationships between marginalised groups and expert discourses and the ways in which these discourses shape the waste management system in the western province. The following section provides a synopsis of our analysis. Within the scope of this chapter, we cannot provide a detailed analysis of all our transcripts. Hence, we focus exclusively on the discourses of the ‘privileged voices’ and how these discourses exert power within the waste management system and on the marginalised waste workers in the community. A. Who Has Power to Make Decisions? Waste management is fundamentally shaped by the universal discourses of development. These discourses position the officials as the educated decision maker and the marginalised groups working with waste as the uneducated, povertystricken group in need of some sort of assistance. At present, scientific and academic knowledge appear to be preferred, leaving little room for the practical knowledge produced by waste collectors, recyclers and community based organisations working with waste. Hence, the scientific or the academic knowledge have become the dominant privileged voice within the system subjugating other types of knowledge. In an interview with one of the senior waste management officials in the Western Province, his reply was:

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__________________________________________________________________ Why do you want to implement a small-scale waste management project? You need to bring some new technology. Did you visit any state-of-the-art waste management facilities in Australia? That’s the kind of the project you need to bring here, not some small-scale project for waste collectors and recyclers. 25 Many officials believe that education, official status and expert knowledge, have granted them a deciding power; a right to decide what is needed and what is not, without consulting the people on the ground. This notion of blindly copying the developed countries has made waste management a politically sensitive issue that consumes a considerable share of the municipal budget. B. How Do They Decide What Needs to Be Done? When we consider the discourses of privileged voices, we can see that the decisions are made based on a top-down approach. Partnerships between decision makers and people on the ground can be built on positive principles such as respect, open communication and knowledge sharing. However, as mentioned above, often the system is filled with power relations that separate groups into those that have power, in terms of income, education, status etc. and those that do not. Policy decisions are often made by those who are detached from the day-today experiences of those working on the ground which according to Hust is an ‘immense lack of knowledge of how things really work in a city.’ 26 This top-down approach of decision-making has not achieved any positive outcome according to a renowned environmentalist, Dr. Ajantha Perera. She argues that this is the crux of the problem, and emphasises that: it lies in the fact that local authorities with no knowledge of the subject are blindly following the advice of foreign donors and privatising garbage collection and disposal operations. The problem, common to South and East Asian countries is rooted in World Bank advisories. Privatisation is welcomed by decisionmaking officers in air-conditioned rooms waiting for an opportunity to line their pockets. 27 Successive governments have been reluctant to take effective measures and enforce strict laws to resolve the waste problem due to the fear of losing votes. Hence, when waste becomes a real nuisance, they attempt to transfer waste to places that will have the least effect on their popularity, often to areas where poor people reside.

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__________________________________________________________________ C. Who Are Excluded from the Decision Making Process? As shown above, the discourses of privileged voices decide who should be excluded from the decision-making process. While dominant forms of knowledge enjoy authority, the knowledge of marginalised sectors are often neglected in decision–making. 28 As noted by one of the waste collectors, marginalised sectors have few opportunities to voice their opinions. On one occasion, they were asked to attend a forum to discuss solutions to current waste management issues in the country. However, small groups or individuals were not given an opportunity to voice their opinions. He added: I had some good things to share, but everyone was busy listening to what the experts had to say. The only good thing I got by attending is a piece of cake and a cup of tea. 29 It is evident that these forums, if organised in a sensitive and locally grounded manner, can serve as effective spaces to co-produce knowledge. It is equally important that opportunities to co-produce knowledge are encouraged at the state level. However, many small-scale entrepreneurs we interviewed were clearly disappointed and do not trust the current political system to help them in any way. One waste recycler stated: I feel disappointed; we do not receive funds from anyone. Even the government does not help. The only thing they do is to open a file and demand to pay tax. We recycle plastics and that is a benefit for the society and the environment, yet no one really appreciate it. If I want to do something, I have to mortgage my land and house and apply for a bank loan. 30 There were others who were positive about what they do, who have hope that things can be changed and it will, in the future. One recycler has attempted to manufacture a plastic tile on his own. He explained that: a proper tile can be made if I had proper moulds. I have a good knowledge about injection moulding. The only problem is that I do not have enough resources. I always want to develop my knowledge although I am a small-scale entrepreneur. If someone is there to help me or give me the technology, I am willing to take a chance. 31 There is a clear difference between what the experts and officials think the marginalised sectors know and what these groups actually do in their everyday

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__________________________________________________________________ lives. For many, waste is their only means of accessing income and they have been doing this for many years thus making them informal experts on waste. However, they have been excluded from the decision making process, making the reality much more complex and the solutions more difficult to achieve. D. What Kinds of Decisions Are Made? Who Benefits, Who Pays the Cost? As previously described, the decision-making process is not just and transparent. The vast majority of dumpsites are located in close proximity to where poor people reside. It is here that exposure to waste is most severe, and inconveniences are most frequent. As everyday lives get affected, governing the waste becomes a challenging process where officials, politicians and residents struggle to solve problems such as lack of cleanliness, pollution and health risks. Disagreements take place over unsatisfactory outcomes leading to public unrest, such as the recent protest held against the uncontrolled garbage mountain in Colombo. These waste issues can be greatly reduced if small-scale community level waste collection and recycling projects are properly implemented in the local authorities. However, few opportunities are given to the marginalised sectors, with large-scale developments currently being preferred to small-scale initiatives which support autonomy. One small-scale recycler pointed out that only the large companies get most of the benefits. According to him: There are loans for very low rates for recyclers. We cannot apply for those. People who can, like large-scale recyclers, get big loans for very low interest rates like 1-2%. Small people like us, are not given any loans. We do not get any help from the places that are there to help. 32 It is evident that decision-making process largely benefits privileged groups. Dominant groups have either monopolised or have had privileged access to particular kinds of knowledge and have, therefore, exercised power within the waste management system through circulating discourses that benefit them to a greater extent. 5. Towards a Socially and Environmentally Just Waste Management System What matters to most marginalised groups often differs from what is assumed by those within the dominant system. Measures to reduce environmental injustice and poverty should first come from the marginalised groups dealing with waste in their day-today lives, not directly from the politicians, authorities, experts and professionals. We argue that, by listening to their needs, giving an opportunity to voice their opinions in project planning and providing space for active participation, marginalised groups working in waste management will be able to

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__________________________________________________________________ make a real transformation in their lives resulting in a more sustainable waste management system in the country. Foucault emphasises that we need to challenge the production of truth and detach ‘the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.’ 33 The key challenge is to create an environment that encourages those who have been marginalised to have enhanced autonomy and to take part in the waste management system on their terms. This is what we try to achieve through a waste-based composite project facilitated by WfL in the Western Province of Sri Lanka. We conclude our chapter with a statement from a small-scale recycler: There are people who can do things better than this. We make our own machines. We have everything here. We just need someone to see what we do. 34 We believe that by working to capture these unheard stories in a different way and co-creating knowledge, waste management systems in developing countries can reach the potential for social change.

Notes 1

Mahinda Chinthana, ‘Mahinda Chinthana: Vision for the Future’, Colombo, 2010. 2 Asian Institute of Technology, Municipal Solid Waste Management in Asia (Thailand: Environmental Engineering and Management, School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology, 2004). 3 ANZDEC Limited, ‘Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka: Delivering Natural Resource and Environmental Management Services Sector Project’, Colombo, 2005; Nilanthi J. G. J. Bandara, ‘Municipal Solid Waste Management: The Sri Lankan Case’, Paper presented at the Developments in Forestry and Environment Management in Sri Lanka (2008). 4 Randika Jayasinghe et al., The Garbage Crisis: A Global Challenge for Engineers 7 (California: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2013). 5 Christian Zurbrügg, ‘Urban Solid Waste Management in Low-Income Countries of Asia: How to Cope with the Garbage Crisis’, Paper presented at the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), Urban Solid Waste Management Review Session, Durban, South Africa (2003). 6 A tense situation developed in the area called Meethotamulla in the Colombo district due to a protest staged demanding the immediate removal of the 16-acre garbage dump site in the area. The protest organised by a group called ‘Peoples Movement against the Meethotamulla Garbage Dump’ claimed that eight nearby

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__________________________________________________________________ villages in the area have been severely affected due to the garbage that is being dumped in the site daily by the Colombo Municipal Council. 7 See the project blog: accessed 2 February 2011, http://wasteforlife.org/?page_id=258. 8 The study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination; Donna Riley, Engineering and Social Justice (California: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2008), 113. 9 Cited in Paul Patton, ‘Of Power and Prisons’, in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, eds. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney,Australia: Feral Publications, 1979), 109-146. 10 Usman Mushtaq discusses about waste, power and justice in the book, ‘The Garbage Crisis’: A Global Challenge for Engineers. See ‘Towards a Just Politics of Waste Management’ (Chapter 2) and ‘Expertise, Indigenous People, and the Site 41 Landfill’ (Chapter 3). Jayasinghe et al., The Garbage Crisis: A Global Challenge for Engineers 7. 11 Micheal Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. S. Smith (London: Routledge, 1972). 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Micheal Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 15 Randika Jayasinghe is an AusAID Leadership Awards Scholar from Sri Lanka reading for her PhD at the University of Western Australia. 16 Carla Willig, Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2008), 120. 17 Lawrence D. Berg, ‘Discourse Analysis’, in The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, eds. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Oxford: Elsevier Publishing, 2009), 215-221. 18 Ibid., 218. 19 Usman Mushtaq, ‘Socially Just Engineering: Power, Resistance, and Discourse at Site 41’ (Master of Science, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 2011). 20 Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language 1941-1995 (London and New York: Longman, 1995). 21 Ian Parker, Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992). 22 Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier, ‘Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis and Dispositive Analysis’, in Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, eds. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage Publications, 2009), 34-61.

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Willig, Qualitative Research in Psychology. Berg, ‘Discourse Analysis’. 25 Personal Communication, July 2012. 26 Eveline Hust, ‘Introduction: Problems of Urbanization and Urban Governance in India’, in Urbanization and Governance in India, eds. Eveline Hust and Michael Mann (New Delhi: Manohar, CSH, South Asia Institute, 2005), 1-26. 27 Vimukthi Fernando and Rikaza Hassan, ‘Colombo’s Stinking Nightmare’, in Sunday Observer Online (Colombo: The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd., 2005). 28 Anna Zimmer, ‘Everyday Governance of the Waste Waterscapes: A Foucauldian Analysis in Delhi’s Informal Settlements’ (Degree of Doctor, Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms University of Bonn, 2011). 29 Personal Communication, July 2012. 30 Personal Communication, July 2012. 31 Personal Communication, July 2012. 32 Personal Communication, December 2011. 33 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 133. 34 Personal Communication, July 2012. 24

Bibliography ANZDEC Limited. ‘Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka: Delivering Natural Resource and Environmental Management Services Sector Project’. Colombo, 2005. Asian Institute of Technology. Municipal Solid Waste Management in Asia. Thailand: Environmental Engineering and Management, School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology, 2004. Baillie, Caroline. ‘Waste for Life: Socially Just Materials Research’. Chapter 4 .In Engineering and Social Justice: In the University and Beyond, edited by Caroline Baillie, Alice L. Pawley, and Donna Riley, 87–106. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2012. Baillie, Caroline, Eric Feinblatt, Thimothy Thamae, and Emily Berrington. Needs and Feasibility: A Guide for Engineers in Community Projects: The Case of Waste for Life. Synthesis Lectures on Engineers,Technology and Society. California: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ Bandara, Nilanthi J. G. J. ‘Municipal Solid Waste Management: The Sri Lankan Case’. Paper presented at the Developments in Forestry and Environment Management in Sri Lanka, 2008 Berg, Lawrence D. ‘Discourse Analysis’. In The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Rob Kitchin, and Nigel Thrift, 215–221. Oxford: Elsevier Publishing, 2009. Environmental Foundation LTD. ‘Climbing out of the Grabage Dump: Managing Colombo’s Solid Waste Problem’. Colombo: Environmental Foundation Ltd., 2007. Accessed 11 February 2011. http://www.efl.lk/publication/. Fairclough, Norman. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language 1941-1995. London and New York: Longman, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. S. Smith. London: Routledge, 1972. —––. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. —––. ‘An Interview with Michel Foucault Conducted by Michael Bess, Sanfrancisco (3 November 1980)’. History of the Present 4, Nos. 1–2 (Spring 1988): 11–13. Hust, Eveline. ‘Introduction: Problems of Urbanization and Urban Governance in India’. In Urbanization and Governance in India, edited by Eveline Hust and Michael Mann, 1–26. New Delhi: Manohar, CSH, South Asia Institute, 2005. Jäger, Siegfried, and Florentine Maier. ‘Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis and Dispositive Analysis’. In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 34–61. London: Sage Publications, 2009. Jayasinghe, Randika, Usman Mushtaq, Toni Alyce Smythe, and Caroline Baillie. The Garbage Crisis: A Global Challenge for Engineers. In Synthesis Lectures on Engineers, Technology and Society 7. California: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2013. Mahinda Chinthana. ‘Mahinda Chinthana: Vision for the Future’. Colombo, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ Medina, Martin. ‘Waste Picker Cooperatives in Developing Countries’. In Wiego/Cornell/SEWA Conference on Membership-Based Organisations of the Poor. Ahmedabad, India, 2005. Mushtaq, Usman. ‘Socially Just Engineering: Power, Resistance, and Discourse at Site 41’. Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 2011. Parker, Ian. Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992. Patton, Paul. ‘Of Power and Prisons’. In Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, edited by Meaghan Morris, and Paul Patton, 109–146. Sydney, Australia: Feral Publications, 1979. Perera, Ajantha. ‘Our Responsibility to Manage Garbage Must Come Long before the Landfill Site’. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Solid Waste Management, 5-7 September Chennai, India, 2007. Riley, Donna. Engineering and Social Justice. California: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2008. Scheinberg, Anne. ‘A Bird in the Hand: Solid Waste Modernisation, Recycling and the Informal Sector’. In Solid Waste Planning in the Real World, CWG-Green Partners Workshop. Cluj, Romania, 2008. The World Bank. What a Waste: Solid Waste Management in Asia. Urban Development Sector Unit, East Asia and Pacific Region, 1999. Accessed 19 March 2011. http://www.worldbank.org/urban/solid_wm/erm/CWG%20folder/1uwp1.pdf/. Van Zon, Levien, and Nalaka Siriwardena. Garbage in Sri Lanka: An Overview of Solid Waste Management in the Ja-Ela Area. Colombo: Integrated Resources Management Programme in Wetlands (IRMP), 2000. Visvanathan, C., and Ulrich Glawe. ‘Domestic Solid Waste Management in South Asian Countries: A Comparative Analysis’. In 3 R South Asia Expert Workshop. Kathmandu, Nepal, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ WASTE Consultants. Plastic Waste: Options for Small-Scale Resource Recovery (Urban Solid Waste Series 2). Edited by Inge Lardinois, and Arnold van der Klundert. Amsterdam: TOOL Publications, 1995. Waste for Life. ‘Waste for Life: Projects’. Accessed 2 February 2011. http://wasteforlife.org/?page_id=258. Willig, Carla. Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2008. Wilson, David C., Costas Velis, and Chris Cheeseman. ‘Role of Informal Sector Recycling in Waste Management in Developing Countries’. Habitat International 30, No. 4 (2006): 797–808. Zimmer, Anna. ‘Everyday Governance of the Waste Waterscapes: A Foucauldian Analysis in Delhi’s Informal Settlements’. Rheinische Friedrich–Wilhelms’ University of Bonn, 2011. Zurbrügg, Christian. ‘Urban Solid Waste Management in Low-Income Countries of Asia: How to Cope with the Garbage Crisis’. Paper presented at the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), Urban Solid Waste Management Review Session, Durban, South Africa, November 2002, 2003. Randika Jayasinghe is a PhD student at the School of Environmental Systems Engineering at the University of Western Australia. Her doctoral research project focusses on social and environmental justice related issues regarding waste management. Caroline Baillie is Chair of Engineering Education for the Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics at the University of Western Australia. She founded the global ‘Engineering and Social Justice’ network (http://www.esjp.org) and applies this lens to her work for ‘Waste for Life’ which she co-founded with Eric Feinblatt.

Part 2 Education: The Role of Education in Justice and Citizenship

Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014 Alexander K. Lautensach and Sabina W. Lautensach Abstract The current global environmental crises are largely caused by unsustainable practices and trends and by their impact on ecosystems at all levels. The lack of sustainability extends into the social and cultural dimensions, manifesting as injustice and inequities in global citizenship and human security. Thus, humanity has every reason to re-evaluate and to change its current practices and aspirations in order to achieve a timely transition to a sustainable civilisation. A crucial contribution can come from educational reforms, which are long overdue. In recognition of that global responsibility the United Nations established the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) (DESD). This chapter assesses the merits of the DESD plan in terms of its vision, conceptual coherence, the strategies it recommends, and its underlying assumptions. Its stated goals are compared with the requirements that must be met by a sustainable global society. Its assumptions are examined for values and implicit beliefs. The resulting picture is not encouraging: The DESD plan invokes numerous laudable goals and values but it does not engage with the actual obstacles towards sustainability, or with the inevitable dilemmas. It neglects intergenerational justice, and it virtually ignores interspecies justice. It does not provide a coherent and convincing vision of sustainability. As well, its stated outcomes do not address the full spectrum of necessary changes. Its greatest accomplishment is to place ESD prominently on the educational agenda in many countries. To improve on that unsatisfactory situation, educators must address the root causes for the educational shortfall so far. They cannot accomplish that by merely restricting themselves to the DESD regime. We suggest where the major gaps lie in education for sustainability, and how they can be addressed. One essential step involves educating young learners to negotiate moral compromises to ensure the acceptable survival for the greatest sustainable number. Key Words: Education for sustainability, sustainable development, human security, UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. ***** 1. Introduction Although much controversy has arisen around the meaning and implications of the term development, most people generally equate it with multidimensional innovation or growth that achieves positive outcomes for the quality of human lives and/or for human security. It can manifest in the areas of financial income,

80 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ employment and professional self-actualisation, distribution of wealth, education, political autonomy, basic needs for survival, health of populations and ecosystems, equality, self-esteem and dignity and freedom. 1 Those areas cover people’s social, biological and economic environments and have been recognised as the main indicators contributing to the human development index (HDI) 2 and the human security index (HSI). 3 Sustainable development, then, includes any such innovation or growth that does not compromise the ability of future generations to develop along the same lines. 4 This agrees with the definition by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), ‘improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems.’ 5 Thus, living sustainably means that no systemic limits are being transgressed. It is also clear to all but the most ideologically blinded observers that very little sustainability is in evidence at this stage in human history. The current global environmental crises, manifesting mainly as climate change, pollution, resource scarcity, the loss of biodiversity, and the increasing trends in all of those, are largely caused by unsustainable practices and trends and by their impact on ecosystems at all levels. 6 The collective environmental impact of humanity is caused by five self-reinforcing processes – economic growth, population growth, technological expansion, arms races and growing income inequality. 7 This impact exceeds the ecological capacity of the planet by about fifty percent, 8 and this overshoot is still increasing while it erodes the source and sink capacities of ecological support structures. 9 Biologically, overshoot results if the signals that the system communicates back to a growing population are delayed, distorted, ignored or denied, which in turn causes unsustainable behaviour to continue unchecked. The general lack of sustainability extends not only through the ecological dimension as the catastrophic impact of human populations on the biosphere, but it also manifests in the social and cultural dimensions as inequities in global citizenship. This includes extreme and growing socioeconomic inequity as well as inadequacies in literacy and women’s empowerment. These factors contribute to structural and cultural violence, which fuels social upheaval and conflict. 10 Obviously, humanity has every reason to re-evaluate its practices and aspirations in order to achieve a timely transition to a sustainable existence on Earth. Such a re-evaluation must address the drivers – dominant beliefs, attitudes and values – that cause the delaying, distorting, ignoring or denying of signals as mentioned above. This is where education plays a crucial role in facilitating our transition to sustainability. It has been argued widely that value education for sustainability is not only feasible, its considerable potential renders such efforts entirely worthwhile and imperative; numerous initiatives, both of the bottom-up and top-down kind, are underway. 11 Yet, on the whole the education sector worldwide has not lived up to its potential. In recognition of the global responsibility for such a reform the United Nations, through UNESCO, established

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__________________________________________________________________ the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) (2005-2014). 12 Yet the worsening overshoot raises the question why it has accomplished so little. 2. The Vision of DESD UNESCO’s DESD website offers the following definitions under the overarching goal of ‘creating a better world for this generation and future generations of all living things on planet Earth.’ 13 The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) (2005-2014) for which UNESCO is the lead agency, seeks to integrate the principles, values and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning, in order to address the social, economic, cultural and environmental issues we face in the 21st century. Sustainable development (SD) seeks to meet the needs of the present without compromising those of future generations. Sustainable development is a vision of development that encompasses respect for all life – human and non-human – and natural resources, as well as integrating concerns such as poverty reduction, gender equality, human rights, education for all, health, human security and intercultural dialogue. Notable in this definition of SD is the explicit ecocentrism – an ethic that elsewhere we identified as essential for sustainability. 14 Thus the definition avoids the relentless anthropocentrism of the development literature. Moreover, it captures the essence of what development should be about – justice, knowledge, welfare and dialogue. In another document UNESCO refers to SD as ‘the many processes and pathways to achieve’ the long-term goal of sustainability, but it also frames SD in terms of end goals rather than means. 15 SD is presented as extending in four intertwined dimensions – ‘social, political/cultural, natural and economic.’ It is not clear to what extent the authors understand that these dimensions are not equal but hierarchical, like a set of nested circles. 16 Their interpretation of sustainability itself stems from the popular Brundtland Report which beguiles in its simplicity but lacks essential specifics, such as what needs are prioritised, whose needs, for how many, and how the intergenerational conflict is to be arbitrated. 17 In essence, such concepts of sustainability are inadequate because they do not address the Tragedy of the Commons, 18 nor do they resolve the inevitable conflict between human and non-human interests. This lack of resolve is evident across UNESCO’s many programme documents. It becomes most apparent in statements that refer to collective needs and opportunities.

82 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ The basic vision of the DESD is a world where everyone has the opportunity to benefit from education and learn the values, behaviour and lifestyles required for a sustainable future and for positive societal transformation. 19 What is missing in this vision is a sense of sufficiency, of sustainable limits to our numbers and impacts, and of how much in resources and services humanity can sustainably appropriate from the biosphere. Thus, UNESCO’s vision of sustainability offers little guidance either in conceptualising the end state or how to work towards it. This dual problem is also evident in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. We will return to this point in section 3. The same unwillingness to prioritise is evident in UNESCO’s description of values for DESD and the principles underlying it. The values, based on the Earth Charter, 20 refer to human rights, democratic principles, humanist ideals and ecocentric principles. 21 The obvious potential for conflict among those values and principles is not addressed. Fortunately, much more realistic visions have been proposed by numerous professional organisations and experts. 22 Supported to a much greater degree by authoritative scientific assessments of the status quo and its trends, those visions demonstrate how contradictions can and should be resolved. They share the recognition that all human activity depends unconditionally on the health of the biosphere. As this dependency is unidirectional there can be no ‘balance’ between the two, or between environmental, societal and economic considerations, as DESD postulates – only compliance by the former with the conditions imposed by the latter. Those conditions include the following: Humanity’s collective environmental impact must decrease to remain below the maximum sustainable impact, according to the I=PAT relationship; 23 this will require not only much greater efforts towards lowering consumption and greater distributive equity but also a reduction in population; and natural ecosystems around the world will have to be strengthened, stabilised, restored and enlarged to halt deteriorative trends. A team from the Stockholm Resilience Institute proposed a set of sustainable development goals to meet those conditions. 24 The most proactive of those visions also recognise, unlike the DESD, that substantial global environmental change has already invalidated some treasured assumptions, such as an immutable carrying capacity of several billions, a benign and predictable climate, or the continued availability of fertile coastal lowlands. 25 The likelihood of an ecological bottleneck event necessitates measures to ensure that a sufficiently sized gene pool with sufficient adaptive strength remains. 26 In humanitarian terms, that amounts to ensuring the acceptable survival of the greatest sustainable number. 27 The required collective wisdom could only be developed through intense educational efforts. The emphasis should be on the word collective,

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__________________________________________________________________ for it is in the collective respect that our species utterly fails to live up to its species name. Collective wisdom also includes effective population policies that cushion the impact of what will otherwise be a cataclysmic reduction in the world’s population. 28 The UN has proved chronically dysfunctional in addressing overpopulation issues. Compared to those more realistic assessments the DESD vision clearly lacks in perceptive quality. Its primary values are bound to clash in numerous instances, and no guidance for arbitration is offered. Even in 2005 the general literature abounded with suggestions, well supported by scientific evidence, how to prioritise ecological contingencies in sustainability education. Yet, even the 2010 update of the listed DESD values shows little evidence of such insights; 29 neither does UNESCO’s 2012 report on DESD. 30 Worse, their emphasis on participatory democracy and human rights seems disingenuous in the absence of any critical stance towards the globalised corporate power structures that increasingly jeopardise those very ideals. But those shortcomings in vision still leave the possibility that DESD might accomplish some valuable outcomes, through educational strategies that might have been implemented in spite of inadequate visioning. To address that possibility we now examine its educational strategies. 3. The Means toward Their Ends: UNESCO’s Educational Strategies UNESCO expressed their strategies mainly in the form of general learning outcomes: Education for sustainable development (ESD) aims to help people to develop the attitudes, skills, perspectives and knowledge to make informed decisions and act upon them for the benefit of themselves and others, now and in the future. 31 This definition for ESD lists four categories of learning outcomes but omits the values invoked in its vision statements. This seems to contradict their express commitment to value education as a cornerstone of behaviour change. 32 Instead, in its International Implementation Scheme UNESCO states that ‘each nation, cultural group and individual must learn the skills of recognising their own values and assessing these values in the context of sustainability.’ 33 Such a reflective assessment of one’s values requires the use of metavalues or priorities, which are not specified. UNESCO’s list of ‘fundamental principles’ calls for ‘integrating the knowledge, values and skills needed for a sustainable way of life into formal education and lifelong learning.’ 34 That integration cannot work without a means to resolve the conflicts between those values. The example of the Earth Manifesto shows that such a metaethical resolution is possible. 35 The definition of ESD also implies that the transition towards sustainability could be accomplished primarily by individuals acting on their ‘informed

84 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ decisions’ alone. 36 Collective responsibilities, communitarian benefits, or synergistic collaboration are not mentioned. Such an atomistic view of education is typical of neoliberal educational reforms but ignores the contingencies of language, culture, and ideology. 37 As a prescription for effective education, this cannot suffice. UNESCO developed the abovementioned international implementation scheme (IIS) in consultation with United Nations Agencies, national governments, civil society organisations and NGOs, and academic experts. It describes strategic linkages with three other UN initiatives – the Millennium Development Goals, Education for All, and the United Nations Literacy Decade. The IIS summarises learning outcomes and lays out seven strategies: ‘visionbuilding and advocacy; consultation and ownership; partnership and networks; capacity-building and training; research and innovation; use of Information and Communication Technologies; monitoring and evaluation.’ 38 These strategies suggest a conceptual leap from poorly articulated ends directly to the realm of tactical means where, conveniently, ends are no longer up for discussion. Similarly, the IIS specifies ‘four major thrusts’ of ESD: ‘improving access to quality basic education; reorienting existing education programmes; developing public understanding and awareness; providing training.’ 39 These thrusts pertain again to managerial means only, as do the DESD objectives. 40 The IIS recognises the failure of education without identifying which aspects of education have to be reformed. 41 A mid-decade review provided fourteen very relevant learning outcomes of DESD that span the cognitive and affective domains, such as futures thinking and coping with crises. 42 They approach the kind of learning objectives that constitute the teacher’s daily bread and butter because they can be directly observed and assessed in learners. However, they do not quite span the range called for by others, nor do they go into enough specifics. 4. Strategies Recommended by Others In his educational prescriptions for ecological literacy, David Orr emphasised the need for unlearning, in order to compensate for what he referred to as the wholesale failure of education to prepare humanity for the transition to sustainability. 43 The most important targets for unlearning are some of the myths that we tend to create and rely on for conceptual explanations and for normative justification and evaluation. 44 Those myths take the form of explicit values, attitudes, ideals, beliefs and paradigms that have outlived their utility in this crisis situation. One myth that clearly informed the DESD documents is the belief in the unlimited growth of economies and populations (cornucopianism) 45 and resulting counterproductive notions of what constitutes progress. 46 As we argued elsewhere, the majority of international development aid projects suffer from the same

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__________________________________________________________________ problem. 47 The need for unlearning follows from the fact that much of education has resulted in the perpetuation of those myths rather than in their critique. Other educationists focused on remediating specific human characteristics that prevent people from responding appropriately to information about the crisis. They include conceptual blocks and cognitive bias, moral ineptitudes and counterproductive mental habits. One example is Aristotle’s ‘akrasia’ (weakness of will). Sadly, the DESD documents offer little indication that their authors might have considered any of those specific issues. Nor do they fare much better on the affirmative side, where educational reform needs to strengthen learning outcomes that help with the transition (such as ecocentric values), and to empower learners to liberate themselves from oppressive dependencies (such as consumerist norms). 48 Paul and Anne Ehrlich referred to those missing positive learning outcomes as the ‘culture gap.’ 49 A balance between negative and positive aims can be achieved under the six overarching strategies of developing a notion of progress independent from material growth, shifting from anthropocentric values towards ecocentric ones, developing a vision of the future built on change and innovation, abandoning parochialist thinking in favour of a sound balance between global and local, acquiring the requisite cognitive skills, and liberating oneself from oppressive socioeconomic constraints. 50 DESD addresses these aims only marginally. Numerous methodological recommendations, largely culturally contingent, have been made (e.g. experiential approaches), including their applications to teacher education. 51 A comparison between those recommendations and the DESD program indicates some compatibility. It ends where the dictates of ecological limits require a rigorous break with those educational traditions that have contributed to the problems. DESD cannot prepare learners for the painful implications of that collision, or to promote some awareness of the imperatives arising from its mitigation and from paying serious attention to the difficult choices people must make. 5. What Can Educators Learn from the DESD Experience? DESD recognises implicitly that in order for learners to contribute effectively to the transition towards sustainability, appropriate learning outcomes must be strengthened and inappropriate ones prevented. However, compared to the general literature the DESD’s vision and strategies show a dangerous permissiveness towards harmful myths, cognitive bias, mental habits and moral ineptitudes. This manifests in the absence of any critical stance towards the status quo and business as usual. Perhaps most significantly, DESD makes no attempt to stop humanity’s war against nature, the single greatest obstacle towards environmental security. 52 In the context of education the DESD does not sufficiently address the range of

86 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ reasons why education in general has not already stepped up to the challenges and accomplished what clearly needs to be done. The message for teachers and curriculum designers is that education for change cannot work without an adequate measure of critique of current practices and omissions. This must include the many instances where official policies force people to live unjustly and unsustainably. Whether such policies are governmental or corporate, they must be faced head-on through critical engagement by the learner. Secondly, the lack of attention to arbitration between conflicting goals and values is likely to result in paralysis and thus contribute further to the current problems of overconsumption and overshoot. A prominent example is the dilemma between reproductive freedom and cushioning the inevitable population reduction. 53 This basic inability to prioritise is both a problem of broader policy and individual disempowerment, as at both levels metaethical reasoning and resolving dilemmas are crucial skills to make the vision of DESD a reality. We conclude that by itself the DESD regime could not accomplish such innovative a breakthrough as is required; nor could its agenda be left intact by any deeper going educational reform that genuinely has that potential. Nevertheless, all failed experiments are also opportunities for learning. We can learn from the DESD’s omissions, particularly by ensuring that learners become enabled to resolve contradictions in values and beliefs. Many educational institutions, jurisdictions and practitioners have already responded to the challenges by implementing their own programs and incentives in education for sustainability, often following rather more perceptive interpretations of the challenges at hand. DESD globally encourages such efforts; some were indeed inspired by it and derive continuing support from it in the face of flagging governmental support (as in Canada). In a 2012 report, UNESCO emphasises this increased attention to DESD among educational institutions but remains silent on any other indicators of success. 54 Despite its lack of explicit commitment, DESD can help address the failure of education. 55 We agree with others that the greatest amount of harm in this crisis is done by people with higher degrees. 56 Their actions and decisions tend to contribute to a worsening of the crisis and a deepening of inequities and insecurity. The five self-reinforcing drivers of the crisis are to a large part propelled by the illadvised, short-sighted and self-serving decisions of this minority who collectively hold a considerable share of global political power. By virtue of their educational backgrounds, professional competence and social status those individuals are privy to all the pertinent information regarding the consequences of their decisions. They can neither claim ignorance, nor can they deny moral culpability. The primary motivators in those leaders as well as in many affluent consumers, are inappropriate values and attitudes, and that is mainly where education has failed. 57 DESD recognised this in its emphasis on value education. Under its banner, local

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__________________________________________________________________ ministries and institutions can help tilt the balance of education away from those values and attitudes through targeted initiatives. 58 Perhaps this is its greatest achievement to date.

Notes 1

Paul A. Haslam, Jessica Schafer and Pierre Beaudet, Introduction to International Development: Approaches, Actors and Issues, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13. 2 See UNDP, Human Development Report (New York: United Nations, 2011). http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2011. 3 See David Hastings, The Human Security Index: An Update and a New Release, Document Report Version 1.0 (March), 2011, http://www.humansecurityindex.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hsiv2documentation-report1_1.pdf. 4 Albert A. Bartlett, ‘The Meaning of Sustainability’, Teachers Clearinghouse for Science and Society Education Newsletter 31, No. 1 (Winter 2012): 2, accessed 8 August 2012, http://www.populationmedia.org/2012/04/04/the-meaning-of-sustainability-by-prof essor-emeritus-albert-a-bartlett/. 5 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Caring for the Earth. A Strategy for Sustainable Living (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, UNEP, WWF, 1991), 6. 6 Johan Rockström and Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2013, ‘Sustainable Development and Planetary Boundaries’, Background research paper submitted by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network to the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, accessed 14 February 2014, http://www.post2015hlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Rockstroem-SachsOehman-Schmidt-Traub_Sustainable-Development-and-Planetary-Boundaries.pdf. 7 Anthony J. McMichael, Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Victor Furkiss, The Future of Technological Civilisation (New York: Braziller, 1974); Joseph F. Coates, ‘The Sixteen Sources of Environmental Problems in the 21st Century’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 40 (1991): 87-91. 8 See World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Living Planet Report 2012 (WWF, 2012), http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/. 9 Anthony J. McMichael, Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease: Past Patterns, Uncertain Futures (Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 2001); Mathis Wackernagel et al., ‘Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human

88 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ Economy’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 99 (2002): 9266-9271. 10 Dietrich Fischer, ‘Peacebuilding Processes’, IN Human Security in World Affairs, eds. Alexander Lautensach and Sabina Lautensach (Vienna: Caesarpress, 2013), 373-395. 11 Alexander K. Lautensach, Environmental Ethics for the Future: Rethinking Education to Achieve Sustainability (Saarbruecken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publ., 2010); Stephen Sterling, Sustainable Education: Revisioning Learning and Change (Devon, UK: Green Books, 2004); Joy M. de Leo, Quality Education for Sustainable Development (Adelaide, AUS: UNESCO-APNIEVE, 2013). 12 See United Nations, UN Decade of Education of Sustainable Development: The DESD at a Glance (Paris: UNESCO, 2005)., http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001416/141629e.pdf. 13 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization), Three Terms and One Goal, accessed 6 May 2013, 1, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-agenda/ education-for-sustainable-development/three-terms-one-goal/. 14 Alexander K. Lautensach, ‘The Ethical Basis for Sustainable Human Security: A Place for Anthropocentrism?’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 6, No. 4 (2009): 437455. 15 UNESCO, 2010, Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Future. Module 2: Understanding Sustainable Development, accessed 10 February 2014, 7-8. http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/docs/module_2.doc. 16 Sara Parkin, The Positive Deviant: Sustainability Leadership in a Perverse World (London: Earthscan. 2010), 202. 17 WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development), Our Common Future: The Brundtland Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Alexander K. Lautensach and Sabina W. Lautensach, ‘Human Insecurity through Economic Development: Educational Strategies to Destabilise the Dominant Paradigm’, International Journal on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability 7 (2011): 347-360. 18 Garrett Hardin, ‘Extensions of “The Tragedy of the Commons”’, Science 280 (5364) (May 1998): 682-683. 19 Arjen Wals, Review of Context and Structures for ESD (Paris: UNESCO, 2009), 8. 20 See Earth Charter Initiative, Values and Principles to Foster a Sustainable Future (Costa Rica: Earth Charter Initiative, 2012), http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/. 21 De Leo, Quality Education for Sustainable Development.

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Richard Heinberg and David Lerch, The Post-Carbon Reader (Heraldsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010); Paul Raskin et al., Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, Stockholm Environment Institute Polestar Report No. 10 (Boston: SEI, 2002), http://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=1547; David Pimentel et al., ‘Will Limits of the Earth’s Resources Control Human Numbers?’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1999), accessed 6 May 2013, http://www.jayhanson.us/page174.htm. 23 Richard York, Eugene A. Rosa and Thomas Dietz, ‘STIRPAT, IPAT and ImPACT: Analytic Tools for Unpacking the Driving Forces of Environmental Impacts’, Ecological Economics 46, No. 3 (2003): 351-365. 24 David Griggs et al., ‘Sustainable Development Goals for People and Planet’, Nature 495 (March 2013): 305-307. 25 Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010). 26 William R. Catton, Jr., Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2009). 27 Alexander Lautensach and Sabina Lautensach, ‘Why “Sustainable Development” Is Often Neither: A Constructive Critique’, 2nd World Sustainability Forum, 1-30 November 2012; Sciforum Electronic Conferences Series, 2012, http://www.sciforum.net/presentation/877. 28 Richard Grossman, ‘The Importance of Human Population to Sustainability’, Environment, Development, and Sustainability 14, No. 3 (2012): 973-977. 29 De Leo, Quality Education for Sustainable Development. 30 UNESCO, Shaping the Education of Tomorrow: 2012 Report on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (Abridged) (Paris: UNESCO, 2012), accessed 10 February 2014, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002166/216606e.pdf. 31 UNESCO, ‘Three Terms and One Goal’, 1. 32 De Leo, Quality Education for Sustainable Development. 33 UNESCO, United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014): International Implementation Scheme (Paris: UNESCO, 2005), 7, http://www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/esd/documents/ESD_IIS.pdf. 34 UNESCO, Values of Sustainable Development, 2012, 2. 35 Ted Mosquin and Stanley Rowe, ‘A Manifesto for Earth’, Biodiversity 5, No. 1 (2004): 3-9. 36 UNESCO, ‘Three Terms and One Goal’, 2012, 1. 37 Chet A. Bowers, ‘Educational Reforms that Foster Ecological Intelligence’, Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy 5, No. 1 (2009): 26-50. 38 UNESCO, UN-DESD, 2005, 17. 39 Ibid., 7.

90 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ 40

UNESCO, UN DESD, 6. The objectives are: to ‘facilitate networking, linkages, exchange and interaction among stakeholders in ESD; foster an increased quality of teaching and learning in education for sustainable development; help countries make progress towards and attain the millennium development goals through ESD efforts; provide countries with new opportunities to incorporate ESD into educational reform efforts.’ 41 Ibid., 29. The authors conclude that reform ‘is an issue of content and relevance. Questioning, rethinking, and revising education from pre-school through university to include more principles, knowledge, skills, perspectives and values related to sustainability in each of the three realms – environment, society, and economy – is important to our current and future societies. This should be done in a holistic and interdisciplinary context, engaging society at large, but carried out by individual nations in a locally relevant and culturally appropriate manner.’ 42 Arjen Wals, Review of Context and Structures for ESD (Paris: UNESCO, 2009), 49. 43 David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (Albany: State University of NY Press, 1992). 44 William Rees, ‘What’s Blocking Sustainability: Human Nature, Cognition and Denial’, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 6, No. 2 (2010): 13-25, accessed 20 January 2011, http://sspp.proquest.com/archives/vol6iss2/1001-012.rees.html. 45 Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, ‘The Impact of Population Growth’, Science 171 (1971): 1212-1217. 46 Bowers, ‘Educational Reforms’; Lautensach and Lautensach, ‘Why “Sustainable Development” Is Often Neither’. 47 Lautensach and Lautensach, ‘Why “Sustainable Development” Is Often Neither’. 48 Lautensach, Environmental Ethics for the Future. 49 Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, ‘The Culture Gap and Its Needed Closures’, International Journal of Environmental Studies 67, No. 4 (2010): 481. 50 Lautensach, Environmental Ethics for the Future. 51 David G. Lloyd, Richard Smith and Kathryn Paige, ‘Education and Sustainability in Teacher Education: First Moves and Pedagogy’, International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic, & Social Sustainability 7, No. 3 (2011): 65-90. 52 Ronnie Hawkins, ‘Our War against Nature’, in Human Security in World Affairs: Problems and Opportunities, eds. Alexander Lautensach and Sabina Lautensach (Vienna: Caesarpress, 2013), 227-248. 53 Diana Coole, ‘Too Many Bodies? The Return and Disavowal of the Population Question’, Environmental Politics 22, No. 2 (2013): 195-215.

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UNESCO, Shaping the Education of Tomorrow: 2012 Report on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (Abridged). 55 Orr, Ecological Literacy. 56 For example, see George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2007). 57 Lautensach, Environmental Ethics for the Future. 58 For example, see Matilda Hald, ed., Transcending Boundaries: How CEMUS Is Changing How We Teach, Meet and Learn (Uppsala, SWE: CEMUS/CSD, 2011), http://www.csduppsala.uu.se/publications.

Bibliography Bartlett, Albert A. ‘The Meaning of Sustainability’. Teachers Clearinghouse for Science and Society Education Newsletter 31, No. 1 (2012): 1–14. Accessed 8 August 2012. http://www.populationmedia.org/2012/04/04/the-meaning-of-sustainability-by-prof essor-emeritus-albert-a-bartlett/. Bowers, Chet A. ‘Educational Reforms that Foster Ecological Intelligence’. Green Theory and Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy 5, No. 1 (2009): 26–50. Catton, William R. Jr. Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2009. Coates, Joseph F. ‘The Sixteen Sources of Environmental Problems in the 21st Century’. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 40 (1991): 87–91. Coole, Diana. ‘Too Many Bodies? The Return and Disavowal of the Population Question’. Environmental Politics 22, No. 2 (2013): 195–215. De Leo, Joy M. Quality Education for Sustainable Development. Adelaide, AUS: UNESCO-APNIEVE, 2013. Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich. ‘The Culture Gap and Its Needed Closures’. International Journal of Environmental Studies 67, No. 4 (2010): 481–492. Ehrlich, Paul R., and John P. Holdren. ‘The Impact of Population Growth’. Science 171 (1971): 1212–1217.

92 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ Furkiss, Victor. The Future of Technological Civilisation. New York: Braziller, 1974. Fischer, Dietrich. ‘Peacebuilding Processes’. In Human Security in World Affairs, edited by Alexander Lautensach, and Sabina Lautensach, 373–395. Vienna: Caesarpress, 2013. Earth Charter Initiative. ‘Values and Principles to Foster a Sustainable Future’. 2012. San José, Costa Rica: The Earth Charter Initiative, 2012. Accessed 6 May 2013. http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/. Griggs, David, Mark Stafford-Smith, Owen Gaffney, Johan Rockström, Marcus C. Öhman, Priya Shyamsundar, Will Steffen, Gisbert Glaser, Norichika Kanie, and Ian Noble. ‘Sustainable Development Goals for People and Planet’. Nature 495 (March 2013): 305–307. Hald, Matilda, ed. Transcending Boundaries: How CEMUS Is Changing How We Teach, Meet and Learn. Uppsala, Sweden: CEMUS/CSD, 2011. Accessed 6 May 2013. http://www.csduppsala.uu.se/publications. Hardin, Garrett. ‘Extensions of “The Tragedy of the Commons”’. Science 280 (5364) (1988): 682–683. Haslam, Paul A., Jessica Schafer, and Pierre Beaudet. Introduction to International Development: Approaches, Actors and Issues, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hastings, David. The Human Security Index: An Update and a New Release. Document Report Version 1.0 (March), 2011. http://www.humansecurityindex.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hsiv2documentation-report1_1.pdf. Hawkins, Ronnie. ‘Our War against Nature’. In Human Security in World Affairs, edited by Alexander Lautensach, and Sabina Lautensach, 227–248. Vienna: Caesarpress, 2013. Heinberg, Richard, and David Lerch. The Post-Carbon Reader. Heraldsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Caring for the Earth. A Strategy for Sustainable Living. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, UNEP, WWF, 1991. Lautensach, Alexander K. ‘The Ethical Basis for Sustainable Human Security: A Place for Anthropocentrism?’ Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 6, No. 4 (2009): 437– 455. —––. Environmental Ethics for the Future: Rethinking Education to Achieve Sustainability. Saarbruecken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publ., 2010. Lautensach, Alexander K., and Sabina W. Lautensach. ‘Human Insecurity through Economic Development: Educational Strategies to Destabilise the Dominant Paradigm’. International Journal on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability 7 (2011): 347–360. —––. ‘Why “Sustainable Development” Is Often Neither: A Constructive Critique’. 2nd World Sustainability Forum, 1-30 November 2012; Sciforum Electronic Conferences Series. http://www.sciforum.net/presentation/877. Lloyd, David G., Richard Smith, and Kathryn Paige. ‘Education and Sustainability in Teacher Education: First Moves and Pedagogy’. International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic, & Social Sustainability 7, No. 3 (2011): 65– 90. McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times Books, 2010. McMichael, Anthony J. Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. —––. Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease: Past Patterns, Uncertain Futures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Monbiot, George. Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2007. Mosquin, Ted, and Stanley Rowe. ‘A Manifesto for Earth’. Biodiversity 5, No. 1 (2004): 3–9. http://www.ecospherics.net.

94 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ Orr, David W. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. Albany, NY: State University of NY Press, 1992. Parkin, Sara. The Positive Deviant: Sustainability Leadership in a Perverse World. London: Earthscan, 2010. Pimentel, David, Owen Bailey, Paul Kim, Elizabeth Mullaney, Joy Calabrese, Laura Walman, Fred Nelson, and Xiangjun Yao. Will Limits of the Earth’s Resources Control Human Numbers? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1999. Accessed 6 May 2013. http://www.jayhanson.us/page174.htm. Raskin, Paul, Tariq Banuri, Gilberto Gallopín, Pablo Gutman, Al Hammond, Robert Kates, and Rob Swart. Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead. Stockholm Environment Institute Polestar Report no. 10. Boston: SEI, 2002. http://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=1547. Rees, William. ‘What’s Blocking Sustainability: Human Nature, Cognition and Denial’. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 6, No. 2 (2010): 13–25. Accessed 20 January 2011. http://sspp.proquest.com/archives/vol6iss2/1001-012.rees.html. Rockström, Johan, and Jeffrey D. Sachs. ‘Sustainable Development and Planetary Boundaries’. Background research paper submitted by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network to the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Accessed 14 February 2014. http://www.post2015hlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Rockstroem-Sachs-Oeh man-Schmidt-Traub_Sustainable-Development-and-Planetary-Boundaries.pdf. Sterling, Stephen. Sustainable Education: Revisioning Learning and Change. Devon, UK: Green Books, 2004. UNDP. Human Development Report. New York: United Nations, 2011. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014): International Implementation Scheme. Paris: UNESCO, 2005, 7. Accessed 8 May 2013. http://www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/esd/documents/ESD_IIS.pdf.

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__________________________________________________________________ UNESCO. Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Future. Module 2: Understanding Sustainable Development, 2010. Accessed 10 February 2014, 7–8. http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/docs/module_2.doc. UNESCO. Three Terms and One Goal, 2012. Accessed 6 May 2013. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-agenda/ education-for-sustainable-development/three-terms-one-goal/. —––. Shaping the Education of Tomorrow: 2012 Report on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (Abridged). Paris: UNESCO, viewed 10 February 2014. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002166/216606e.pdf. —––. Values of Sustainable Development. Paris: UNESCO. Accessed 25 October 2012. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-agenda/ education-for-sustainable-development/sustainable-development/values-sd/. Wackernagel, Mathis, Niels B. Schulz, Diana Deumling, Alejandro C. Linares, Martin Jenkins, Valerie Kapos, Chad Monfreda, Jonathan Loh, Norman Myers, Richard Norgaard, and Joergen Randers. ‘Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 99 (2002): 9266–9271. Wals, Arjen. Review of Context and Structures for ESD. Paris: UNESCO, 2009. WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development). Our Common Future: The Brundtland Report. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Living Planet Report 2012. Gland, Switzerland: WWF, 2012. http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/. York, Richard, Eugene A. Rosa, and Thomas Dietz. ‘STIRPAT, IPAT and ImPACT: Analytic Tools for Unpacking the Driving Forces of Environmental Impacts’. Ecological Economics 46, No. 3 (2003): 351–365. Alexander K. Lautensach is assistant professor at the School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia, where he trains teachers. His scholarly

96 Learning from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development __________________________________________________________________ interests extend to curriculum design, science education, environmental security, health security, human ecology and bioethics. Sabina W. Lautensach is director of the Human Security Institute (Canada) and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Human Security. She conducts research in political anthropology, human security, cultural safety and conflict resolution.

Young People as Co-Researchers: The Formation of a Sustainability and Citizenship Survey in Northern Ireland Jenny Wren River Banks Abstract This chapter discusses participatory methods being used in the formation of a survey designed to explore how young people (14-15 years old) understand the relationship between sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) and citizenship in Northern Ireland. The measures for the survey are being collated in three ways. Firstly, they are being collected and modified from existing surveys. Secondly, they are being created through a reading of literature on the surrounding issues, including curricula and policies. Thirdly, they are being created by coresearchers from a Peer Advisory Group (PAG) in line with a children’s rights based approach. The purpose of using strategies from a children’s rights-based approach is to create a survey with measures of high face validity, impossible without first exploring children’s and young people’s understandings. These discussions with the PAG, although not regarded as data, shall be used to include capacity building within the survey by assisting survey participants in forming their views. The chapter describes the early stages of the survey’s formation and provides a reflection of this method, discussing how using strategies from a children’s rights-based approach can actively engage young people as participants and as co-researchers, resulting in a survey that will be potentially more accurate in assessing young people’s attitudes towards citizenship and sustainability. The survey shall explore which conditions teenagers find most conducive for interdependence awareness, for connecting sustainability and citizenship, and for envisioning and acting towards a just, participatory, sustainable society. Key Words: Children, young people, children’s rights, co-researchers, education, sustainability, citizenship, participatory methods, survey, measures. ***** 1. Introduction This chapter discusses how strategies from a children’s right based approach are being used in the formation of a sustainability and citizenship survey in Northern Ireland. As Figure 1 shows there is an area in question where sustainability, education, and citizenship overlap; this is the area of potential under research.

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Image 1: Citizenship and sustainability within education. The investigation of the overlap. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. A large scale survey is being created by working with young people as coresearchers in a peer advisory group (PAG). The purpose of the survey is to explore how the wider population of young people in Northern Ireland (n=1000) understand the relationship between sustainability and citizenship, theoretically, practically, and in the context of education. Below the research questions are outlined. 1.1 Research Questions 1. 2. 3.

What factors influence the extent to which young people exhibit features of ‘sustainable citizenship?’ To what extent do young people understand sustainability in relation to its environmental, social and economic dimensions? How do young people conceptualise citizenship as it relates to sustainability?

In relation to the above:  

How is this mediated by young people’s identity (e.g. gender, social class, religion, ethnicity/cultural background, and their perception of local/national/global citizenship)? How is this mediated by young people’s experience of interdependence (e.g. social capital [including levels of segregation and intercultural connections], inter-generational connections etc.)?

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__________________________________________________________________  

4.

How is this mediated by young people’s political and selfefficacy? How is this influenced by young people’s experience of education for ‘sustainable citizenship’ (e.g. in formal and informal educational contexts and through media)? What is the role of schools in developing young people’s attitudes and behaviours towards ‘sustainable citizenship?’

2. Drawing on a Children’s Rights Based Approach In order to answer these questions and create the survey a children’s rights based approach is being used. Participatory approaches to research can be beneficial in a number of ways. Children and young people learn from, and can be empowered by, the opportunity to change social policy and exercise their rights. This creates a better understanding which in turn improves the research. 1 Whilst others have written about the increasing need to include children’s and young people’s participation in research, few have used rights to frame the requirement of this participation. 2 In the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Article 12 gives children the right to have their views given due weight in relation to all matters affecting them. 3 This study draws on the children’s rights based approach used by Lundy and McEvoy which requires researchers to use children’s rights standards to inform their research design. 4 One aspect of this approach is working with young people as co-researchers in a Peer Advisory Group (PAG), involving them throughout the research process. 5 In the case of this research the initial research design and the collection of data is being done by the researcher alone. However as Figure 2 displays, the young people are consulted at various stages throughout the research, assisting in further design and interpretation as co-researchers in the PAG. Therefore, for creating the survey, interpreting the data, and considering the dissemination of results, the researcher is working with the PAG.

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Image 2: PAG’s Involvement in the Research Process. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. The purpose of the PAG is to help the researcher find the best way to ask and interpret the young people’s peers about and around understandings of sustainability and citizenship in addition to discerning the language they use to express this understanding. The PAG is made up of 6-10 young people of similar age to the survey participants (14-15 years old) from an ecological society in a school in Northern Ireland. The first session with the PAG is centred around

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__________________________________________________________________ building capacity as children must have access to information in an age and capacity appropriate format on all issues of concern to them. 6 This again aligns with a children’s rights based approach which requires that children are assisted in forming and expressing views. 7 The content of the sessions are listed below. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Capacity building session with the PAG around the main issues involved in the development of the survey. Development of items and dilemmas for the use in the survey. Critique of items created by the researcher through a reading of the literature, modification of other existing measures, and discussions with the other PAG, and creation of open ended answers. Return after pilot of Survey to reassess scales with PAG. Assistance with interpretation of results. Creation of recommendations for improving citizenship education for a sustainable future based on evidence from the research.

3. The Survey Concepts construct theory and create a context for social research; concepts are the way we organise observations and ideas into categories. 8 The term construct shall be used henceforth to describe the translation of concepts into the survey. Measures can be devised to analyse constructs in the form of independent and dependent variables. Measurement allows detection of differences through a consistent device for making distinctions and estimating relationships between constructs, such as between sustainability and citizenship, through tests for correlation analysis. 9 This way other researchers can repeat the measurement and it should give reliable and valid results. Constructs are measured by scales. Bryman uses the term indicators; however in the paradigm of education indicators have a different definition, thus the term scale shall be used in its place. 10 These scales become operational definitions of the construct. 11 Whilst direct measures can be used to count something quantifiable, such as age, concepts are not as easily measured and indirect measures require scales. Scales are used to measure constructs for which no other direct measurement device exists. 12 As attitudes and traits cannot be measured directly several questions (or items) are combined into a single scale. These questions will follow a basic structure in which a statement is presented for participants to respond to by choosing the appropriate box in a Likert scale. In the survey young people shall be asked to indicate their responses to the attitude/behaviour items on a 5 point scale (for example: strongly agree, agree, neither agree or disagree, disagree, strongly disagree). This can explore sets of attitudes, and some kinds of behaviour, through

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__________________________________________________________________ sets of indirect measures. As these are not quantities they require coding to facilitate analysis as the scale does not have a true ‘0’ value. Rather it is summative, being used to measure aspects such as personality, behaviour, or attitude. 13 The scale has an overall score which is used as a quantitative measure (albeit indirect and thus can lack reliability and/or validity which shall be taken into account) of the construct. A single question can never be used to measure a construct as it cannot capture the complexity and range of the construct under investigation. For this reason several questions (or items) are used in order to provide as comprehensive a scale as possible. Scales made up of at least eight items (related to the same construct and interrelated to each other) shall be used. 14 It is important to note that within the scale the statements shall be deliberately phrased in both positive and negative ways to identify respondents who exhibit response sets. Whilst scales are predominately used for psychometric measures, descriptive questions/direct measures can also be used in this way. An objective of this research is to create an overall measure for ‘sustainable citizenship.’ With a construct as complex as this a series of scales shall be developed for associated sub-constructs:  

‘sustainability’ (including the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of this); ‘citizenship’ (including the various ways in which this conceptualised).

For certain constructs there will be developed scales that shall be used. This is preferable as they will have been tested for reliability and validity. Inevitably, however, there are some constructs for which there is no reliable scale. In this case scales will be developed based on theory and work with the PAG. The survey shall contain a mixture of questions/statements designed for descriptive analysis, psychometric measures, and dilemmas (explained below) as Table 1 below shows. The survey shall be made up of predominately closed questions. Closed questions are good for collecting information that can be easily coded, manipulated and analysed through statistics (e.g. using programs such as SPSS and STATA).

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__________________________________________________________________ Table 1: Types of Questions in the Survey. Citizenship

Sustainability

Sustainable Citizenship

Knowledge of Sustainability and citizenship (self-reported)

Open and closed questions

Open and closed questions

Open and closed questions

Attitudes towards sustainability and citizenship

Existing and developed scales Dilemmas

Existing and developed scales Dilemmas

Open and closed questions

‘Sustainable Citizenry Behaviour’ (intended or actual)

Existing and developed scales Dilemmas

Existing and developed scales Dilemmas

Open and closed questions

Whilst closed questions allow for many statistical tests such questions do not explore the reasoning that lies behind some of the responses. Therefore, a freeresponse area containing open ended questions shall be included in addition to fixed response questions to encourage expression on a range of issues and give a richer result, consistent with a children’s rights-based approach. 15 They may also ensure ‘true’ viewpoints are better represented by giving young people an opportunity to represent themselves in their own words. 16 There are some advantages to this; respondents can answer in their own terms, unusual responses can be derived, the answers from the PAG can help participants form their own views, levels of knowledge and understanding can be more fully gauged, and areas where the researcher’s knowledge is limited might be covered by participants. A disadvantage is that it takes respondents time to fill them in which may put off the 14-15 year old respondents. 17 Advice on the number and nature of free response questions will be taken from the PAG. Dilemmas shall be used to present the respondents with a hypothetical situation and three positive alternatives from which they can choose one. The one they choose should be based on how they would react, behave, or feel about the situation presented to them. The three alternatives describe a ‘high sustainable citizenship’ answer (coded 2), ‘a low sustainable citizenship’ answer (coded 1) and a ‘neutral sustainable citizenship’ answer (coded 0). As these alternatives are coded the chosen ones can be analysed using a formula which creates a scale. This scale could show where schools within the sample fall on a scale from ‘low’ to ‘high’

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘sustainable citizenship.’ This shall be compared to the results from the psychometric measures. Questions will also be constructed around the following issues, identified in the research questions above as potential factors influencing young people’s knowledge of, and attitudes and behaviours towards ‘sustainable citizenship:’    

identity (e.g. gender, social class, religion, ethnicity/cultural background and perception of local/national/global citizenship); interdependence (e.g. social capital (including levels of segregation and intercultural connections, inter-generational connections); political and self-efficacy; education (formal and informal).

4. Constructing the Survey with the Co-Researchers To create the survey strategies from a children’s rights-based approach are being used i.e. including young people as co-researchers in a PAG, as discussed previously. The purpose of the PAG is to help the researcher find the best way to ask the young people’s peers about the extent to which they understand the concepts of sustainability and citizenship and to use the language they use to express this understanding in the wording of items in the survey. This creates a translation of constructs into scales. Consequently, the survey results should have higher face, content and construct validity, and thus become more representative of the population. Face validity shows that the measure accurately reflects the dimensions of the construct in question. The PAG will be asked if the scales reflect the concept concerned and shall be amended if they do not. The groups’ knowledge and experience should thus benefit the creation of the survey greatly, in addition to developing their own thinking on these subjects. The Committee stated that for compliance with Article 12 the child does not necessarily have to have comprehensive knowledge of every aspect of matters which affect them, however, they must have sufficient understanding in order to appropriately form their own views on the matter. 18 In the context of research this means that there will be questions asked of young people to which they may not previously have given much consideration. Lundy and McEvoy suggest that a rights-based approach in this context requires that the capacity of young people to respond to such questions is built in the research process: assisting them to find ‘(in)formed views.’ 19 Again the PAG will advise on which aspects of the survey will require a degree of capacity building for participants. Following the formation of the survey it shall be piloted to assess how well the items work together as a scale in terms of reliability. Reliability refers to the consistency of the measure of a concept; this involves assessing stability, internal

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__________________________________________________________________ reliability and inter-observer consistency. As Figure 2 shows the PAG shall be visited at this point once again. Following amendments the survey shall be sent to the sample, after which the PAG shall assist in interpretation of the open ended answers. 5. Capacity Building and the Use of Arts Based Methods with Young People as Co-Researchers Whilst this is a predominately quantitative survey, arts based methods are being used to assist in the formation of the survey through capacity building with the coresearchers prior to the creation of items for scales, for dilemmas and for open ended questions. These methods can potentially help to build the capacity of the young people. In the area of environmental evaluation quantitative approaches are being criticised and new participatory methods that give high importance to conflicting perspectives and understanding, social learning and deliberative processes, and emotions and engagement, now acknowledge that artistic creativity could constitute a platform for convivial communication on environmental issues. 20 Whilst art based methodologies can be used to assist in self-expression around these issues they can go further by supporting the young people ‘in understanding the central research questions of the project.’ 21 This helps the coresearchers by building up their knowledge of the broader concepts in the context of the research. 22 As sustainability and citizenship are complex concepts arts based methods may provide an engaging way to introduce the theoretical framework of the research to young people. For example, visual methods may help develop the co-researchers understanding of environmental problems, the processes of ecological sustainability and the consequences of political economic development on the environment. 23 Responses to pictorial vignettes and descriptions of their own work are also extremely valuable. Whilst the information gathered from sessions from the PAG is not considered research data, capacity building activities that engage young people in this way could help to expand the co-researchers’ thinking on issues of sustainability and citizenship. This firstly introduces co-researchers to the wider existing knowledge associated with the research questions (outlined previously) and, secondly, it should provide them with a comprehensive framework which may assist in interpretation of data. 24 In session one the co-researchers drew around each other to create a ‘citizen.’ In the inside of this citizen they wrote everything they thought a ‘good citizen’ would do and on the outside everything a ‘bad citizen’ would do (see Figure 3).

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Image 3: PAG Session 1 Good/Bad Citizen. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. Session two included co-researchers creating images including: 1. 2. 3.

A picture of their worst possible imagined future (dystopia) (see Figure 4). A picture of their best possible imagined future (utopia) (see Figure 4). A timeline of how to get from the present to their utopia with ideas for overcoming the challenges that led to their dystopia (see Figure 5/6).

Image 4: PAG Session Two: Utopia/Dystopia. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author.

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Images 5 and 6: PAG Session 2; TimeLine to Sustainability. © 2013. Images courtesy of the author. This session also included the co-researchers imagining what a ‘sustainable citizen’ would do. They helped participants develop objectivity. It is fundamental for the co-researchers in the PAG to develop the ability to think beyond their ‘own immediate circumstances’ 25 by progressing along Lundy, McEvoy, and Byrne’s ‘gradient of objectivity’ from ‘subjective experience’ to ‘objective engagement.’ 26 The capacity building activities used promoted this progression by moving away from exercises based on the co-researcher’s own attitudes and behaviour to exercises that helped them consider how other young people might think and behave. This was achieved in part through the exercise shown in Figure 7 where co-researchers wrote their ideas about how a ‘sustainable citizen’ would behave on post-it notes and attached them to ‘Spheres of Sustainability: Social, Environmental, and Economic’ at various levels of individual, family, community, nationally and internationally.

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Image 7: Spheres of Sustainability: Social, Environmental, and Economic at various levels of individual, family, community, nationally and internationally. © 2013. Image provided courtesy of the author. During session two the co-researchers had developed enough objectivity to begin to create questions themselves by imagining how their peers would answer in hypothetical situations. Three example dilemmas are shown below. Your friends tell you they will only be friends with you if you wear the buy brands of clothes they wear. Do you…

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Tell them you will only wear the brands if you like them, they are ethical, and you need new clothes (high sustainable citizenship answer) b) Tell them you will wear the brands if you like them and you need new clothes (neutral sustainable citizenship answer) c) Tell them you will buy the brands if you like them whether you need new clothes or not (low sustainable citizenship answer). A new model of your phone arrives in the shop. Do you… a)

Use the phone you have until it breaks and then recycle it and buy a new one (high sustainable citizenship answer) b) Wait until it comes down in price and then buy it even if your old phone still works (neutral sustainable citizenship answer) c) Buy it immediately even if your own phone still works (low sustainable citizenship answer). You see an empty plastic bottle on the ground. Do you… a)

Pick it up and put it in a recycling bin when you find one (high sustainable citizenship answer) b) Put it in any bin if one is near (neutral sustainable citizenship answer) c) Throw your own litter on top of it (low sustainable citizenship answer). In addition to this the co-researchers denoted some of the items previously written by the researcher for inclusion in scales to have low face validity as the coresearchers did not understand all of the words and felt that other young people of their age would not either. 6. Conclusion This chapter has discussed how adopting strategies from a children’s rights based approach can improve research. Through reflections on the early stages of the survey’s formation it appears that active engagement of young people as participants and as co-researchers may result in a survey that will be potentially more accurate in assessing young people’s attitudes towards citizenship and sustainability. As this chapter has discussed, research that concerns young people must involve young people in the research process, not just because it is their right to be involved but because it is the right thing to do. In addition young people must

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__________________________________________________________________ be assisted in forming ‘(in)formed views.’ 27 By working with young people as coresearchers the survey discussed should more fully represent the situation at hand. This could potentially disclose which conditions young people in education in Northern Ireland find most conducive for high levels of interdependence awareness, for connecting sustainability and citizenship, and for envisioning and acting towards a just, participatory, sustainable society.

Notes 1

Kay Tisdall, John M. Davis and Michael Gallagher, Researching with Children and Young People: Research Design, Methods and Analysis (London: SAGE Publications Limited, 2008): 1-220. 2 Laura Lundy and Lesley McEvoy, ‘Childhood, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Research: What Constitutes a “Rights-Based” Approach?’, in Law and Childhood, ed. Michael Freeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012a): 75-91. 3 United Nations (UN), The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (1989), accessed 9 October 2013, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx[05/07/2013]. 4 Laura Lundy and Lesley McEvoy, ‘Developing Outcomes for Educational Services: a Children’s Rights–Based Approach’, Effective Education 1, No. 1 (2009): 43-60. 5 Ibid. 6 UN, UNCRC. 7 Laura Lundy and Lesley McEvoy, ‘Children’s Rights and Research Processes: Assisting Children to (in) Formed Views’, Childhood 19, No. 1 (2012): 129-144. 8 Martin Bulmer, Sociological Research Methods (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1984), 1-351. 9 Alan Bryman, Social Research Methods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1-840. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Paul Connolly, Quantitative Data Analysis in Education: A Critical Introduction using SPSS (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-263. 14 Bryman, Social Research Methods. 15 Lundy and McEvoy, ‘Childhood, the UNCRC and Research’, 75-91. 16 Sara L. McLafferty, ‘Conducting Questionnaire Surveys’, Key Methods in Geography (2003): 87-100. 17 Bryman, Social Research Methods. 18 UN, UNCRC.

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Lundy and McEvoy, ‘Children’s Rights and Research Processes’, 129-144. Sandrine Simon, ‘Systemic Educational Approaches to Environmental Issues: The Contribution of Ecological Art’, Systemic Practice and Action Research 19, No. 2 (2007): 143-157. 21 Ibid., 48. 22 Lundy Laura, Lesley McEvoy and Bronagh Byrne, ‘Working with Young Children as Co-Researchers: An Approach Informed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’, Early Education & Development 22, No. 5 (2011): 714-736. 23 Sandrine, ‘Systemic Educational Approaches to Environmental Issues’, 143-157. 24 Lundy and McEvoy, ‘Children’s Rights and Research Processes’, 129-144. 25 Lundy, McEvoy and Byrne, ‘Working with Young Children as Co-Researchers’, 723. 26 Ibid., 723. 27 Lundy and McEvoy, ‘Children’s Rights and Research Processes’, 129-144. 20

Bibliography Bryman, Alan. Social Research Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bulmer, Martin. Sociological Research Methods. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1984. Connolly, Paul. Quantitative Data Analysis in Education: A Critical Introduction Using SPSS. New York: Routledge, 2007. Lundy, Laura, and Lesley McEvoy. ‘Developing Outcomes for Educational Services: A Children’s Rights–Based Approach’. Effective Education 1, No. 1 (2009): 43–60. —––. ‘Childhood, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Research: What Constitutes a “Rights-Based’Approach?” Child and Family Law Quarterly (2012): 331–350. —––. ‘Children’s Rights and Research Processes: Assisting Children to (in) Formed Views’. Childhood 19, No. 1 (2012): 129–144. Lundy, Laura, Lesley McEvoy, and Bronagh Byrne. ‘Working with Young Children as Co-Researchers: An Approach Informed by the United Nations

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__________________________________________________________________ Convention on the Rights of the Child’. Early Education & Development 22, No. 5 (2011): 714–736. McLafferty, Sara L. ‘Conducting Questionnaire Surveys’. Key Methods in Geography (2003): 87–100. Simon, Sandrine. ‘Systemic Educational Approaches to Environmental Issues: The contribution of Ecological Art’. Systemic Practice and Action Research 19, No. 2 (2006): 143–157. Tisdall, Kay, John M. Davis, and Michael Gallagher. Researching with Children and Young People: Research Design, Methods and Analysis. London: SAGE Publications Limited, 2008. United Nations (UN). United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Geneva: United Nations, 1989. Accessed 9 October 2013. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx[05/07/2013]. United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. General Comment No. 12, the Right of the Child to be Heard (CRC/C/GC/12). Geneva: United Nations, 2009. Jenny Wren River Banks holds a BSc in Environmental Science from Aberystwyth University in Wales and is currently a PhD Candidate in the Centre for Children’s Rights, School of Education, Queen’s University Belfast.

Animal Welfare Education’s Role in Creating a Just Environment Roy Kareem Abstract The formation of a just environment needs engaged citizens to extend the arc of justice towards other species; education has a specific role in laying out a framework for young people to explore and take ownership of such an agenda. Animals provide a familiar and intimate bridge to take students on this journey – Animal Welfare Education (AWE) promotes the conceptualisation of animals as sentient beings that are of intrinsic value, and as such require us to act with compassion in both our direct and indirect interactions with them. Within AWE, critical thinking and participatory exercises challenge students’ individual and collective responsibility to other sentient beings and to wider society, and as an educational process the World Society for the Protection of Animals’ First Concepts in Animal Welfare (FCAW) programme uses such pedagogies to empower five to sixteen year olds in formal education to seek out animal welfare focused solutions across the globe. Within AWE’s ethical framework the concepts of justice and citizenship provide entry points for this exploration, and begin to frame the application of a self-developed responsibility towards those animals under our care and those that remain in the wild. AWE asks students to question the bargain we make with these animals and to begin to consider how we construct just and compassionate relationships, reverberating to those non-human animals that lie outside our immediate control as well as the humans in our social and familial circles. The FCAW programme applies this educational model via a robust and varied methodology, including pre and in-service training for teachers in the delivery of AWE, national curriculum development, and the tailoring of educational materials to integrate animal welfare language across disciplines. Key Words: Animal welfare education, pedagogy, compassion, empathy, quantum worldview. ***** 1. Introduction They (animals) are not just living things; they are beings with lives... that makes all the difference in the world...next time you are outside...notice the first bird you see…you are beholding a unique individual with personality traits, an emotional profile, and a library of knowledge built on experience…what you are witnessing is not just biology, but a biography. 1

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__________________________________________________________________ The idea that animals are sentient, that they possess and are aware of their own emotions, that they have a biography, lends them an intrinsic value that lies at the heart of animal welfare and Animal Welfare Education (AWE). An expansive concept of empathy therefore recognises suffering and joy not just in other humans but also within other species. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. 2 It will be suggested in this chapter that moral arc mentioned above curves a little more towards justice, if we are able to expand the circle of compassion from ourselves, to others, to animals, and then beyond. The formulations of this chapter started in parallel with my own career at the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), where I help to manage their global education programme for 5-16 year olds, called First Concepts in Animal Welfare (FCAW). In my mind it became clear that in order for AWE to be delivered in the most effective manner possible, the pedagogical and theoretical framework it was built upon needed to be explicitly explored and established. This was important for two reasons: firstly, it is much easier to deliver a consistent educational experience, if the pedagogical roots of the programme are explicit from the outset. Secondly, it was apparent that AWE had become siloed from mainstream educational and cultural norms, even though the public’s daily direct and indirect interactions with animals, be it as food or companions, are too numerous to count. Placing AWE on the pedagogical map would allow the perception of unseen connections to the wider educational world, presenting a platform for its influence to spread well beyond its starting point. This chapter will therefore briefly look at the modern conception of AWE, its pedagogical make-up, with specific examples of how it is delivered. The impact that AWE programmes have had will be briefly reviewed before looking at the potential ties between animal welfare and a reimagined global justice based on a recognition of an underlying interconnectedness across all life. 2. Animal Welfare Education Current protocols around animal welfare often focus on the health of the animals in question. While this definition is still relatively mechanistic in its conception, it is an evolving paradigm that has generally expanded rather than contracted in its recognition of the needs of animals beyond the merely physical. Depending on the working definition of animal welfare in place, AWE can be stated to simply be any form of education that seeks to enhance this state. This

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__________________________________________________________________ open definition points to the fact that there is no single written doctrine, pedagogy, or curriculum that makes up a standardised version of AWE, although there are some commonalities in its cultural interpretations and methods of delivery. AWE like either pedagogies can in theory be applied to any age range, though it is generally focused on formal early years education (particularly 5-12 years of age), with a significant though smaller focus on tertiary education, where there is an emphasis on veterinary education. AWE is considered to sit within the broader pedagogy of Humane Education (HE), which concerns itself with human rights, animal protection, environmental stewardship and cultural issues. 3 Though Humane Education has a much broader framework of aims than AWE, they remain close educational relatives in the methodologies they employ and the value base that they are founded upon. 4 AWE previously relied on behaviour change models of education, which are predicated on the so-called deficit behaviour model that presumed an undesirable behaviour stemmed from a simple lack of knowledge, and that this could be rectified by filling that vacuum with the correct information. Progressive education systems that championed participatory and less didactic types of teaching problematised this type of approach within AWE, and its incorporation of prosocial pedagogies based around altruism, empathy and collaboration, led to its current iteration, exemplified by the First Concepts in Animal Welfare (FCAW) programme. The significance of this is that many contemporary forms of AWE and HE have pedagogies that attempt to reflect the values they are actively encouraging. It is contradictory and counterproductive to be told that empathy exists as an external fact, or to be ordered to be compassionate towards others, when the pedagogies employed are in direct contrast to those same values. AWE therefore asks students to explore the concept of empathy with non-human animals while using collaborative methodologies that create the space for students to work with others in the classroom or in their communities, or by inviting students to reflect on their relationships with animals and challenge embedded assumptions via activities designed to incorporate critical thinking skills. AWE programmes work in a variety of animal contexts within the formal education system, though one of the most popular methodologies has been to focus on responsible pet ownership, as companion animals are seen as one of the key relationships that children have with animals while growing up (interestingly the subject of animals as food or producers, which in terms of numbers would be easily the most significant childanimal interaction, is rarely addressed). Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter to comment in any depth about all the values that are explicitly present within AWE, as has been mentioned compassion and empathy are central to much of its work, in that AWE’s methodology explicitly asks students to contemplate the mind of another sentient creature and then act in a way which reduces or minimises suffering. The notion that empathy towards animals encourages the same notions towards humans is still

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__________________________________________________________________ the basis for many HE programmes today, though as it has evolved it has interposed itself with other influential pedagogical themes, such as Environmental Education, Education for Sustainable Development, Social Justice Studies or Global Education. However, it is AWE in particular that asks us to feel and explore our connection to animals in an explicit and fundamental way. An example of a pedagogical framework that seeks to address these deep seated issues of interrelatedness is explored by David Selby in his paper ‘Global Education: Towards a Quantum Model of Environmental Education.’ 5 Selby’s interpretation of a new educational paradigm builds upon the historical base established by HE, but incorporates quantum theory in explaining a radical interconnectedness within and across all life, putting forward the idea that quantum physics has led to the development of a ‘quantum worldview.’ 6 This view suggests two key points that are applicable to the reinterpretation of the human-animal relationship within a global citizenship: that sub-atomic particles only have meaning in relationship to the greater whole, i.e. that there are no individual parts only ‘patterns in an inseparable web of relationships,’ 7 and that they also simultaneously exist in two states, as both particles and as waves, i.e. they manifest a duality which cannot be observed concurrently. Both these ideas present a turn away from the sole use of a mechanistic/reductionist vision to explain and explore the world, to one where the observed and observer intertwine and subjective context becomes manifest. Via this lens, if as humans we can begin to see ourselves as radically and intimately connected to everything then we ‘move to a sense and experience of belonging, of being “at home,” with all life forms and all places.’ 8 The narrative presented within a ‘Global Education: Towards a Quantum Model of Environmental Education,’ 9 therefore, potentially represent the first step in the development of a theoretical framework to underpin the pedagogy of current AWE programmes. 3. First Concepts in Animal Welfare A modern interpretation of AWE is the First Concepts in Animal Welfare (FCAW) programme at the WSPA, which is now active in 15 countries around the world and uses a spectrum of tactics to effectively deliver its remit. The FCAW programme lobbies curriculum bodies or those with appropriate power to include animal welfare language on curricula, trains teachers over a year long period in how to incorporate and deliver AWE in their existing teaching practices, and works with Initial Teacher Training Institutions to ensure all graduating teachers have some competency in AWE. The curriculum that is taught to teachers during their FCAW training highlights the fact that animal welfare can be infused across their curricula rather than having to be subject specific. For example, in a Maths lesson students could be learning to calculate areas by investigating the amount of space that animals have in different types of production systems, while in English they could be exploring the

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__________________________________________________________________ conceptualisation of animals in poetry. Resources are also provided in local languages via themes such as responsible pet ownership, disaster risk reduction, human-animal health, and wildlife trafficking. The precursor to the FCAW programme, Respect for All Forms of Life, 10 was introduced into Costa Rican primary schools in 1990. Across a two-year evaluation, it was found that children who took part in the programme showed significantly more humane responses to standardised questions compared with a control group, and this effect was still in evidence three months later in the posttest evaluation. 11 Monitoring and evaluation work for the current FCAW programme is in a pilot phase, but a large baseline data set has already been established. While many other AWE programmes have shown positive shifts in attitude towards animals amongst students after programme intervention, other Humane and Animal Welfare Education programmes have attempted to measure levels of human directed empathy as a result of animal focused education programmes. 12 For example, a study assessing the effect of a year-long humane education programme with 4th grade American students that was focused solely on their relationship to animals found increased levels of empathy towards humans immediately after the programme finished and at a one year follow up assessment. 13 While at this stage there is an insufficient evidence base to state that there is a causative connection between increased levels of animal empathy and corresponding increases in interpersonal empathy amongst students, it does suggest a strong bi-directional link. Such a connection points towards the largest set of empirical data for any area that AWE has had an interaction with, which is in the context of the relationship between human-animal violence and interpersonal violence, often referred to as simply the violence link. The predominant hypothesis states that there is a causative relationship between animal cruelty by or in the presence of children and interpersonal violence later on by those exposed to such trauma. There have been a number of studies which show a link between interpersonal violence in adults and an exposure to animal violence as children, however as human interpersonal violence is multidimensional in its creation, whether the effect is a primary causative agent continues to be debated. What can be stated is that there are strong correlations between interpersonal violence, sexual abuse, and simultaneous or subsequent acts of violence towards animals by both the original perpetrators and their victims. 14 4. Conclusion While there may be correlations between human-animal and human-human relationships, where does this take us on the road to any form of global justice? This chapter began with the premise that animal sentience as a characteristic demands at the minimum an improved form of treatment from humans, with AWE

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__________________________________________________________________ being a useful tool to move such an agenda forward. However, to make the link between AWE, justice and global citizenship it was suggested that we might need to travel beyond the terrain of just the human-animal bond towards some of the themes explored in Selby’s version of global education, which may provide the cross-contextual bridge that straight forward AWE currently lacks. Looking at the relationship between humans and animals does at least start such a process by extending the circle of empathy and compassion, viewing an interconnectedness through the lens of a shared capability for sentience and requiring us to step out of our own mind in to that of a different species. Perhaps while not being a fully global education, the themes raised within AWE help to begin to fuse the partitions between self and nature that have arisen from the use of reductionist pedagogies, contributing to the formation of a student with an awareness of the paths of intimacy that thread through all levels of action and responsibility. It is therefore postulated that though some current systems of education may present the information towards what a just global citizenship looks like in theory, it requires the internal tools of self-reflection and application that robust forms of AWE can provide, to make it a reality.

Notes 1

Johnathan Balcombe, Second Nature (New York City: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 204. 2 Theodore Parker, Ten Sermons of Religion (Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1853), accessed 15 May 2013, http://books.google.com/books?id=lUUQAAAAYAAJ&pgis=1. 3 ‘What Is Humane Education?’, accessed 20 May 2013, http://humaneeducation.org/become-a-humane-educator/what-is-humane-educati on/. 4 David Selby, ‘Global Education: Towards a Quantum Model of Environmental Education’, Canadian Journal of Environmental Education (1999): 125-141, accessed 20 May 2013, http://openjournal.lakeheadu.ca/index.php/cjee/article/view/324. 5 Ibid., 126. 6 Ibid., 136. 7 Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-Rast, Belonging to the Universe: Explorations on the Frontiers of Science and Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 83. 8 Selby, ‘Global Education’, 129. 9 Ibid., 125. 10 ‘Concepts in Animal Welfare: An Animal Welfare Syllabus. Module 1: Introduction’, accessed 10 June 2013,

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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.wspa-international.org/Images/Module_1%20Introduction_tcm2517551.pdf#false. 11 Ibid. 12 Kate Nicoll, Cindy Trifone and William Ellery Samuels, ‘An In-Class, Humane Education Program Can Improve Young Students’ Attitudes toward Animals’, Society and Animals 16 (2008): 45-60; Frank Ascione, ‘Humane Education Research: Evaluating Efforts to Encourage Children’s Kindness and Caring toward Animals’, Genetic Social and General Psychology Monographs 123 (1997): 57-78; Frank Ascione and Claudia Weber, ‘Children’s Attitudes about the Humane Treatment of Animals and Empathy: One-Year Follow up of a School-Based Intervention’, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals 9 (1996): 188-195. 13 Ascione and Weber, ‘Children’s Attitudes’, 188-195. 14 Frank Ascione, ‘Animal Abuse and Youth Violence’, Juvenile Justice Bulletin (2001): 1-16.

Bibliography Ascione, Frank. ‘Humane Education Research: Evaluating Efforts to Encourage Children’s Kindness and Caring toward Animals’. Genetic Social and General Psychology Monographs 123 (1997): 57–78. —––. ‘Animal Abuse and Youth Violence’. Juvenile Justice Bulletin (2001): 1–16. Ascione, Frank, and Claudia Weber. ‘Children’s Attitudes about the Humane Treatment of Animals and Empathy: One-Year Follow up of a School-Based Intervention’. Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals 9 (1996): 188–195. Balcombe, Johnathan. Second Nature. New York City: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Capra, Fritjof, and David Steindl-Rast. Belonging to the Universe: Explorations on the Frontiers of Science and Spirituality. San Francisco: Harper, 1993. Institute for Humane Education. ‘What Is Humane Education?’. Last modified 26 of July 2013. Accessed 20 May 2013. http://humaneeducation.org/become-ahumane-educator/what-is-humane-education/.

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__________________________________________________________________ Nicoll, Kate, Cindy Trifone, and William Ellery Samuels. ‘An In-Class, Humane Education Program Can Improve Young Students’ Attitudes toward Animals’. Society and Animals 16 (2008): 45–60. Parker, Theodore. Ten Sermons of Religion. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1853. Accessed 28 May 2013. http://books.google.com/books?id=lUUQAAAAYAAJ&pgis=1. Selby, David. ‘Global Education: Towards a Quantum Model of Environmental Education’. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education (1999): 125–141. Accessed 20 May 2013. http://openjournal.lakeheadu.ca/index.php/cjee/article/view/324. World Society for the Protection of Animals. ‘Concepts in Animal Welfare: An Animal Welfare Syllabus. Module 1: Introduction’. Accessed 10 June 2013. http://www.wspa-international.org/Images/Module_1%20Introduction_tcm25-175 51.pdf#false. Roy Kareem is the International Education Manager for the First Concepts in Animal Welfare Programme at the World Society for the Protection of Animals.

Part 3 Power: Society, Citizens and Governance

A Non-Reductionist Defence of Global Citizenship Andries De Smet, Wouter Peeters and Sigrid Sterckx Abstract According to Samuel Scheffler, a conflict exists between distributive justice and individual responsibility. At the heart of this debate lies the common-sense moral concept of ‘special responsibilities,’ i.e. responsibilities we only have to people with whom we have significant personal ties. For example, membership of the same community is often said to entail this kind of responsibility. However, this conception of individual responsibility is under attack from two different directions. On the one hand, according to the voluntarist objection, special responsibilities may constitute significant burdens for their bearers and hence, cannot be imposed on people without their consent or voluntary choice. The distributive objection on the other hand, claims that the common-sense moral conception of responsibility is overly limited in scope, and that it cannot be a sufficient guide for moral conduct, given the challenges we are facing in a globalised world (such as climate change, persistent poverty and rapid resource depletion). We will take the non-reductionist claim as the point of departure for our analysis. According to this claim, genuine special responsibilities are based upon relationships that one has reason to value, irrespective of whether or not these relationships are actually valued. Although non-reductionists defend special responsibilities against the voluntarist objection on this basis, we will argue that a sound conception of the reasons to value certain relationships can widen rather than restrict the scope of individual responsibility, thus meeting the distributive challenge as well. More specifically, we will examine which conditions might provide sufficient reasons to value relationships. We will conclude that such an account can widen the scope of special responsibilities to include the whole of mankind and shall defend a conception of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism. Key Words: Non-reductionism, special responsibilities, global justice, global citizenship. ***** 1. Introduction In common sense morality we distinguish between general and special obligations. The former are owed to everyone equally on the basis of our common humanity, whereas the latter are owed only to some specific subset of persons with whom we have a special relationship. We feel we owe more to our brother, a friend, or perhaps even a fellow countryman, than to a distant stranger. Both types of obligations often coexist without any problem, but sometimes they conflict.

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__________________________________________________________________ Why should we be allowed to give priority to special obligations? What exactly constitutes a special relationship and bestows compelling force upon it? Reductionists suppose that special obligations arise out of discrete interactions that occur in the context of our relationships, such as promises, mutual interdependences or a notion of reciprocity. 1 For example, we have a duty to take care of our elderly parents because they nurtured us when we were young. Nonreductionists, in contrast, believe this is ‘one thought too many.’ 2 For them, the mere fact that we value a relationship with someone gives rise to a special obligation towards this person. The relationship itself, not some preceding interaction, is the source of the special responsibility we bear. 3 Does this imply that every relationship we value is equally morally significant? According to Wellman, non-reductionism is vulnerable to objections when it tries to answer this question. 4 If non-reductionists want to maintain that our intuitions about relations are what really matters, they cannot denounce racism or sexism. Some people place great value on their relationships with people belonging to the same groups as themselves, which would establish special responsibilities towards that subset of persons. Non-reductionists can try to avoid this conclusion by showing why the relationship with our compatriots may imply a special responsibility and our relationship with people of the same race or sex may not. Yet, in doing so they would have to point to other grounds than the relationship itself to explain this difference. Consequently, they would no longer be defending a non-reductionist account. Special responsibilities based on special relationships that one should not value cannot be refuted in a purely non-reductionist manner. Non-reductionism also seems to face another problem. People do not only value relations they should not, but also do not value relations they should value. Some liberals reject every responsibility one has not voluntary accepted (the voluntarist objection), but can consent be that important? If a mother does not think she has a special relationship with her child, does this imply that she bears no special responsibility for the child? Do we only have responsibilities for those we already feel responsible for? In this chapter we will examine how non-reductionists try to resolve this issue. Our focus will be on what exactly constitutes a reason to value relationships and the need to consider harm when developing an account of global citizenship. 2. A Relationship One Has Reason to Value In his book, Boundaries and Allegiances, Samuel Scheffler focuses on the responsibilities we bear as individuals in a globalised world. He believes the changing circumstances of the modern world have resulted in a growing uncertainty about exactly what those responsibilities are. The restrictions imposed on individual responsibility that are supported by a conception of human social relations as ‘consisting primarily in small-scale interactions, with clearly demarcated lines of causation, among independent individual agents’ have become

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__________________________________________________________________ distorted. 5 Therefore, he claims, this restrictive conception of individual responsibility embodied in common-sense moral thought is outdated. Our special obligations increasingly seem to conflict with our general obligations. We feel ourselves clasped between the values of loyalty and equality, and most of us cherish both. 6 Scheffler tries to reduce this tension without giving full priority to either one of these values. Essential in this attempt is his non-reductionist defence of unreduced special responsibilities: Among the things that we value are our relations with each other. But to value one’s relationship with another person is to see it as a source of reasons for action of a distinctive kind. It is, in effect, to see oneself as having special responsibilities to the person with whom one has the relationship. Thus, in so far as we have good reasons to value our interpersonal relations, we have good reasons to see ourselves as having special responsibilities. 7 Important here is that Scheffler considers these relationships to generate responsibilities irrespective of whether or not these relations are actually valued. He does not deny the importance of choice or consent in determining which relations matter, but refuses to ground all responsibility in our own decisions: ‘for the relationships that generate responsibilities for an individual are those relationships that the individual has reason to value.’ 8 In this way he tries to refute the voluntarist objection in a non-reductionist way. Does he succeed in this effort? This is a difficult question to answer, for Scheffler does not specify the exact meaning of having a reason to value a relationship. His account appears to resemble Hardimon’s principle of reflective acceptability: To say that a social role is reflectively acceptable is to say that one would accept it upon reflection. Determining whether a given social role is reflectively acceptable involves stepping back from that role in thought and asking whether it is a role people ought to occupy and play. Determining that a given social role is reflectively acceptable involves judging that it is (in some sense) meaningful, rational, or good. 9 The resemblance is clear from the fact that Scheffler, like Hardimon, seems to imply that special responsibilities can be generated – upon reflection – even without an actual consent. However, their accounts diverge in that Hardimon specifies which properties (that is, meaningful, rational, or good) establish a role (or relation) as reflectively acceptable, whereas Scheffler does not aim to develop a detailed accounting of the responsibilities one might have.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. What Constitutes a Reason to Value a Relationship? Barry and Lawford-Smith outline a number of reasons that may generate special obligations and responsibilities, such as those we might have towards citizens of our (ex-) colonies, 10 and special relations that we voluntary enter into through contracts or promises. They also mention responsibilities we bear for people who are vulnerable to our actions 11 or if we benefit from certain injustices they experience and thus become morally complicit in those injustices. 12 These are all valid reasons to be held responsible, but our obligations seem to be more stringent when we stand in some causal relationship to some distant other(s). When we are in some way responsible for the situation of others, we are more likely to feel obliged to assist them. 13 Referring to Linklater, Dobson specifically mentions relations of actual harm as a source of political obligation: The obligation to compensate for harm, or to take action to avoid it, is not an obligation of charity to be met through the exercise of compassion, but of justice. Justice … is a more binding and less paternalistic source and form of obligation than charity, and its political nature takes us out of the realm of “common humanity” and into the realm of citizenship. This obligation to do justice is a political obligation rather than a more general moral obligation, and is therefore more appropriately predicated of “being a citizen” than “being human.” 14 Harming someone seems to be an indisputable reason to value a relationship. We are in a special relationship with the people we harm and bear responsibility towards them, regardless of whether we actually value this relation or not. We cannot simply dismiss this obligation merely because we do not feel sufficiently motivated. The distinction Dobson and Linklater make between obligations of charity and obligations of justice is important here. When we neglect a duty of charity to, say, feed a hungry child, we may be blameworthy but still act within the bounds of justice. When we are causally responsible for the malnutrition of that child and still fail to fulfill this duty, however, we are acting unjustly. Through the process of globalization we have become causally interconnected with virtually everyone. As such, this does not constitute a reason to value our relationship with every distant other. However, if we turn out to be systematically harming others, this generates a strong reason to value this relation, namely a reason of justice. According to this account, the harm we might inflict gives rise to a special obligation to a very large subset of persons, with a potentially universal scope. On this basis, we can argue for a concept of global citizenship, along with the accompanying special responsibilities.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Harm as a Reason to Value Relationships A. Does Our Economic Interdependence Constitute a Reason to Value Relationships? Pogge argues that we are harming the global poor through the global economic order we uphold. We are not merely failing to fulfill a positive duty of charity or assistance; we actively violate our negative duty not to harm other people. 15 If this is the case, we would have a strong reason to value our relationship with the global poor and to shoulder the special responsibilities resulting from that relationship. Pogge supports his claim by pointing to two privileges that appear to play a very important role in the active violation of our negative duty, namely the international borrowing privilege and the international resource privilege. Both rely on the fact that we tend to regard leaders of other countries as legitimate representatives – irrespective of how they came to power, how they exert it, or the extent to which they are supported by their domestic population. 16 The international borrowing privilege focuses on the right the international community grants rulers to borrow money. Pogge mentions three important adverse effects of this privilege. 17 First, it enables rulers to remain in power, because they can borrow much more and more cheaply. They can use this money as they please, which sometimes comes down to paying militias to oppress popular opposition. Second, coup attempts and civil wars become more attractive. Whoever succeeds in a coup gets the borrowing privilege as an important bonus. The third effect regards the situation after the dictatorship has been overthrown. The succeeding government is very likely to be crippled by the huge debts made by the ousted despot and is not capable of implementing the necessary reforms. As such, the international borrowing privilege keeps harming the people, even after the oppressive regime has been overturned. The international resource privilege, in turn, not only recognises the effective control that those in power have over the resources of the country, but also seems to legitimate this control. 18 When a company buys resources from a corrupt despot, they become the legitimate owner of those goods, regardless of how the despot came to power or what he does with the money acquired through the sale. As history has repeatedly shown, the resource privilege provides a strong incentive for coup attempts and civil wars in resource-rich countries. Similar to the borrowing privilege, the resource privilege financially rewards whoever successfully comes to power and provides them with the means to maintain their position. Therefore, Pogge concludes that: the underfulfillment of human rights in the developing countries is not a homegrown problem, but one we greatly contribute to through the policies we pursue and the international order we impose. We have then not merely a positive responsibility with regard to global poverty, like Rawls’s “duty of assistance,” but a

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__________________________________________________________________ negative responsibility to stop imposing the existing global order and to prevent and mitigate the harms it continually causes for the world’s poorest populations. Because our responsibility is negative and because so much harm can be prevented at so little cost to ourselves, the reduction of severe global poverty should be our foremost moral priority. 19 The question arises, however, whether we are indeed failing to fulfill a negative duty, or whether Pogge ‘[stretches] the concept of harm awkwardly to make space for duties of assistance?’ 20 Is the feasibility of an alternative economic order, that would cause less suffering, sufficient to claim that the affluent are in fact harming the poor? This conclusion seems to be too strong. Van der Veen has attempted to rebut it by pointing out three options we have regarding the current global economic order: we can sustain the status quo, we can improve it to alleviate suffering, and we can worsen it. If we worsen the situation, we are definitely violating our negative duty not to harm others. If we merely sustain the status quo, we are failing our positive duty to improve the situation of the global poor and thus are blameworthy, but not in the same sense as we would be if we had aggravated the situation. The longer we fail to fulfill our positive obligation to improve matters, the stronger its claim on us becomes, but it cannot suddenly switch from a positive to a negative obligation. 21 Our obligation of assistance or charity then becomes more urgent, but – following Dobson and Linklater – it does not evolve into an obligation of justice. Thus, although a morally superior global economic order is possible, not improving the status quo does not amount to violating our negative duty not to harm. Therefore, merely sustaining the status quo without reforming global economic institutions is not sufficient to constitute a harm-based reason to value our relationship with the global poor and to bear special responsibilities for them. B. Does Climate Change Constitute a Reason to Value Relationships? Key to the argument sketched above is the condition of not actually worsening the situation of distant others when we sustain the status quo. Whether this is the only way in which one can violate a negative duty not to harm, seems worthy of further research. As Pogge rightly argues, we could be harming others without worsening their situation in relation to the status quo. Merely sustaining the status quo can constitute a wrong, but does not amount to neglecting a negative duty, as explained by van der Veen. However, the question arises whether this conclusion also holds when sustaining the status quo actually worsens the situation of distant others. The adverse effects of climate change on human life include increased mortality (related to, for example, the increased frequency and magnitude of heat waves), food and water insecurity, the spread and exacerbation of diseases,

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__________________________________________________________________ conflicts resulting from resource scarcity, and increased migration. 22 In the climate case, doing nothing to improve the status quo thus indeed seems to worsen the situation of distant others. Based on these facts, Dobson and Hayward qualify global justice as a matter of ecological debt. 23 That is, Hayward argues that: We have a very simple, clear, robust and decisively negative duty: not to deprive any human being of access to the means of a minimally decent human life. … The affluent are using excess ecological space; they are therefore ecological debtors. They have a “negative duty” not to run up an ecological debt. They have a counterpart duty to repay it – by ceasing overdrawing and starting underdrawing. Meanwhile, they have a duty to recompense those who have been deprived access to the ecological space that they have been drawing benefit from. 24 This seems very promising as a reason to value a relationship. Yet we believe that reference to a fair share of ecological space is – although meaningful – not necessary to constitute such a reason. The harm resulting from climate change’s adverse effects is in itself sufficient to constitute a special responsibility towards the people we affect. Through our part in the process of climate change, we are harming a specific and large subset of persons, hence we bear a special responsibility towards them. We are violating our negative obligation not to harm those distant others and we are under a binding obligation to transcend the increasingly harmful status quo. 5. Concluding Remarks We started our analysis with the concept of ‘special obligations’ and Scheffler’s non-reductionist claim that such obligations are based upon relationships that one has reason to value, irrespective of whether or not these relationships are actually valued. The process of globalisation has provided new reasons to value certain relationships and bear new special responsibilities. We distinguished between obligations of charity and obligations of justice and we invoked the criterion of harm as the decisive benchmark. Against Pogge, we argued that sustaining the global economic order does not violate our negative duty not to harm others. Failing to mitigate climate change, in contrast, does entail such a violation because it actively causes harm and worsens the situation of distant others. Therefore, we have a reason to value our relationship with those who are adversely affected by climate change and we bear responsibility for them, even if we do not feel (sufficiently) motivated to assume such responsibility. The harm we cause through climate change thus grounds special obligations of justice. It widens our scope of citizenship, but does not fully ‘globalise’ our obligations. Taking into account the

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__________________________________________________________________ harm we actually cause gives rise to a special obligation to everyone who suffers because of it. As the negative effects of climate change continue to exacerbate, we are getting ever closer to an account of global citizenship that implies fully global obligations.

Notes 1

Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 98. 2 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973-80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18. 3 Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances, 100-104. 4 Christopher H. Wellman, ‘Relational Facts in Liberal Political Theory: Is There Magic in the Pronoun “My”?’, Ethics 110, No. 3 (2000): 552-554. 5 Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances, 39-40. 6 Ibid., 79. 7 Ibid., 103. 8 Ibid., 107. 9 Michael Hardimon, ‘Role Obligations’, Journal of Philosophy 91, No. 7 (1994): 348. 10 Lea Ypi, Robert Goodin and Christian Barry, ‘Associative Duties, Global Justice, and the Colonies’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (2009): 103-135. 11 Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 12 Christian Barry and Holly Lawford-Smith, eds., Global Justice (Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), xiii. 13 Andrew Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 171. 14 Ibid., 28. 15 Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 23. 16 Ibid., 118. 17 Ibid., 120-121. 18 Ibid., 119-120. 19 Thomas Pogge, ‘Priorities of Global Justice’, Metaphilosophy 32, Nos. 1-2 (2001): 22. 20 Alan Patten, ‘Should We Stop Thinking about Poverty in Terms of Helping the Poor?’, Ethics and International Affairs 19, No. 1(2006): 27. 21 Robert van der Veen, ‘Hebben de Rijke Landen een Negatieve Plicht om de Armoede in de Wereld te Bestrijden?’, in Internationale Rechtvaardigheid. Over

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__________________________________________________________________ Politiek en Ethiek in een Mondiaal Tijdperk, eds. Gert Verschraegen and Ronald Tinnevelt (Kapellen: Pelckmans, 2005), 82-85. 22 Ulisses Confalonieri, Bettina Menne, Rais Akhtar, Kristie L. Ebi, Maria Hauengue, Sari Kovats et al., ‘Human Health’, in Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds. Martin L. Parry, Osvaldo F. Canziani, Jean P. Palutikof, Paul J. van der Linden and Clair E. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 396-406, accessed 2 May 2013, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2chapter8.pdf; Anthony Costello et al., ‘Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change’, The Lancet 373 (2009): 1700-1701; Anthony J. McMichael, Anthony Nyong and Carlos Corvalan, ‘Global Environmental Change and Health: Impacts, Inequalities, and the Health Sector’, BMJ 336 (2008): 192; Anthony J. McMichael and Elisabet Lindgren, ‘Climate Change: Present and Future Risks to Health, and Necessary Responses’, Journal of Internal Medicine 270, No. 5 (2011): 403-404. 23 Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment, 120-121; Tim Hayward, ‘On the Nature of Our Debt to the Global Poor’, Journal of Social Philosophy 39, No. 1 (2008): 16-17. 24 Hayward, ‘On the Nature of Our Debt’, 16-17.

Bibliography Barry, Christian, and Holly Lawford-Smith, eds. Global Justice. Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Confalonieri, Ulisses, Bettina Menne, Rais Akhtar, Kristie L. Ebi, Maria Hauengue, Sari Kovats, Boris Revich, and Alistair Woodward. ‘Human Health’. In Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by Martin L. Parry, Osvaldo F. Canziani, Jean P. Palutikof, Paul J. van der Linden, and Clair E. Hanson, 391–431. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Accessed 2 May 2013, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter8.pdf.

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__________________________________________________________________ Costello, Anthony, Mustafa Abbas, Adriana Allen, Sarah Ball, Sarah Bell, Richard Bellamy, Sharon Friel, Nora Groce, Anne Johnson, Maria Kett, Maria Lee Caren Levy, Mark Maslin, David McCoy, Bill McGuire, Hugh Montgomery David Napier, Christina Pagel, Jinesh Patel, Jose Antonio Puppim de Oliveira, Nanneke Redclift, Hannah Rees, Daniel Rogger, Joanne Scott, Judith Stephenson, John Twigg, Jonathan Wolff, and Craig Patterson. ‘Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change’. The Lancet 373 (2009): 1693–733. Dobson, Andrew. Citizenship and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Goodin, Robert. Protecting the Vulnerable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Hardimon, Michael. ‘Role Obligations’. Journal of Philosophy 91, No. 7 (1994): 333–63. Hayward, Tim. ‘On the Nature of Our Debt to the Global Poor’. Journal of Social Philosophy 39, No. 1 (2008): 1–19. Linklater, Andrew. The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. McMichael, Anthony J., Anthony Nyong, and Carlos Corvalan. ‘Global Environmental Change and Health: Impacts, Inequalities, and the Health Sector’. BMJ 336 (2008): 191–194. McMichael, Anthony J., and Elisabet Lindgren. ‘Climate Change: Present and Future Risks to Health, and Necessary Responses’. Journal of Internal Medicine 270, No. 5 (2011): 401–413. Patten, Allan. ‘Should We Stop Thinking about Poverty in Terms of Helping the Poor?’. Ethics and International Affairs 19, No. 1 (2006): 19–27. Pogge, Thomas. ‘Priorities of Global Justice’. Metaphilosophy 32, Nos. 1-2 (2001): 6–24. —––. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.

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__________________________________________________________________ Scheffler, Samuel. Boundaries and Allegiances. Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Van der Veen, Robert. ‘Hebben de Rijke Landen een Negatieve Plicht om de Armoede in de Wereld te Bestrijden?’. In Internationale Rechtvaardigheid. Over Politiek en Ethiek in een Mondiaal Tijdperk, edited by Gert Verschraegen, and Ronald Tinnevelt, 73–89. Kapellen: Pelckmans, 2005. Wellman, Christopher. ‘Relational Facts in Liberal Political Theory: Is There Magic in the Pronoun “My”?’ Ethics 110, No. 3 (2000): 537–562. Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973-80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Ypi, Lea, Robert Goodin, and Christian Barry. ‘Associative Duties, Global Justice, and the Colonies’. Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (2009): 103–135. Andries De Smet is a Junior Research Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science of Ghent University. His doctoral research project focuses on cosmopolitanism and global justice. Wouter Peeters is a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of the Free University of Brussels (VUB). His doctoral research project focuses on political philosophical and ethical issues regarding climate governance, social justice and environmental sustainability. Sigrid Sterckx is a Professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of Ghent University and a part-time Professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).

Civil Society in the Anthropocene: A Paradigm for Localised Ecological Citizenship Kartik Sameer Madiraju and Peter Gilbert Brown Abstract Whereas early conceptions of citizenship saw individuals as having societal obligations, the dominant individualist-liberalist ideology has precipitated widespread weakening of democratic influence. Civic duty now comprises of wealth creation, consumption and political passivity, and representative democracies are subject to corporate lobbying, not popular will. However, initial civics ideologies were also exclusionary, biased and anthropocentric, insofar as no ecological duties towards other species existed. In response, we propose a new philosophy of citizenship, where political activism and civic duty are ecologically embedded. We re-introduce citizenship as a political, social, and ecological practice, where identity is integrated within political and ecosystem boundaries. Applying a bioregionalist framework for conceptualising citizenship, we identify civic duties predicated on community self-sufficiency, diversity and ecological boundaries. Under this framework, we describe how citizens can reclaim democratic power and influence in policymaking to achieve environmental justice for all species. Civic duty has been systematically diminished to merely an avenue for economic rather than political activity. The reclamation of citizenship as a force for environmental reform can begin with the introduction of a new citizenship paradigm inclusive of ecological civic duties. Key Words: Ecological citizenship, civic duty, bioregionalism, decentralisation, embedded, biosphere, limits, relational quality. ***** 1. Introduction Citizenship is a word rich in meaning: it refers to those who envision and articulate the public good; that serve in public office and hold others in office to society’s highest standards; they take the long view; and may be called upon to sacrifice fortune as well as life and limb for the polity of which they are apart. Their sense of self is informed by the community of which they are a part. Today, citizens have been reduced to consumers, convinced that consumption and passive political acts such as voting are subconsciously benefiting society. Private institutions have gained leverage over political administration rendering citizens unable to effect political reform. 1 The consumerist and liberalist ideology of financial and governmental deregulation has degraded democracy to corporate oligarchy, and all but emasculated the public sphere. 2 In the past, achieving political and social reform required citizens to execute duties separate from

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__________________________________________________________________ consumption – to be active in defining and furthering the public good; and holding those in public office accountable. At present, there is a crying need for reform: human activity is exceeding biophysical limits in our planet’s ability to withstand pollution, and its ability to replenish what we extract. 3 Some suggest that no reform of civic action is required, pointing to technological innovation or green capitalism as alternatives. 4 These remedies are too little and too late. Our objective in this chapter is to offer a reconstruction of civics that could spark massive changes in public policy to avert, or at least mitigate the impending planetary disaster. 1.1 An Argument for Civic Obligations towards Nature Because of constant support for the liberalist-individualist dogma, it is important to provide the impetus for a reconstruction of civics. For societal reform, we argue that both an ethical (membership) and a political commitment (citizenship) are required. Those willing to assume civic duties beyond consumption must have some sense of membership within the political system, because ethical frameworks tend to guide the ideals of reformists – a sense of what civil society should be. Citizenship is necessary for political reform because it is the strongest institution that implies membership and membership is necessary for political reform. Rifkin suggests that membership arises from innate interdependence and empathy within humans, 5 which we call the relational quality of citizenship (isonomia in Ancient Greece). 6 The contemporary civics discourse assumes this relational quality is merely the aggregation of individual efforts. One consequence of this assumption is that we diminish our sensitivity to the ecological systems that support civic life. A purely liberalist, consumerist civil society is unable to anticipate or respond to ecological threats and crises. One could argue that with greater emphasis on limiting corporate influence and citizen involvement, the original relational quality of citizenship could be revived. But we argue that this would still be insufficient in addressing the environmental crisis for two reasons. First, original civic obligations were anthropocentric – the relational quality, though essential for reform, is grounded in a view that only considers humans intrinsically valuable. Second, the relational quality currently only responds to human problems that are visible and immediate. However, with respect to climate change, impacts are gradual; and other species cannot campaign for their survival. So while the relational quality is crucial, it is inadequate when embedded in contemporary citizenship ideologies. The first assumption we must challenge is that only humans are affected by this relational quality. The best rebuttal is that human life is predicated on numerous dynamic and energetic systems within the biosphere, which create a relational quality between humans, other species, and the abiotic environment. The material throughput required to produce goods and services is sourced from ecological systems. Similarly the impact we have on ecological systems affects the living

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__________________________________________________________________ characteristics of every species. The second assumption is that technology will find a substitute for those that are scarce – in reality, increasing efficiency has not lowered consumption, and most natural resources are dwindling, 7 and sink for the inevitable waste streams are filling. So while citizenship contains a relational quality essential for producing civic obligations necessary for political reform, our ethical sphere of consideration is too constricted to address a biosphere crisis. 8 Because civic reform is necessary to address the environmental crisis, the only way to achieve this reform is to extend the relational quality to the entire biosphere, similar to Leopold’s land ethic. 9 Since the flourishing and well-being of nature is a prerequisite to life itself, civic life could not exist without a healthy biosphere – the schism between ecology and civil society that threatens interspecies cohesiveness must be bridged through citizenship. Therefore, any conception of civics is inadequate unless it can nurture interdependence between civil society and the biosphere. 2. Ecologically Embedded Citizenship 2.1 Grounding Ecological Citizenship The question now is how can civil society extend that relational quality, both ideologically and practically. We argue that the ideological basis for ecological citizenship must contain a conception of self and communal identity; an embedded world-view; an ethical and a political allegiance; and finally, a spiritually robust narrative. These pillars of ecological citizenship could justify various civic duties. 2.1.1 An Ecological Conception of Self and Community A notion of the self in ecological citizenship is crucial, 10 and we deviate from previous conceptions in which membership is irrelevant. 11 We argue that ecological citizenship must conceptualise the self as unified dualist entity, with an individual private, autonomous component that synergises with a social, communal, member component. 12 Since we are able to think and act independently, we are individuals; but because we are necessarily interconnected, we are also members of both cosmos and community. This is a union between the Tomashow’s reflective element of ecological identity, where we are invited to introspectively evaluate our view of the biosphere and our experiences with nature 13 and the social element that Leopold argued was innately human. 14 The self is interdependent on others, and this interdependence is the bridge between the self the community. Interdependence imbues the property of emergence to the community – as a complex system organised from the dualist self, interdependence creates a dynamic whole that is greater than its summed constituents. The community includes all biotic life and abiotic processes which make life possible. The importance of membership lies in the participatory quality it implies: every life form is continuously participating in the processes that promote the flourishing of the community.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2.1.2 Forming an Embedded World-View for Ecological Citizenship Thermodynamics portrays life as dualist: the human body is skin-encapsulated, but an open system that interacts with its environment, degrading energy gradients, forming ‘dissipative structures.’ 15 It is not surprising that ecological citizenship shares definitional characteristics with the natural sciences, since both are reformist. Thermodynamic principles also situate complex systems in space and time – a sort of embeddedness. Similarly, ecological citizenship adopts an embedded worldview of how the biosphere is situated in the cosmos, and how civil society is embedded in the biosphere. This is a departure from Vogel and Dryzek, who view nature as a social construct, 16 or view interactions as contractual. 17 Ecological citizenship adopts a worldview in which civil society interacts and synergises with the biosphere, both embedded in the cosmos. Ecological citizenship acknowledges that we are only part of evolution, and we are participants in the unfolding and flourishing of this process. 18 Ecological embeddedness requires that nothing that emanates from civil society transcend the limits of the biosphere’s sinks and regenerative ability. 2.1.3 Pledging Allegiance to the Flourishing of Life-Systems In ecological citizenship, there can be no instance in which individualistic pursuits undercut the well-being of the community and no instance in which the liberalist and consumerist social contract overrides the ecological covenant between humans and their ecosystems. As such, ecological citizenship does not prescribe allegiance to an artificialised nation-state, and patently rejects allegiance to the economic ideals of unlimited growth. Instead, ecological citizenship allows us to pledge loyalty to that which truly guarantees our well-being and health: the biotic community as a whole, and the abiotic flows, which both facilitate and constrain evolution. Bioregionalist Mike Carr refers to this allegiance as ‘lifeaffirming.’ 19 This means that ecological citizenship invites civil society to first commit to the flourishing of life, to respect the boundaries and complexities with which all life is associated; only then, when the life-affirming framework is setup as a guiding scaffold, can allegiances to species-specific communities, nations, clans, have any meaning. In pledging allegiance to those systems that make civil society a possibility, we begin to understand our ecologically interdependent and embedded nature. 2.1.4 Developing a New Narrative Thomas Berry speaks of a ‘Great Work’ that defines our time within the biosphere – our calling is to achieve the monumental transition from consumerism that has ravaged the planet, to a humble sense of communion with the biosphere. 20 The notion of a new narrative guiding the ‘Great Work’ is especially important in ecological citizenship, and rejects the old mechanistic and consumerist story. 21 To assume obligations towards nature, the new narrative must be focused on the

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__________________________________________________________________ following qualities: a sense of wonder, sacrosanctity and intrinsic value. Ecological citizenship requires a narrative that is in awe of nature, not to reinforce a false, idealized wilderness, 22 but to invoke respect and humility towards the complexity and unpredictability of the biosphere. 23 Second, civil society cannot develop an ethical and emotional connection to the biosphere unless it is considered sacred. An economic view is too arrogant, regarding ecological processes as ecosystem services; at the same time a purely scientific view risks being too reductionist. Finally, we subscribe to Sandler’s notion of intrinsic value: a combination of acknowledging nature’s value independent of humans, while appreciating the importance of actively according that value (subjective and objective intrinsic value,). 24 3. Exercising Ecological Citizenship through Civic Obligations 3.1 What Are Ecological Civic Duties? Before outlining ecological civic duties, it is important to highlight distinctions between our and other environmental citizenship concepts. Andrew Dobson argues that civic duties arising from environmental citizenship are categorically nonreciprocal, since they are duties we perform for future generations. 25 Tim Hayward, in his critique of Dobson’s ideology, argues that Dobson does not provide a distinction between moral obligations to nature, which Hayward believes are independent of citizenship and political obligations, which Hayward argues are produced solely by citizenship. He critiques the duties offered by Dobson, as being not ‘distinctly ecological.’ 26 Hayward’s critique seems to create a false dichotomy between moral and civic obligations. Hayward’s critique would not apply to our conception of ecological civic duties because we situate civic duties as flowing from a moral framework 27 – this means that obligations towards nature necessarily require an ecologically embedded ethic, and a moral obligation towards nature produces obligations in every sphere within the biosphere. The civic duties that we outline need not be distinctly ecological so long as all duties are ecologically embedded. With respect to Dobson, we argue that ecological civic duties are in fact reciprocal – our civic duties towards nature are a reflection of our interdependence and reciprocity between civil society and the biosphere. 28 The civic duties are outlined as follows: 1.

Membership Duty: As Brown argues, the contemporary civics places humanity as the chosen species with rights over or the biosphere, stemming from intellectual vanity, 29 divine right. 30 Ecological citizenship rejects this understanding, regarding us as only a part of the biosphere. Humans must first apply for membership, by increasing their awareness of the ecosystems that surround them – this includes understanding where our food comes from, inputs

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2.

3.

and outputs of environmental processes, the small variations in human behaviour that influence those processes, and most of all, a respect for our interdependence with the biosphere. In increasing our awareness, we apply for membership in the biosphere that we have forsaken, and in maintaining this awareness we begin to practice membership. Practice is achieved by communicating knowledge, sharing the narrative and educating civil society, such as meeting to discuss community impacts on the environment, engaging in ecological restoration, or a bioregional mapping project to gain an understanding of spatial impacts. 31 House Holding Duty: House-holding is a concept that redefines the human-biosphere relationship, moving from dominance to harmony. House holding becomes a duty to respect, and to protect communities in which ecological citizens live. Just as contemporary citizenship assumes a duty to protect the political boundaries of nations, albeit artificial, house holding is the civic duty to protect the entire ecosystem of a community by engaging in waste clean-ups, traditional “public health” measures such as clean water and the control, but not necessarily, the isolation of sewage, coastal restoration, reconnecting habitats via wildlife corridors, and other activities. The household can be a nebulous concept to define, but we ascribe to the philosophy of bioregionalism in setting boundaries for each localized household. Bioregionalism is an environmental movement that believes the boundaries for action and justice are defined by existing natural landscapes, and not by political boundaries, which often make piecemeal of ecosystems. In this way, the civic duty is defined by natural landscape. Entropic Thrift Duty: Entropy is a thermodynamic concept, which can be thought of as an indicator of the degree of disorder in a system. As entropy is maximized, the system reaches equilibrium and all energy gradients are dissipated. The existence of concentrated energy, or low entropy structures, are essential for life. But as we consume more material goods, we decrease the long and sometimes the short term, ability of the Earth to support life. 32 Similarly, the conversion of high residence time carbon (fossil fuels) to low residence time carbon (carbon dioxide) not only affects climate systems but also limits the ability of other species to access these essential energy gradients. As such, ecological

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4.

5.

citizens must practice entropic thrift and endeavour to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Peter Brown suggests that entropic thrift comes in the form of self-discipline, in which ecological citizens should begin to question the excesses of their desires – since the self is also dualist. 33 At the same, since these are collective action problems, these efforts must also be performed communally. Consumer Disobedience: Neo-classical economics, liberalist civic philosophy and capitalist mentality assume the nature of the human species is to relentlessly consume, feeding their self-indulgences. But those corporations that pollute and overextend biophysical limits must be denied growth in favour of the conservation of the Earth’s lie support capacity. So just as Thoreau advocated for civil disobedience in the face of an unjust war, 34 and as Gandhi advocated for boycotts and divestment from British goods in the face of colonial tyranny, 35 ecological citizens must also exercise consumer disobedience. Such disobedience can be achieved through divestment and boycotts – exercising political will by not consuming, perturbing the status quo and gradually compelling corporations to address the demands of ecological citizens. This is positively achieved by investing in the community and land itself – having a garden – supporting local organic farms over factory farms, supporting credit unions over private banks, and supporting local artists and craftspeople over mass production. Duty to Protect Nature’s Rights: The duty to assert rights for nature and safeguard those rights is an affirmation of Aristotle’s claim that humans were political animals. 36 Stone posited the idea of giving legal standing to ecosystems and suggested that humans must act as legal guardians of natural entities, fighting against injustices committed against ecosystems and submitting cases before the court on their behalf 37 – this is different from contemporary anthropocentric policies, because Stone believed that cases could be prosecuted even if human health threats were not demonstrable. Dobson argues that citizenship must entail both duties and rights, 38 but ecological citizenship acknowledges that humans must assume more duties, and the biotic community is deserving of more rights. Ecological citizens must protect the right of ecosystems to flourish, not be subject to extraction or pollution beyond their

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__________________________________________________________________ regenerative capability. Citizens can do this primarily through self-governance, community organizing, political involvement and direct action. The conception of citizenship provided here is not only theoretically robust, but also in practice. The bioregionalist approach to governance and environmental stewardship is a clear example of local communities practicing membership, entropic thrift and allegiance to the biosphere. By empowering citizens to engage in ecosystem restoration efforts in Vermont, 39 bioregionalism has fostered greater communion between humans and the ecosystem, creating communities and institutions committed to the life support systems that make the flourishing of truly civic life possible. 40 Similarly, the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund has empowered communities across the United States to assert rights for ecosystems – these rights have been used to encourage self-governance and the practice of consumer disobedience through the banning of coal mining, or natural gas fracking. 41 4. Concluding Remarks In this chapter we aim to re-construct civics by embedding it in an ecological framework of four major pillars. We think the five duties resulting from these pillars are best realized in a bioregional context for three reasons: proximity to ecosystems engenders a stronger sense of accountability; decentralisation is better suited to increasingly complex systems; and localised approaches mimic diversity in nature. However, as Brown and Garver advocate in Right Relationship, 42 grassroots citizenship must be complemented with governance that is similarly embedded and that facilitates the execution of ecological civic duties. A paradigm shift in governance can come from civil action, as it has in the past, but not in response to climate chaos. As such, ecological citizenship implicitly points towards an anticipatory, precautionary global governance strategy. Distant and proximate governing bodies alike must routinely monitor material throughputs, biodiversity, regenerative capabilities and other indicators of the biosphere’s well-being. In the future, we envision institutions being oriented towards bioregions, via global reserves and ecological federations. 43 The cognitive dissonance between our contemporary worldview and our desire to produce the greatest public good is both ironic and tragic – civil society has been convinced that liberalism and consumerism will result in prosperity. But this has not happened. And as citizens awaken to this reality, they must shed the garb of consumption and embrace a reciprocal citizenship ideology in which the flourishing of the biosphere is championed consciously and deliberately.

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Notes 1

Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 394 (1886); Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). 2 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity, 1962). 3 Johan Rockstrom, ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Nature 461 (2009): 472-475. 4 Herman Daly, ‘Ultimate Confusion: The Economics of Julian Simon’, The Social Contract Press 13 (2003); Richard Adams, ‘Milton Friedman: A Study in Failure’, The Guardian (2006). 5 Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilisation (USA: Tarcher, 2009). 6 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1963). 7 Gus Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 8 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 9 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986). 10 Chris Hilson, ‘Greening Citizenship: Boundaries of Membership and the Environment’, Journal of Environmental Law 13 (2001): 335-348. 11 Andrew Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 12 Tom Colwell, ‘The Ethics of Being Part of Bature’, Environmental Ethics 9 (1987): 99-113; Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black Rose, 1995); Steven Vogel, Against Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Raymond Murphy, ‘The Internalization of Autonomous Nature into Society’, Sociology Review 50 (2002): 313-333; Don E. Marietta. ‘Ethical Holism in Individuals’, Environmental Ethics 10 (1988): 251-258. 13 Mitchell Tomashow, Ecological Identity (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996). 14 Leopold, Sand County Almanac. 15 Ilya Prigogine and Gregoire Nicolis, Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (New York: Wiley, 1977) . 16 Vogel, Against Nature. 17 John S. Dryzek, ‘Green Reason’, Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 195-210. 18 Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club Books, 2006). 19 Mike Carr, Bioregionalism and Civil Society (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004). 20 Thomas Berry, The Great Work (New York: Broadway, 2000). 21 Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990). 22 William Cronon, Uncommon Ground (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995). 23 Robert Nadeau, Rebirth of the Sacred (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Ronald Sandler, ‘Intrinsic Value, Ecology and Conservation’, Nature Education Knowledge 3 (2012): 4; Peter Taylor, Respect for Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Christine Korsgaard, ‘Facing the Animal You See in the Mirror’, Harvard Review of Philosophy XVI (2009): 2-7. 25 Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment. 26 Tim Hayward, ‘Ecological Citizenship: Justice, Rights and the Virtue of Resourcefulness’, Environmental Politics 15 (2006): 435-446. 27 Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience 2008 Edition (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008). 28 Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver, Right Relationship (San Francisco: BerrettKoehler Publishers, 2009); Peter Brown, ‘Economics, Finance, Governance and Ethics for the Anthropocene’, Capital Institute (2012). 29 Brown and Garver, Right Relationship. 30 Lynn White, Ecology and Religion in History (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). 31 Michael Vincent McGinnis, Bioregionalism (London: Routledge, 1999). 32 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths (New York: Pergamon Press, 1976). 33 Brown, ‘Ethics for the Anthropocene’. 34 Thoreau, Civil Disobedience. 35 Thomas Weber, Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 36 John Agard Pocock, The Citizenship Debates (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998). 37 Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? 3rd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 38 Andrew Dobson. Politics at the Edge (Edited by C. Pierson and S. Torney) (London: MacMillan 2000). 39 Stephen C. Trombulak. and Christopher M. Klyza, Defining Vermont (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998); Christopher M. Kylza, The Future of the Northern Forest (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994). 40 Lake Champlain Basin Program, Opportunities for Action (Grand Isle, VT: Lake Champlain Basin Program, 1994); Linda Henzel, Personal communication with Christopher M. Kylza, 1996; Gary Synder, A Place in Space (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1992). 41 Toronto’s Waterfront and the Sustainable City, Regeneration (Toronto, ON: Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront, 1992); Jeffrey Kaplan, ‘Consent of the Governed’, Orion Magazine, November/December (2003); ‘Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’, last modified 6 May 2013, accessed 5 April 2013, http://www.celdf.org/; Mari Margil and Ben Price,

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘Pittsburgh Bans Natural Gas Drilling’, Yes Magazine, (2010); ‘Mission. Groundswell’, last modified 6 May 2013, accessed 6 April 2013, http://www.groundswell.gs/mission/; Natalia Greene, ‘The First Successful Case of the Rights of Nature implementation in Ecuador’, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (2011). 42 Brown and Garver, Right Relationship. 43 Ibid.

Bibliography Adams, Richard. ‘Milton Friedman: A Study in Failure’. The Guardian (2006). Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. London: Penguin Books, 1963. Berry, Thomas. The Great Work. New York: Broadway, 2000. —––. The Dream of the Earth. Sierra Club Books, 2006. Bookchin, Murray. The Philosophy of Social Ecology. Montreal: Black Rose, 1995. Brown, Peter. ‘Economics, Finance, Governance and Ethics for the Anthropocene’. Capital Institute (2012). Brown, Peter, and Geoffrey Garver. Right Relationship. San Francisco: BerrettKoehler Publishers, 2009. Carr, Mike. Bioregionalism and Civil Society. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004. Cheney, Jim. ‘The Moral Epistemology of First Nations Stories’. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 7 (2002): 88–100. Colwell, Tom. ‘The Ethics of Being Part of Nature’. Environmental Ethics 9 (1987): 99–113. ‘Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’. Last modified 6 May 2013. Accessed 5 April 2013. http://www.celdf.org/. Cronon, William. Uncommon Ground. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995.

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__________________________________________________________________ Daly, Herman. ‘Ultimate Confusion: The Economics of Julian Simon’. The Social Contract Press 13 (2003). Dobson, Andrew. Politics at the Edge (Edited by C. Pierson and S. Torney). London: MacMillan 2000. —––. Citizenship and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Dryzek, John S. ‘Green Reason’. Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 195–210. Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. Energy and Economic Myths. New York: Pergamon Press, 1976. Greene, Natalia. ‘The First Successful Case of the Rights of Nature Implementation in Ecuador’. Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (2011). Groundswell. ‘Mission. Groundswell’. Last modified 6 May 2013. Accessed 6 April 2013. http://www.groundswell.gs/mission/. Hyland, James L. Democratic Theory: The Philosophical Foundations. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity, 1962. Hayward, Tim. ‘Ecological Citizenship: Justice, Rights and the Virtue of Resourcefulness’. Environmental Politics 15 (2006): 435–446. Hilson, Chris. ‘Greening Citizenship: Boundaries of Membership and the Environment’. Journal of Environmental Law 13 (2001): 335–348. Kaplan, Jeffrey. ‘Consent November/December (2003).

of

the

Governed’.

Orion

Magazine,

Korsgaard, Christine. ‘Facing the Animal You See in the Mirror’. Harvard Review of Philosophy XVI (2009): 2–7. Kylza, Christopher M. The Future of the Northern Forest. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lake Champlain Basin Program. Opportunities for Action. Grand Isle, VT: Lake Champlain Basin Program, 1994. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. Margil, Mari, and Ben Price. ‘Pittsburgh Bans Natural Gas Drilling’. Yes Magazine, (2010). Marietta, Don E. ‘Ethical Holism in Individuals’. Environmental Ethics 10 (1988): 251–258. McGinnis, Michael Vincent. Bioregionalism. London: Routledge, 1999. Murphy, Raymond. ‘The Internalization of Autonomous Nature into Society’. Sociology Review 50 (2002): 313–333. Nadeau, Robert. Rebirth of the Sacred. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Northern Forest Lands Council. Finding Common Ground. Concord, NH: Northern Forest Lands Council 1994. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 394 (1886). Pocock, John Agard. The Citizenship Debates. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998. Prigogine, Ilya, and Gregoire Nicolis. Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems. New York: Wiley, 1977. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilisation. USA: Tarcher. 2009. Rockstrom, Johan. ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’. Nature 461 (2009): 472–475. Sandler, Ronald. ‘Intrinsic Value, Ecology and Conservation’. Nature Education Knowledge 3 (2012): 4. Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.

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__________________________________________________________________ —––. A Place in Space. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1992. Speth, Gus. The Bridge at the Edge of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Stone, Christopher. Should Trees Have Standing? 3rd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). Taylor, Peter. Respect for Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Thoreau, Henry David. Civil Disobedience 2008 Edition. Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008. Tomashow, Mitchell. Ecological Identity. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996. Toronto’s Waterfront and the Sustainable City. Regeneration. Toronto, ON: Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront, 1992. Trombulak, Stephen C., and Christopher M. Klyza. Defining Vermont. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998. Vogel, Steven. Against Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Weber, Thomas. Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. White, Lynn. Ecology and Religion in History. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Kartik Sameer Madiraju is a graduate student at the Department of Bioresource Engineering at McGill University, Canada. He has over nine years experience in fuel cell engineering and renewable energy, and has been involved in environmental policy and social justice initiatives since 2010. Peter Gilbert Brown is a professor at the Department of Geography at McGill University, Canada. The author of three books on environmental ethics and philosophy, his teaching and research are concerned with governance and protection of the environment.

Water as a Hazard in the Sudan Adil Mustafa Ahmad Abstract The Sudanese need to establish sound bases for environmental justice and global citizenship. The combination of military dictatorship and militant Islamist thought and the resultant isolation of the state have led to reactive political decision-making on vital matters thus harming the country’s ecosystems and its people. This chapter deals with the issue by focusing on one vital natural resource – fresh water – and highlighting how it has been made to deliver, or threaten, destruction and hamper development. This happens in different ways all arising from taking wrong decisions or failing to take the right ones. Most of the Nile basin lies in the Sudan, rains are plentiful and large underground reservoirs exist. Yet, ironically, water has enhanced the country’s vulnerability through the state’s indifference, mismanagement, religious fanaticism and political expediency. The chapter considers: 1)constructing the High Dam in Egypt flooding Nubian settlements, fertile lands and minerals and displacing communities; 2) building another dam in Nubia and planning two more flooding practically the entire Sudanese Nubia; 3) drying up the Jonglei wetlands destroying distinctive ecosystems and aiding desert advance; 4) constructing a dam in Ethiopia 12.5 km from the Sudanese border holding a reservoir of about 74 billion cubic metres in an earthquake area being a potential time bomb for the Sudan; 5) drawing water by Libya from the Nubian Aquifer which lies in four countries without presenting any studies or seeking the consent of the other parties being a threat to regional development in the west; 6) failing to combat desertification and in some cases escalating it by igniting or fuelling tribal wars and causing massive displacement pushing tribes southwards to get in conflict with other tribes. The chapter calls for the involvement and intervention of regional and international bodies and for active ‘global citizenship.’ Key Words: Top/down policies, mismanagement, flooding human heritage, desertification, conflict, destroying ecosystems. ***** 1. Background In common with the majority of Arab and African nations, the Sudanese are in dire need to establish viable bases for environmental justice and global citizenship. By the former we mean justice to the environment with all its components, human and non-human (ecosystems, wildlife, landscapes, etc). And by the global or globally-minded citizen we mean an individual whose views and actions extend beyond a desire or duty to serve specific communities to whom he relates and are

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__________________________________________________________________ devoted to ‘the human being’ at large regardless of race, gender, religious belief or political affiliation – the devotion in our case being linked to the environment. What conflicts strongly with these two concepts is the concept of national sovereignty on which governments lean heavily to force their actions through. The dividing line between where a government is free to act and where other stakeholders (national or foreign) are entitled to have their say is rarely observed and is sometimes declared a red line, i.e. a demarcation for issues not to be raised in the first place. This chapter chooses to ignore the secession of 2011 which resulted in the creation of two states: the Sudan and South Sudan – a choice made on the grounds that the two nations’’ physical environments and peoples’ activities remain firmly linked and equally threatened and the problems afflicting the two populations have common roots that extend centuries back. A blend of military dictatorship and fundamentalist Islamist thought grips the Sudan resulting in hard line, combative policies that brought about a prolonged isolation of the state (political and economic sanctions, head of state and many top officials wanted by the International Criminal Court), a dwindling middle class left by massive brain drain, etc. These difficulties were compounded by unjustifiable positions the present Sudanese government continues to take oscillating between what looks like daring challenge at certain situations and slavish submission at others. Inconsistency in decision making and harmful outcomes thus characterise much of the government’s actions. The inconsistency appears in the reactive policies, i.e. those formulated as reactions to problems as they arise rather than as products of mature visions; 1 the harm comes from taking wrong decisions or omitting, through external pressure or apprehension, to take the right ones. These hit hard the country’s natural resources, ecosystems and people’s livelihoods. An ecology of failure is established as shown repeatedly by indices of ‘corruption,’ ‘quality of life’ and ‘failed states.’ 2 To highlight this ecology of failure hence the need for environmental justice and citizenship we examine one vital natural resource, fresh water. Water is a lifegiver. At the same time, it is a tool for torture. Its two symbolisms, as a blessing and as a curse, appear side by side in religion, mythology and real life. Dealing with the latter case, we attempt to show how water in the Sudan can be made to deliver destruction and waste and impede progress – the damage being sometimes local and more often transboundary. 2. Water as an Impediment to Progress: Six Cases The Sudan, where most of the Nile basin lies, where rains are plentiful in many regions and large amounts of underground water exist, has been harmed by mismanagement of, and indifference to, water issues, religious fanaticism and political expediency. The following six major examples (Image 1) briefly highlight

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__________________________________________________________________ the different ways in which the country has been, and will likely continue to be, adversely affected by these factors unless prompt action is taken. During the period 1960-70 the High Dam in Egypt was constructed creating a lake 500 km long, 150 km of which stretch over Sudanese soil. Nubian settlements in that stretch were flooded; the population of Wadi Halfa town (about 50,000 people) had to be resettled in another location, New Halfa town in eastern Sudan, or to migrate to other destinations. 3 Fertile agricultural land, two million palm trees and minerals, especially gold, were lost and so were Ancient Nubian archaeological sites. Nubia, falling partly in the Sudan and partly in Egypt, is regarded as the second cradle of human civilisation (next to Mesopotamia): there is evidence today that Ancient Nubian civilisation took shape before its Ancient Egyptian neighbour. 4 Since the lake, created by the high dam, materialised in the middle of the desert, water loss by evaporation was high, estimated at 10 billion cubic metres per year. The dam brought advantages and disadvantages to Egypt but its negative effects on the Sudan were overwhelming. The 1959 agreement signed by the two countries was unfair to the Sudanese. The compensation paid by the Egyptian government (LE 15 million) was ridiculously low and Nubians still suffer today, half a century later, the effects of the forced exodus. The water was shared by Egypt and the Sudan in the ratio 3:1 with Egypt getting 55.5 billion cubic metres a year and the Sudan 18.5 billion cubic metres a year. Water lost by evaporation from the lake was deducted 50-50 from the two countries’ shares. ‘Why 50-50?’ is a pertinent question. Evaporative loss is directly proportional to water surface since the lake lies in one climatic zone but the lake’s surface area inside Egypt is more than four times that inside the Sudan; therefore, the deduction from each country’s share must be in that ratio – a fifth from the Sudan and four fifths from Egypt. Some argue, more convincingly, that the whole lake business is an Egyptian concern to which the Sudanese people were opposed and had little to gain. Therefore, losses by evaporation from the entire lake should have been deducted from Egypt’s share. 5 On the brighter side, in 1964, as the flooding started in Wadi Halfa town, about 3000 Halfawis refused resettlement in New Halfa and stayed on backing into the desert as the water advanced. Their perseverance and toil were finally rewarded and a town of some 23,000 people exists today south of old Wadi Halfa site

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Image 1: The Sudan and the Locations of the Six Problem Cases. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. now some 27 metres below water surface. What has been lost is irretrievable but the new town is in possession of an asset: the lake, still awaiting proper utilisation. Four decades later, Marawi Dam, our second example, was constructed further south, again within Nubian territory. The new 170 kilometre long lake repeated a similar scenario of lost land, settlements, archaeological sites and minerals, of need to resettle people, and of riots, detentions and deaths. Two more dams at Dal and Kajbar between the two man-made lakes are now planned in the face of fierce opposition and if implemented practically all Ancient Nubian sites and artefacts in the Sudan will be lost forever.

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__________________________________________________________________ The third example, Jonglei Canal, presents a contrasting scene where water harms not by its advance but by its retreat. Wetlands are a valuable feature of south Sudan; three of these exist: Jonglei, Mashar and Bahr Al-Ghazal. Of these, Jonglei is the largest covering at the height of the flood more than 10,000 square kilometres (Image 2). This is a precious asset since evaporation from the vast water surface and vegetation is not lost as it is in parched Nubia but rises to saturate the troposphere and create a mesoclimatic spot rich in flora and fauna and active as an ecosystem and a barrier against desert creep from the north. We have insistently argued that the Jonglei project should be abandoned (unless its feasibility is supported by scientific evidence) and the region developed as a wetland – a challenging but not unrealistic proposal for an oil state. 6

Image 2: The Jonglei Wetlands in South Sudan (Assembled by Architect Umaima A. Ahmad from Various Sources.) © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. Yet successive Egyptian rulers are again in the scene pressing Sudanese governments to dry up the Jonglei wetland by cutting a canal across it thus draining the flood waters back into the Nile with Egypt paying half the expenses. The resultant increase in the river revenue would then be shared equally by the Sudan

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__________________________________________________________________ and Egypt. ‘Why equally?’ is again a pertinent question. This, after all, is Sudanese water created by floods and heavy rainfall and Egypt’s sharing of the expenses cannot reasonably entitle her to share the benefits equally and forever. More importantly, the permanent damage wrought by this action on the ecosystem would not only affect south Sudan but would almost inevitably reach its southern neighbours. The fourth example, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), presents for the Sudan a hazard of yet another different nature. It is located in Ethiopia at a distance of some 12.5 km from the Sudanese border. Its lake is designed to hold about 74 billion cubic metres. 7 When in full operation it should generate (arguably) 6000 MW of electricity partly to meet Ethiopian needs and partly to be sold to the Sudan and Egypt. GERD has been under construction since April 2011 across the Blue Nile, the livelier branch which supplies the Nile with 86% of its waters. When deciding on locating dams for power generation natural slopes are more logical choices than flat plains, other factors remaining constant; and the wetter the region the better to reduce and utilise evaporation. Thus it is logical to generate electricity on the Ethiopian natural slopes for the benefit of the three countries. Yet GERD constitutes for the Sudan new hazards. It stands on an earthquake area, the Great African Rift Valley, and as such it is a potential time bomb. If it does burst, the Sudan, not Ethiopia, will bear the brunt. The Blue Nile cannot accommodate the masses of water pouring down from the lake. Its maximum flow is 1.25 billion cubic metres a day and its minimum during the dry season is 11 million cubic metres a day. A disaster not only in eastern Sudan but all along the Blue and Main Niles in the Sudan seems certain – a situation aggravated by the presence of two other dams across the Blue Nile a short distance downstream. A frightening scenario is given by a leading Sudanese hydrologist. 8 The second likely hazard is that Ethiopia will be in control of the dam’s operation. In a region burdened by conflicts and armed violence and by dictatorial rule, if hostilities flare up between the two countries the dam, regulating Blue Nile and Main Nile flows, could turn into a weapon against the Sudan (and Egypt, automatically). Experts have also criticised the size and efficiency of the dam. They maintain that the ‘plant load factor’ 9 of the dam is a mere 33% compared to 45-50% for other dams in Ethiopia and argue that a series of cascade dams, instead of a giant gravity dam, would have been more effective ultimately. Moreover, both the silt content of the Blue Nile and its present natural speed of flow would decline perceptibly. Our fifth example is the Great Man-Made River in Libya. It was constructed in the early 1990s to deliver water through 4-metre diameter pipes, along 1400 km to supply Libyan towns of the north. Most of the water comes from the Nubian Aquifer, an unreplenishable fresh water fossil reservoir which falls in four countries: the Sudan, Egypt, Libya and Chad. No studies of the project were made available and no one knows exactly the amount of water, the boundaries of the

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__________________________________________________________________ aquifer or the shares of each country. Yet the giant machine in oil-rich Libya has continued since 1995 to draw water from the aquifer at 6.5 million cubic metres a day for the benefit of Libya alone. In our sixth example, water constitutes a subtle agitator and cause of unrest to add to the visible causes. The Sudanese government’s failures to deal with climate change, the advancing desert in the fragile savannah belt and its continual ignition and escalation of battles have further increased the ecological imbalance (Image 3). The destruction of settlements and flight from them, the abandonment of agriculture, the rapid deforestation to build temporary shelter and provide firewood and fodder, have aided the reduction of rainfall, drying up of wells and recurring droughts in a fragile belt stretching east-west across the Sudan (and the continent) and thus speeded up its southward march. This has in turn forced pastoralist tribes and livestock herders to move southwards in search of water (underground and surface) and rain-fed pasture and thus come in conflict with other tribes. 10

Image 3: Pastoralism, Declining Rainfall and Environmental Degradation in Bahr Al-Ghazal, South Sudan. © 2013. Image courtesy of the author. 3. The Physical Planners’ Dilemma Physical planners, particularly those operating at regional levels, find themselves in constant confrontation with politicians and the politicians appear

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__________________________________________________________________ helpless as they are forced to implement policies and adopt priorities obviously harmful to the nation – policies and priorities often dictated by external, influential forces on weak governments to serve their own interests. A clear pecking order is in operation among governments. The main dictating force in this case is Egypt whose interests are in natural conflict with those of the Sudan when water issues are concerned. It can hardly be in the interest of Egypt to see the Sudan creating extensive irrigation, agricultural or industrial schemes or expanding, flourishing cities – all consuming and polluting Nile waters. Simple arithmetic rules: a plus here being a minus there. This solid Egyptian stance was further consolidated when the present Sudanese government was accused of collaborating with Egyptian Islamist fundamentalists in the failed attempt on Egyptian ex-president Husni Mubarak’s life in Addis Ababa in June 1995 – the Egyptian grip on the Sudanese government tightened further. Another opponent was Libyan ex-president Mu’ammer Al-Qath-thafi who had the means and guts to draw water in huge quantities from a jointly owned, unreplenishable source without agreements with other owners and without producing appropriate scientific studies. Although in 2011 both tyrants were ousted through popular uprisings, the former being under trial since then and the latter brutally massacred, the ruthless pragmatism of the policies they had set are unlikely to be changed by their successors. Thus the rights of our future generations will continue to be ignored. But let us turn to past generations and their rights. The issue of ‘archaeological terrorism’ comes to the fore – in this case flooding ancient Nubian sites. On various occasions some officials have expressed views that these sites and artefacts being pre-Islamic are not worth saving and are better left to decay or be washed away. This attitude cannot be too lightly overlooked. We have seen the damage inflicted on Khartoum since the Sudanese government turned to despotic Islamist rule in September 1983 and stepped the despotic rule up persistently since then. 11 More recently, in November 2012, and going to ridiculous extremes in Mursi’s Islamist Egypt, a preacher, Murjan Salim Al-Jawhari, has asked for the razing of the Sphinx and the Jeeza pyramids for the same reason. Relics of ancient civilisations have long lost their original religious, spiritual or symbolic content. The early Muslims who took the Faith to Egypt in A.D. 641 knew better – they never bothered to destroy any Pharaonic relic. Only religious fanatics are blind to their forefathers’ achievements and need reminding that powerful human civilisations have been founded on false beliefs. Worse than that, artefacts of other living religions have not been spared. In Afghanistan in 2001, the giant statues of Buddha in Bamiyan were blown up after being denounced by the Taliban as idolatrous images: these images are sacred to 250-500 million Buddhists living today. Even worse is the destruction by Muslims of the artefacts of other Muslims as happened in Timbuktu, Mali, by fanatic Tawariqs when they invaded Ahmed Baba Centre and burned and flooded by tap water over 1400 rare manuscripts

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__________________________________________________________________ relating to Sufi Muslims whom they oppose on some issues. All these artefacts do not belong to the countries where they lie; they are part of our larger human heritage and protecting them must be seen as an international obligation. ‘High,’ ‘Grand,’ ‘Great,’ ‘Man-made,’ ‘Fourth Pyramid of Egypt,’ ‘Eighth Wonder of the World,’ ‘Millennium,’ ‘Renaissance!’ This is how such highly questionable projects were pushed through by playing on people’s emotions and aspirations and intimidating potential critics. A planner’s routine demand for an environmental and social impact assessment could stamp him as an obstacle to progress if not a traitor. 4. Concluding Remarks The different ways in which negligence, indifference, fanaticism and bad governance generally can hamper progress in the Sudan have stressed the need for environmental justice and citizenship. It has been argued before that government policies in the Sudan try to solve problems as they arise, hence the lack vision, coherence and effectiveness 12 and the radical shifts with each change of government or of ideology by the same government. Our recommendations will thus differ according to the different threats we face. The obvious recommendations – related to transparency, enlightening and empowering people, seeking to involve them, undertaking feasibility studies for any project, taking decisions freely and holding decision makers accountable – while having become normal practice in Western democracies are still unattainable under Third World dictatorships except in cases when governments have been overthrown. They must be stated all the same. Some natural resources have been flooded and lost forever, others damaged or threatened and the Sudanese and other nations under dictatorships are calling for protective action. In light of the above discussion, constructing Dal and Kajbar dams would be criminal acts calling for resistance. International bodies should step in, especially those operating in fields like archaeology, theology and ancient civilisations. Nubia has to be declared a world heritage site. Similarly, the Jonglei canal project has to be shelved and revived only if irrefutable evidence proves its feasibility. GERD, now under construction, must have its design subjected to reassessment and its future operation and monitoring made the responsibility of regional and international bodies so that a tool for development will not constitute a potential hazard or turn into a handy weapon. Studies must focus on the Nubian aquifer, above all information regarding its boundaries, size, shares of each country and ways of utilising it in a manner which safeguards against monopolisation and exploitation. Climate change and desert arrest should be major concerns; that would stop the decline of rainfall, the drying up of wells and the depletion of greenery. Adaptation

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__________________________________________________________________ and resilience should be accorded high priority for development in that fragile belt and in the various battle zones. To conclude, democracy, liberalism, the enlightenment and empowerment of people take a long time to build hence the necessity of reliance on global support and intervention to save us from the hazards of resource ruin and false development.

Notes 1

Ian Haywood and Adil Mustafa Ahmad, ‘Land Use Planning in the Sudan’, in The International Handbook on Land Use Planning, ed. Nicholas Patricios (USA: Greenwood Press, 1986), 153-184. 2 According to the US Think-Tank Fund for Peace ‘Failed States Index’ The Sudan consistently appears among the top three. The results they show start at 2005. 3 Hassan Dafalla, The Nubian Exodus (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1975). 4 Charles Bonnet and Dominique Valbelle, The Nubian Pharaohs: Black Kings of the Nile (New York; Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2006). 5 It must be kept in mind that with 84 billion cubic metres a year the Nile is one of the smallest of the major rivers of the world (compare to the Niger, 180, the Zambezi, 230, the Volta, 390, the Congo, 1200 let alone the Amazon, 6900 billion cubic metres a year). See Amazon Basin Facts, accessed 13 May 2013, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/Amazonia/Facts/basinfacts.cfm. 6 Adil Mustafa Ahmad, ‘Post-Jonglei Planning in Southern Sudan: Combining Environment and Development’, Environment and Urbanization 20, No. 2 (October 2008): 575-586. 7 It was not possible to get any studies on GERD apart from some figures given by Ethiopian officials in the media. Figures for the size of the reservoir vary between 67 and 76 billion cubic metres. 8 An interview with hydraulics engineer Yahia Abdel Majeed, As-Sahafa newspaper, Khartoum, 3 April 2013; Personal communications, Engineer Yahia Abdel Majeed. 9 The ‘plant load factor’ is the expected electricity production divided by the potential production if the power plant was utilised permanently at full capacity. 10 See, for example, Abdelbasit Saeed, Post-Conflict Peace Building and SocioEconomic Integration Issues in South-West Kordofan, Sudan Report (Bergen, Norway: Chr Michelsen Institute, 2008). 11 Adil Mustafa Ahmad, ‘Khartoum Blues: The Deplanning and Decline of a Capital City’, Habitat International 24 (2000): 309-325. 12 Haywood and Ahmad, ‘Land Use Planning in the Sudan’.

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Bibliography Ahmad, Adil Mustafa. ‘Khartoum Blues: The Deplanning and Decline of a Capital City’. Habitat International 24 (2000): 309–325. —––. ‘Post-Jonglei Planning in South Sudan: Combining Environment and Development’. Environment and Urbanization 20 (2008): 575–586. Beyene, Mehari. How Efficient Is the Grand Ethiopian Millennium Dam? Unpublished Manuscript, dated 14 July 2011. Bonnet, Charles, and Dominique Valbelle. The Nubian Pharaohs: Black Kings of the Nile. New York, Cairo: American University of Cairo Press. 1996. Dafalla, Hassan. The Nubian Exodus. London: C. Hurst & Co. 1975. Haywood, Ian, and Adil Mustafa Ahmad. ‘Land Use Planning in the Sudan’. In The Internatonal Handbook of Land Use Planning, edited by Nicholas Patricios, 153–184. USA, Greenwood Press, 1986. Saeed, Abdelbasit. Post-Conflict Peace Building and Socio-Economic Integration Issues in South-West Kordofan. Bergen University and University of Khartoum. 2008. Adil Mustafa Ahmad is Professor of Architecture at the University of Khartoum, Sudan. His current research and design works focus on aesthetics, the physical environment, climatic design and human settlements.

Media and Ecological Consciousness Alessandro Bellafiore Abstract The concept of ‘citizenship’ in the age of the ecological consciousness is forced to change, involving a wider perspective on the connections tying together social systems and other entities of the ecological systems they belong to; connections in which dependencies and relations are nested in a complex structure. An oldfashioned preservationist approach appears obsolete or, in any case, insufficient, like some technological utopia, to enclose a new idea of ecological responsibility, not only focused on human needs or interest, producing new perspectives on equity and justice. Beyond the enormous and still unresolved contradictions within social systems, new radical problems appear at the horizon and social institutions have to face them with an apparently inadequate set of tools. Prisoner of the structural limitations of representative systems – like the need for creating and maintaining consensus – and unable to cope with vested interests of economical subjects, national and international institutions have not enough political force and have no choice except that of investing in the diffusion of ecological consciousness, making possible, via a different path, the adoption of needed and even radical resolutions through engagement. An essential help could come from the media system, which may be capable of actively participating in an evolution of the public awareness; but the actual approach to ecological issues is often confined to an attention to catastrophic events with a narrative sometimes describing the result of ecological dynamics as the effect of a mysterious menace, with no human responsibilities. A critical analysis of the way in which ecological issues are treated and a consideration about the presence – or the absence – of a sort of moral duty of media in ecological policies appears therefore necessary. Key Words: Citizenship, ecological consciousness, social system, ecological system, media system, equity, responsibility, freedom, institutional limitations. ***** 1. Introduction The aim of this chapter is to offer some considerations tying the changes in the social organisation, required by the present ecological consciousness, with the very intimate core of citizenship. The evidence that a purely conservationist environmental attitude or a mere set of restrictive regulations are insufficient to cope with ecological issues – both because of the conflict it may produce with the reasons for citizenship, and for a lack of power of State institutions – requires different strategies, based on a co-operative engagement of individuals as a mean to trigger a change in their everyday behaviours, otherwise very difficult to obtain.

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__________________________________________________________________ A strategy not based on the assumption of the citizen as a complete rational actor, but also approaching the more emotional and moral side of his/her reflection, is a path actually followed by governmental institutions and implies a role for the media system. The analysis of an institutional document on the topic allows us to produce some observations on the purposive use of media, the internal consistency they are required to have and the ethical and practical concerns which may arise. These concerns can be valued as justified, or not, on the base of the subjective perception of the entity and the necessity of the goal to achieve. 2. Human Consociation Historically the concept of citizenship, as well as human consociation, has been observed under the partial light of an attention merely focused on the human community. What made reasonable and apparently necessary the existence of a community of women and men, organised in a stable form with its own rules and constraints, has been identified in an advantage of the consociated life, respect to a pre-social status. 1 An early perspective originated in Western philosophy and also permeating in the classical sociological theory, with Emile Durkheim who formalizes the idea of an organic solidarity linking individuals, considered as a peculiar feature of the evolved human communities. 2 Indeed, the objects of the political reflection have usually been the life and the well-being of the human fellows belonging to the community; a well-being that concerns just and only humankind. No mention of the rest of the existing word is usually present, and when present it is mostly referred to the human opportunity of exploiting it. This point of view found a moral statement and a foundation in the prevailing Western religious narrative in which the existing world is an appendage of humankind – imagined as the scope of creation – and environment is seen as a given property to be managed pursuing the goal of the maximum human benefit. 3 A narrative in which, as in many others, a consolidated habit in looking at the relation between social and ecological systems from an utilitarian perspective can be easily recognised. The concept of citizenship emerging from those premises – the right to access nature, the idea of consociation as the way to the supreme collective good, and the idea of a community made just and only by humans – is established on a search for the greater well-being for the larger number, using for this goal all the needed resources. Social institutions of modern State pursue and protect this search, in change they find their own legitimacy in the partial cession of sovereignty accepted by individuals. The very idea lying at the base of the welfare state is tailored on such a concept of citizenship: producing the maximum benefit for humans that, per definition, is a ‘net benefit;’ indeed environmental costs are simply not contemplated.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. The Ecological Age The emergence of the ecological thinking during the 20th century, intending with this expression as a set of ideological and moral assumptions – derived from data provided by ecological science, of which it is a cultural translation – seriously puts under scrutiny the legitimacy of a perspective assuming a net prevalence of the social system respect to the world it belong to. 4 Not only because the idea of a purely human community seems less and less adequate to describe the increasing awareness of the surrounding reality, but also because the evident tie between human actions and their environmental consequences poses a principle of responsibility and suggests the opportunity for a self-limitation in behaviours and rights that would have been previously simply not conceivable. The first expression of an attention to the environment took the form of conservationism, in which protection was strictly tied with the chance for a future human exploitation; differently environmentalism, and more poignantly ecologism, promoted preservation in the name of the intrinsic value of the natural environment. But this commitment pursued by a relevant part of the environmental movement has often collapsed in a form of radical preservationism, aimed to the mere preservation of the still existing natural world – or of what is supposed to be natural. Further, this perspective often does not focus the intervention on the social system, or just affects marginal features of it, leaving almost untouched the core of social organisation, individual freedoms and consumption habits. Traditional preservation or slight regulations are ineffective and reforms regarding the economic and productive system are needed as well as interventions directly affecting individual habits. Indeed, nor an unquestioned trust in the results of technological innovation, nor the perspective of an ‘ecological modernization’ 5 are viable, 6 at least without some form of ‘downshifting.’ 7 The most suitable subject for managing the change would appear to be State institutions but here a number of problematic issues arise, partly tied to the very nature of State, partly due to a possible conflict between this change and the consolidated ideas about citizenship and consociation. 4. Institutions The State derives its legitimacy from the agreement with which citizens limit their own freedom looking for a more secure social order. But the constraints to freedom are not absolute and this limitation has produced the discrimination between public and private sphere. Here lies a fundamental difference with the policies of the age of ecological consciousness: the control and the interference of institutions may affect a space that has been considered for a long time as external to the state interest and its possibility of action. Some elements seem to suggest the chance for a more active and pervasive State action, very different from the liberal way of thinking about State; the very concept of welfare in an Ecological State could deeply change, traversing and exceeding the individual dimension, because

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__________________________________________________________________ the price of pursuing a diffused well-being would weight on individuals’ lives. Now, many obstacles make the role of state complex, confining it in an impasse; among them four major ones may be recalled here: consensus trap, influence of vested interests, State inner contradictions and the need for equilibrium between constraints and advantages of citizenship. Mostly with regard to democratic systems the problem of the creation and the conservation of consensus is of primary relevance and often it results in an attenuation or procrastination of needed policies. To this element the influence exerted by economic lobbies should be added; an influence to which institutions have largely proved their inability to resist. Even the hypothesis of an ‘ecological government’ led by technical experts, a maximum rationality option, triggers some concerns, primarily in relation to the appointment of these technicians and their attribution of a political mandate. To this regard, Arne Naess observes how the conclusive answer cannot be found in the work of experts because they often choose the path of confirming what seems to be the preference of the majority, in line with democratically elected administrative roles, giving, in essence, birth to a reactionary attitude. 8 Institutions in representative systems seem to lack the power to implement radical and unpopular reforms, even if those reforms are necessary; a dynamic that can be observed both at national and international level, considering the repeated failure and ineffectiveness of international meetings and commissions. The whole problem may be approximately framed in the concept of environmental state, in which ‘causing and being responsible for ameliorating environmental problems’ puts State in ‘an inescapable contradiction,’ producing ‘an indefinite pattern of ambivalence and internal struggle’ 9 impeding the adoption of policies. Nor mere regulation, without emotive and intellectual engagement would probably be successful, 10 in force of the internal conflicts in State institutions and of the frustration that regulation might produce in citizens. If a strong institutional action regulating production and economical systems, making them compliant with a new set of standard (e.g. moving from a scenario in which consumers are suggested to prefer green products to one in which just this kind of products exists) would be the most effective one, it actually appears as something very unlikely to achieve. Apparently, the shortest way for State institutions to perform their tasks and guide the transition toward a more ecologically informed social organisation is a deep change in the perception individuals hold of their condition and of their responsibilities, making environmentally correct behaviour a willing action, stimulated by personal attitude and vocation, more than by a form of civil obedience based on constriction. 11 Achieving this would permit institutions to avoid some of the obstacles mentioned above, driving change with citizens, not in spite of them, looking for an ‘engaged change.’

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Media System A major subject in the effort to produce such a change, with an influence on people’s consciousness, evaluations and feelings can be reasonably found in media system. An increasing attention is being paid by institutions to the media system role, and it may be interesting moving from a practical example. In January 2010 the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (UK) released a note entitled Climate Change: Engagement and Behaviour, 12 focused on the way United Kingdom should deal with climate change. In this note a relevant attention is focused on the role that media might play in stimulating and orienting the engagement of civil population. In the text it is stressed how public engagement is important in implementing policies, ‘especially regarding controversial policies;’ 13 and engagement also appears as a necessary element for triggering change and avoiding forms of passive resistance or opposition in personal behaviours, a key factor in the reduction of environmental impact. When considering about citizens’ engagement it would be an ingenuous mistake considering them just as fully rational actors and decision makers; an assumption that relies on unverified premises and which has proved to be largely ineffective. 14 Mere information might not be a sufficient force to stimulate consciousness and consequent changes in behaviour, also in consideration of the fact that strictly environmental arguments may, or not, be considered as relevant in personal evaluations. In this sense it is pragmatic to admit that, as shown by a study 15 on the approach people have regarding climate change and other general issues, besides ‘engaging’ people, profiles like ‘denying,’ ‘uninterested,’ or ‘doubting’ still exist, and they might be the main target of communicative actions; acting just on the base of desirable attitudes would be useless. If information in itself may be not enough to start a change in behaviours, than more specific and marketing oriented strategies have to be considered as suitable. Assuming that trust in informal contexts is greater than in the interaction with Government, or institutional message, the use of ‘trusted brands and popular media such as soap operas’ 16 is actually considered and the UK Department for Environment, Food and Natural Affairs (DEFRA) appears as seriously looking toward those opportunities. A similar hypothesis might raise strictly ethical concerns about the deliberate use of ‘not declared’ or implicit message. This kind of practices is often adopted in commercial campaigns and, in that context, it is considered as socially deplorable, but what if it is used, by institutions, for environmental awareness? Here we have a general point: have institutions always to act according to an idea of institutional action or can they adopt more subtle strategies to achieve a goal that, ultimately, is for the common well-being? This point goes beyond the aim of this chapter but needs to be addressed. Beside the environmental communication being more or less explicit, another point, tied to the aim a policy may have, is that of the perception to elicit in the public.

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__________________________________________________________________ The way in which environmental issues are communicated is supposed to make the use of media more or less effective; for example, guilt and fear could produce an emotive removal of the subject matter, making the communication not useful. 17 The merely catastrophic attitude often privileged by media on environmental issues – focusing on the most dramatic or ‘pulp’ aspects – might be counter-effective because it plays on a sentiment of fear and describes problems as not solvable, triggering an approach of inaction, 18 sometimes still maintaining the misconceived idea of unmotivated events, without any human responsibility. The difficult equilibrium point between a too rational and a too emotive way to treat this matter is where three forces are balanced: -

the ability to elicit participation and ethical engagement; a not excessive presence of fear, also considered that, anyway, it is just a finished and ephemeral stimulus for change; 19 offering the needed level of information to make evident the relation between human actions and environmental issues, triggering a possible reaction.

Not casually the text stresses the importance of coherent messages – labelled as consistency – because of their greater persuasive force. 20 But, looking at reality, environmental issues are presently communicated in many very different ways, some of them in direct contradiction; just think about climate change: is not uncommon to see a programme denouncing the urge for an intervention followed by a more sceptical or minimising one. For the public opinion this is clearly a confusing and counter-intuitive approach. What can be done to this regard? Should the diffusion of sceptical positions in some way be restrained? Definitely a provocative question, having two sides: a scientific one, regarding the responsibility of choosing a position instead of others, according to which we should also ask ourselves if a prudential approach might be acceptable, assuming that a change in behaviour would be anyway positive, even without a tragedy just around the corner. The second one is more focused on media system and concerns the legitimacy of requesting the adoption of an unanimous or at least consistent editorial policy (supposing it is feasible and that a sufficiently influential subject exists). Even if we assume for a moment the legitimacy of a similar request, it is still not so obvious if media should accept such a limitation. Probably we should consider in a different way the obligation to conform to those standards for privately owned media, relying for their existence on autonomous policies and sources (like advertising). This is obviously relevant if we note that media streams are the place of the striking contrast between appeals for reducing pollution and waste and encouraging consumption.

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__________________________________________________________________ If we consider it on the basis of our consolidated set of values we should of course conclude that it would be a not legitimate limitation of freedom of speech, thought and trade, and that this hypothesis should be definitely rejected. But, from a different point of view, keeping in our mind the scenario in which the ecological situation and the needed reforms affect so deeply the values system, put State institutions in a contradiction, question the forms of citizenship, and considering possible effects of a not effective action (or even worse of an inaction) it might not be so unimaginable appointing media system a role that is, at the same time, of responsibility and limitation. It could be even considered unfair if the media system would not be subjected to any constraint while citizens see their freedom questioned in the name of an ecological need and of an ecological responsibility. Obviously, all this looks ambiguous and probably frightening but, in front of State institutions forced to adopt a ‘soft’ approach to achieve essential goals, should not media – playing such a relevant role in present social system – contribute with their policies and even with the acceptance of a moderation of one’s own freedom? This perspective is far from the conception of the liberal State we are used to, but, probably, also the idea of State has to be renewed in the quest for an Ecological State. 6. Conclusion In conclusion, it is undoubtedly true that media can play a role in the change even if their capacity of affecting behaviours should not be imagined as a panacea, nor it is a valuable excuse for institutional capitulation or inaction. The idea of institutions intervening on individual freedoms is always scaring and the same happens with any limitation to the freedom of information, and it is difficult to overvalue this aspect, but it would be simply paradoxical and contradictory to call for a solution to ecological issues, largely produced by human behaviours, and keep imagining strategies and policies not affecting social systems and their everyday life, of which media system is part and parcel. Probably, in this step toward ecologically informed reform we discover a last tenacious stronghold of anthropocentrism.

Notes 1

Even if their conception of the relation between the citizen and State institutions widely differs, especially for what concerns the equilibrium point between individual freedom and social constraints as well as about the very nature of humankind, two authors that may be recalled here as classic examples of the philosophical tradition seeing in social institutions a ‘correction’ to a practically imperfect ‘state of nature’ are Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. As illustrative works we may refer, respectively, to: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter,

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__________________________________________________________________ Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (London: Dent, 1914); John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946); John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954). 2 The formulation of the concept of ‘organic solidarity’ was a central concept in the work of Durkheim, mainly clearly expressed in works like Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984). Writes Durkheim: ‘For if society lacks the unity that derives from the fact that the relationships between its parts are exactly regulated, that unity resulting from the harmonious articulation of its various functions assured by effective discipline and if, in addition, society lacks the unity based upon the commitment of men’s wills to a common objective, then it is no more than a pile of sand that the least jolt or the slightest puff will suffice to scatter.’ Kenneth Allan, Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World (New York: Pine Forge Press 2005), 136. 3 Callicott offers a richly informed analysis on the relation between religious narratives and the emerging models of relation with ecological systems, also exploring the chance for establishing not a unique environmental ethic but ‘many’ ethics, grounded in to the different narratives. See: J. Baird Callicott, Earth’s Insights. A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). A more specific analysis on the implications of the prevailing Western religious narratives, and especially on the consequences of the idea of the coincidence of humankind with the general finality of the creation, is that of Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, Science 155 (1967): 1203-1207. 4 A synthesis of the definition Talcott Parsons gave of social systems: ‘A social system is defined as any group of people who interact long enough to create a shared set of understandings, norms, or routines to integrate action, and established patterns of dominance and resource allocation…. They must be oriented toward certain goals or objectives, they must create mechanisms for integration and adaptation, and they must create mechanisms for self-reproduction.’ Frances Westley, Steven R. Carpenter, William A. Brock, Crawford S. Holling and Lance H. Gunderson, ‘Why Systems of People and Nature Are Not Just Social and Ecological Systems’, in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, eds. Lance H. Gunderson and Crawford S. Holling (Washington: Island Press, 2002), 103-120. 5 Buttel writes: ‘Ecological modernization theorists are basically of the view that as much as environmental problems in the past have been caused by an industrially driven process of expanded production and consumption, the solution to environmental problems cannot be found in radical movements that seek to restore the lower levels of output and consumption that prevailed years ago or in

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__________________________________________________________________ centralized command-and-control regulation. Rather, in the ecological modernization perspective, the solution to environmental problems caused by industrialization requires more industrialization – or super industrialization – albeit industrial development of a far different sort than that which prevailed during most of the 20th century.’ Frederick H. Buttel, ‘Environmental Sociology and the Explanation of Environmental Reform’, Organization & Environment 16 (2003): 322. 6 Diamond observes how there is something like a chain of interrelated problems that may impede or make more unlikely that a social system be able to confront an ecological crisis. In detail: the group could not be able to foresee that a problem is going to emerge; they could be not aware of the actual existence of a problem; even if aware they could not try to solve it; they could attempt to solve the problem but without success. Jared Diamond, Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 28-29. 7 One of the most recent articulations of the Latouche’s concept of ‘downshifting’ is contained in the book: Serge Latouche, Vers un Société d’Abondance Frugale. Contresens et Controverses sur la Décroissance (Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2012). 8 Writes Arne Naess: ‘The vast majority of experts with influence on the policy of Western industrial states avoid argumentation from fundamentals. They prefer to state which are the preferences of the majority, or are in harmony with the stated goals of the government elected democratically by the populace.’ Alan Drengson and Bill Devall, Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), 175. 9 Buttel, Environmental Sociology, 321. 10 While in many studies on green marketing the attention is mainly focused on the rational evaluations and on the relation between beliefs and behaviours, Pooley and O’Connor contend that the emotional dimension has a great relevance both in the behavioural choice as well as an instrument that may be used in the ‘green’ communication. Julie A. Pooley and Moira O’Connor, ‘Environmental Education and Attitudes: Emotions and Beliefs Are What Is Needed’, Environment and Behaviour 32 (2002): 711-723. 11 Arne Naess introduces the idea of an ecologically conscious behaviour, based upon an ideal coincidence of inner personal attitude with ‘ethic’ behaviour. In consequence of this coincidence, acting in an ecologically adequate way, even when it implies restriction and self-limitation, becomes not a frustrating or violent act but a benevolent and satisfying one. Drengson and Devall, Ecology of Wisdom, 34. 12 Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, Climate Change: Engagement and Behaviour (London: 2010). 13 Drengson and Devall, Ecology of Wisdom, 1.

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__________________________________________________________________ 14

Whitmarsh contends that, even among the rational motivations leading to the adoption of ecologically friendly behaviours in consumers, some of those motivations are related to those intended by policy makers or are not related at all with an environmental concern, but just with an economical or practical one (e.g. people save energy to spend less money not to protect environment). Lorraine Whitmarsh, ‘Behavioural Responses to Climate Change: Asymmetry of Intentions and Impacts’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 29 (2009): 13-23. 15 Irene Lorenzoni and Mike Hulme, ‘Believing Is Seeing: People’s Views of Future Socio-Economic and Climate Change in England and in Italy’, Public Understanding of Science 18 (2009): 383-400. 16 Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, Climate Change, 3. 17 Ibid., 4. 18 Ellen et al. observe how some not completely rational elements may shape the individual attitude towards a certain action; for example, it has been observed how the perceived effectiveness of a certain behaviour or policy could be a key element in determining the actual chance for an individual to adopt it. Pam Scholder Ellen, Joshua Lyle Wiener and Cathy Cobb-Walgren, ‘The Role of Perceived Consumer Effectiveness in Motivating Environmentally Conscious Behaviours’, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 10 (1991): 102-117. 19 Russell points out how fear cannot be chosen as a basic value for long term policies, just because people can’t sustain indefinitely the pressure of fear as stimulus for action or avoidance of behaviours. Bertand Russell, Authority and the Individual (London: Unwin, 1977). 20 Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, Climate Change, 3.

Bibliography Allan, Kenneth. Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. New York: Pine Forge Press, 2005. Buttel, Frederick H. ‘Environmental Sociology and the Explanation of Environmental Reform’. Organization and Environment 16 (2003): 306–344. Callicott, J. Baird. Earth’s Insights. A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. London: Penguin Books, 2011.

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__________________________________________________________________ Drengson, Alan, and Bill Devall. Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labour in Society. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. Ellen, Pam Scholder, Joshua L. Wiener, and Cathy Cobb-Walgren. ‘The Role of Perceived Consumer Effectiveness in Motivating Environmentally Conscious Behaviours’. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 10 (1991): 102–117. Gunderson, Lance, and Crawfod S. Holling. Panarchy. Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington: Island Press, 2002. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. London: Dent, 1914. Latouche, Serge. Vers un Société d’Abondance Frugale. Contresens et Controverses sur la Décroissance. Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2012. Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Civil Government. Oxford: Blackwell, 1946. —––. Essays on the Law of Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954. Lorenzoni, Irene, and Mike Hulme. ‘Believing Is Seeing: People’s Views of Future Socio-Economic and Climate Change in England and in Italy’. Public Understanding of Science 18 (2009): 383–400. Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Climate Change: Engagement and Behaviour. London, 2010. Pooley, Julie A., and Moira O’Connor. ‘Environmental Education and Attitudes: Emotions and Beliefs Are What Is Needed’. Environment and Behavior 32 (2000): 711–723. Russell, Bertrand. Authority and the Individual. London: Unwin, 1977.

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__________________________________________________________________ Westley, Frances, Steven R. Carpenter, William A. Brock, Crawford S. Holling, and Lance H. Gunderson. ‘Why Systems of People and Nature are Not Just Social and Ecological Systems’. In Panarchy. Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, edited by Lance Gunderson, and Crawfod S. Holling, 103– 120. Washington: Island Press, 2002. White, Lynn Jr. ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’. Science 155 (1967): 1203–1207. Whitmarsh, Lorraine. ‘Behavioural Responses to Climate Change: Asymmetry of Intentions and Impacts’. Journal of Environmental Psychology 29 (2009): 13–23. Alessandro Bellafiore is visiting research assistant at the Environment Network of the University of Portsmouth. The main focus of his research are the consequences of ecological issues and ecological policies on social systems.

Coltan: A Study of Environmental Justice and Global Supply Chains Darian McBain Abstract As global trade barriers are reduced and citizens become more readily connected, supply chains have gone global. Not only are the products global – someone can be holding the same model of phone in China as they are in London – but so are the supplies and suppliers. A mineral can be mined in Africa, exported across porous borders to be transported for processing in Europe, sent to Asia for manufacturing and end up in the hands of consumer in North America. This is the story of coltan, a mineral commonly mined as tantalum in countries as diverse as Australia and Brazil, but that rose to notoriety for its production in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The story of the production of coltan in itself is interesting – mine working conditions, the funding of war, citizenship and borders, governance and government, loss of habitat and life, intervention and the role of public campaigning. Beyond these issues an even bigger question needs to be asked – how, as global citizens, can we influence or control supply chains? Through analysing a quantitative case study of the supply chain of coltan in 2000, this chapter considers the role of environmental justice with respect to supply chains. Various programs have been put in place since 2000 to try to reduce the negative human and environmental impacts associated with mining coltan. These include governance and diplomacy, formal processes for certification, establishing conflict free mines, identifying alternative sources, information and media campaigns, and most recently the enactment of legislation for disclosure. By reframing supply chain management as a cross disciplinary issue for citizens in the global marketplace, the application of environmental justice may be critically examined. Key Words: Coltan, supply chain management, environmental justice, Congo, social footprint, multi-regional input-output analysis. ***** 1. Introduction If we look back 300 years, most supply chains were short and quite simple. Many commodity supply chains extended only to the local town or nearby trading towns, supplies were bought and sold from within each country. As the 20th progressed into the 21st century, supply chains became increasing complex. Efficient transportation, mass supply, reduction and removal of trade barriers and variability in the cost of labour and legislated standards mean that products are sourced from and transported to anywhere in the world.

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__________________________________________________________________ The variability in labour and environmental standards is particularly relevant when considering environmental justice in a global market. This chapter seeks to address how consumers can influence environmental justice (including social justice) outcomes upstream in the supply chain, when faced with evidence of human rights and environmental abuses. To illustrate, multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis is used to generate a social footprint to quantify the death toll associated with sourcing coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2000 and hypothetically allocate responsibility for deaths to end consumers around the globe. This chapter will then consider the current options for consumers seeking environmental justice and identify areas for future research. 2. Coltan, Mobile Phones and Environmental Justice Through environmental justice campaigns, coltan is intricately linked with images of mobile phones and gorillas although the full story is more complex. Coltan is the colloquial name for the mineral compound columbium-tantalite, which can be processed to form tantalum. Tantalum (Ta) is a useful metal, having a high heat and corrosion resistance and, most importantly for the electronics sector, it is lightweight and an excellent conductor. 1 Although used in many applications including medical devices, optical lenses, cutting tools and weaponry, one of the most well-known uses of tantalum is in high performance capacitors for electronic devices. This means that tantalum is found in most mobile telephones, smart phones, lightweight computers and games consoles. The raw colombitetantalite ore is mined in many countries, including Australia, Brazil, Mozambique, Canada, DRC and Rwanda. Processed metal comes from sources including China, Kazakhstan and Germany and an increasing market in tantalum from scrap and waste (i.e. recycled) is coming from markets mainly in Estonia, Russia and Mexico. 2 In an effort to make a rather unremarkable component mineral into a cause for justice, campaign groups in the 2000s linked coltan to mobile phones, and gorillas to coltan. Multiple campaigns sought consumers of mobile phones (ostensibly containing coltan) to either boycott using their phones, recycle their old phones or campaign for justice through their telecoms provider. 3 The injustice attributable at least in part to the mining of coltan in the DRC includes death, violence and torture, rape, the breakdown of family units, poor labour conditions, high child mortality, child labour and loss of biodiversity. The campaigns have continued to ring true as mobile phone use has become more ubiquitous and revolutionised life. Since the first public mobile phone call was made in New York in 1973, on a device weighing approximately 1kg, there are now approximately 6.5 billion mobile phone service subscribers worldwide. 4 Mobile phones are revolutionising communication and the way people interact in Africa in particular, with over 650 million subscribers and the World Bank crediting the creation of over 5 million jobs on the African continent to the mobile

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__________________________________________________________________ phone industry. The outcomes of greater mobile phone penetration in Africa include poverty reduction, access to agricultural information, banking, clean water and education. 5 In some African countries more people have access to a mobile phone than access to clean water or electricity. In 2000 there were 16.5 million mobile phone subscriptions in Africa. By 2011 this had risen to 648 million subscriptions. The advent of affordable smart phones and the ability to run these devices off mobile broadband networks that require little infrastructure has helped Africans become global citizens, as well as bring about social and economic advances. 6 As demonstrated with the uprisings in the Arab Spring, connectivity and global citizenship can be powerful forces for justice. What if the tool that is improving global citizenship and wellbeing is also implicated in environmental injustice? The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry recognises that there are significant environmental and labour issues within its supply chains that go beyond coltan and mobile phones. These issues include poor working conditions in factories, child labour, exposure to chemicals and environmental hazards, enforced overtime and environmental degradation. Apple Inc has born a great deal of media attention for the conditions in factories of suppliers such as Foxconn in China but it is recognised that if these issues exist within the Apple Inc supply chain then they are likely to be repeated elsewhere. 7 Part of the problem in seeking social and environmental justice for those impacted in the supply chain is the distance between the ultimate consumer and the producers. There is a ‘democratic deficit:’ whereas globalisation has brought people together through broadened markets and an increased mobility between states, it has also alienated people as distrust of government and corporations increases and with it comes an increasing feeling of powerlessness to effect global market decisions. 8 Corporations have little incentive to bring about environmental or social change unless it is part of their core reason for being (e.g. social enterprises) or it directly affects their market. As sales of Apple Inc products have shown, even deaths directly linked to supply chain working conditions do not necessarily result in changed consumer behaviour. 9 In addition to social issues, environmental justice campaigns relating to mobile phone production also look at the impact on the environment. In areas such as fishing there is clearly a link between good conservation management, sustainable (long term) business and profit. 10 However this does not hold true for all industries. In the DRC, it was reported that during the coltan boom in 2000 it was suspected that all of the elephants and most of the eastern lowland gorillas in the KahuziBiega National Park were killed, mostly for bush meat. 11 The plight of the eastern lowland gorilla became one of the focal points in the consumer campaign for environmental justice in the DRC.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. Linking War Induced Deaths to Coltan Supply Whilst the injustice associated with coltan mining in the DRC is incalculable, this research seeks to quantify the loss of life due to the mining boom in coltan in the year 2000, and hypothetically associate deaths due to the civil war funded by coltan with consumer end use to create a social footprint. In 2000, and for this year only, the sale of coltan was the greatest funding source for all sides of the civil war in the DRC. In all other years, natural resources such as diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt and timber were identified as being important for the generation of funding for the civil war. 12 However, in 2000 there was a spike in the price paid for tantalum on the spot market, from $30/lb to $300/lb. 13 This has been attributed to a number of reasons, such as demand for laptops associated with the dotcom boom, a new generation of mobile phones, the popularity of the Sony Play Station 2 or congestion in the minerals trading market due to long term contracts and stockpile. 14 As tantalum is traded on the free market (as opposed to the metals market) and the ongoing civil war left warring factions searching for funding sources, artisanal mining of Congolese surface deposits (i.e. mining by individuals and small teams with very basic equipment) began in earnest. It was claimed by a Congolese warlord that in the year 2000 diamonds provided an income of US$200 000 per month, whereas coltan could generate revenues of up to US$1 million per month. 15 In the subsequent years, coltan made a few people very rich in the DRC and neighbouring countries but also caused incalculable damage to society and an estimated 5 million deaths up to 2010. 16 From 2000 the UN Security Council investigated the conflict in the DRC and issued a number of reports that identified, amongst other issues, that coltan mining was funding the armed conflict and the sale of coltan to international companies had become ‘...the engine of the conflict in the DRC.’ 17 Without the sale of coltan conflict would not disappear, but the sale of coltan provided a source of funding that allowed the conflict to proliferate. 18 To understand where the coltan ended up in the supply chain in 2000, and attribute deaths hypothetically associated with the coltan trade, we used a hybrid Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) with MRIO analysis. Using MRIO analysis, millions of supply chains can be traced based on economic data. Through a painstaking interview process, the UN Security Council uncovered how coltan moved in 2000, out of the DRC, across porous borders into neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and on to third party traders and then processing. By combining this data with other research, an even better understanding can be gained of how raw materials flow as a path through the supply chain. The combined LCA MRIO approach is not new when used for assessing environmental impacts. 19 It has even been used to map how international trade can drive biodiversity threats. 20 Here the novelty is its use in quantifying social impacts in a supply chain to create a social footprint for coltan.

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__________________________________________________________________ Whilst it is possible to observe injustice in a supply chain, it is often difficult to quantify. Many popular sustainable supply chain approaches, including surveys or site visits, encourage an understanding of the issues but do not contribute to quantification of the problem. By using economic data combined with qualitative and quantitative data, this study traced coltan from the source in the DRC, through porous borders with Rwanda, onto processing in Kazakhstan, Germany and the USA and to final markets around the world. Each of these supply ‘paths’ (representing the flow of money from one industry sector to another and in between countries) has a hypothetical number of war induced deaths associated with it (see Table 1). For a detailed outline of the case study data, methodology and assumptions see Moran et al (2014). 21 The results of the analysis indicated that the top 440 paths account for half of the 2 million deaths estimated for the year 2000, while the top 15 paths (shown in Table 1) represent 552 150 deaths or 28% of the total. Table 1: Top 15 Supply Routes of Coltan Flowing from the DRC to Final Consumers in 2000. © Daniel Moran and Darian McBain 2012. Path Number

Deaths 1

Path 119,076 DRC -> Germany Processing -> Final demand in Germany in the communication and electronic equipment sector

2

99,230 DRC -> Rwanda -> Germany Processing -> Final demand in Germany in the communication and electronic equipment sector

3

56,313 DRC -> Germany Processing -> Final demand in Germany in the office equipment sector

4

54,155 DRC -> Rwanda -> USA Processing -> Final demand in USA in the electronic capacitor, resistor, coil, transformer, and other inductor manufacturing sector

5

46,928 DRC -> Rwanda -> Germany Processing -> Final demand in Germany in the office equipment sector

6

30,946 DRC -> USA Processing -> Final demand in USA in the electronic capacitor, resistor, coil, transformer, and other inductor manufacturing sector

7

21,282 DRC -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Final demand in China in the electronic computer sector

8

21,282 DRC -> Rwanda -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Final demand in China in the electronic computer sector

9

20,042 DRC -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Final demand in China in the communication equipment sector

10

20,041 DRC -> Rwanda -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Final demand in China in the communication equipment sector

11

13,029 DRC -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Final demand in China in the electronic computer sector

12

13,029 DRC -> Rwanda -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Final demand in China in the electronic computer sector

13

12,269 DRC -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Final demand in China in the communication equipment sector

14

12,269 DRC -> Rwanda -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Kazakhstan Processing -> Final demand in China in the communication equipment sector

15

12,259 DRC -> Final demand in Germany in the coltan processing sector

As we can see from Table 1 all of the top 15 paths end in the electronics, communication or capacitor sectors, implying that mobile phones were an end use for coltan but not the sole end use. These sectors would include many electronic goods, not just telephones. This has implications for the validity of some of the statements used in coltan environmental justice campaigns. Other supply chain paths within the top 100 analysed ended in uses as varied as the Mexican transport manufacturing sector, the German medical sector and the Canadian construction sector. Using this methodology, companies can work out their responsibility for the hypothetical death toll in that year by calculating their market share of the industry sector. With a greater data certainty this methodology can be used to make real estimates of consumer responsibility rather than a hypothetical modelling presented here. Based on the data, it is possible to make policy decisions clearer or

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__________________________________________________________________ environmental justice campaigns more focussed. Using a willingness to pay/willingness to accept approach, it would be possible to calculate how much an individual is willing to pay for environmental justice, which may aid business decision making processes. This research makes an important contribution to understanding an individual’s share of the responsibility for injustice. However, it raises an important question for global citizenship – what can an individual do to address this responsibility and influence environmental justice in the supply chain? 4. Discussion: How Can Citizens in the Global Marketplace Influence Environmental Justice? The focus on seeking environmental justice in a supply chain context has been polarised into corporate action versus consumer action. For consumers, the focus is primarily on direct action such as boycotting a product or company, avoiding a purchase through reuse or recycling, pressuring a company to change their behaviour, or asking third party retailers/suppliers to change their supply lines or influence their suppliers. The focus on human rights and the supply of goods and services is increasingly on eradicating modern slave labour. Modern slavery covers human trafficking and enforced economic or sexual exploitation. 22 International campaigns such as Walk Free 23 focus specifically on supply chain action through consumer power and corporate leadership. Calls by governments such as Australia 24 and the UK are seeking to ensure that there is no slavery or human trafficking in the supply chains of goods and services to government. Governance within DRC must also be addressed – in addition to the UN Security Council resolutions themselves, the UN Security Council called for a democratically elected central government in the DRC which has the strength and influence to control trade and its borders. 25 There is a recognition that business and governments need to work together on complex issues emerging around environmental protection, human rights and economic growth. 26 Particularly where there is a weak government, environmental justice is unlikely to be enforced. Some believe that global capitalism has allowed corporations to generate unsustainable profits at the expense of the environment and society by transcending national and state boundaries and avoiding relevant regulation. 27 Supply chain partnerships and certification can provide both consumers and corporations with greater certainty of justice within a supply chain. One report identified over 10 supply chain initiatives aimed at the electronics sector, most of which failed due to a number of breakage points in the supply chain and lack of commitment/funding by supply chain partners. 28 A German programme for ‘fingerprinting’ coltan to identify its source of origin is providing some success for certification, but issues with coltan extend beyond just the origin of the material and into the whole of the supply chain. 29 Supply chain certification processes such as the Durban Process for Ethical Mining (based on the Kimberly Process for used

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__________________________________________________________________ to control conflict diamonds) have had difficulty in implementation and finding the correct supply chain partners to support the process. New methods are emerging to trace (and potentially certify) supply chains. For example a study in Africa identified that the use of a mobile supply chain management and equipment tracking system enabled for mobile phones could revolutionise the tracking and supply of medical equipment. 30 A similar system could be used for tracking conflict minerals, providing both local ownership of relevant parts of the supply chain and an option for certification. Another approach may include a greater focus on understanding supply chains and consumer preferences. The 2013 scandal regarding the undisclosed sale of horse meat in UK food products demonstrates that even when companies have good supply chain practices in place, vigilance and understanding consumer low/zero tolerance issues is important. The supermarket chain Waitrose, well known for its ethical approach to supply chain management, reported an 11% increase in sales in the quarter following the scandal. 31 These low/zero tolerance issues often fit within the paradigm of environmental justice – child labour, death of workers, cruelty to animals (particularly charismatic animals or those that are frequently anthropomorphised), destruction of valued environments. Having a supply chain certified to high environmental and social standards can bring about a market and competition delineator. For corporations seeking to avoid use of conflict minerals there are several sources of information 32 as well as emerging regulation. As part of the financial reforms in the US Dodd-Frank Act 2010, Section 1520 requires listed companies to report publicly on the source of conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold), and if the source is the DRC further demonstration that the sourced material is conflict free is required. 33 There is concern that the implementation of SEC 1520 will remove a vital source of income from the DRC if companies source only from non-conflict countries. There is also concern that other emerging sources of tantalum, such as Venezuela and Colombia could be funding conflict. 34 Total supply chain control is demonstrated through Solutions for Hope. 35 This project was established by Motorola Solutions Inc (producer of communications equipment) and AVX Corporation (producer of tantalum capacitors) in July 2011. They have created a conflict free closed pipe supply chain from miners in the DRC to smelting, component manufacturing and end user. The project is still in operation, and in 2013 the first available conflict free smartphone using the conflict free supply chain is available through Fairphone. 36 Consumer campaigning on the issue of coltan has generally focussed on minimising the use of tantalum from conflict sources through alternative providers and boycotts (e.g. Conflict Free Campus Initiative), encouraging companies to trace, audit and certify their tantalum supply chain (e.g. Enough project) and minimising consumption through recycling efforts (e.g. They’re Calling on You

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__________________________________________________________________ campaign). All of these approaches have some benefits but also limited success to date. Boycotting DRC produced coltan, if it can be accurately identified in the first place, brings up many problems in itself. A boycott of all coltan, whether by individual consumers or by corporations, will deny people of the DRC of an income that is greatly needed, as well as depriving warlords of their income. As an alternative, tracing the source of the weapons used in conflict and stopping the flow of weapons into the region may be an alternative to stopping the trade of coltan out of the region. The weaponry used in the civil war is not made in the DRC nor in neighbouring African states and this approach may prove more successful at halting conflict. 5. Conclusion In conclusion, mobile telephony has made one of the biggest improvements to life in Africa in decades. Connectivity enables knowledge, power and ultimately gives the people strength and the ability to act as global citizens on global issues. The rise of the production of mobile telephony and lightweight electronic goods has also contributed to funding one of the bloodiest and longest running civil wars in Africa’s history. With an estimated 5 million people killed in the civil war conflicts to date in the DRC, the mining of coltan for militia profit has indirectly had a terrible impact on human life and the environment. Using MRIO analysis helps conceptualise the scale of the problem and allocate a responsibility for deaths along the supply chain of coltan. The research using MRIO analysis to enumerate the social footprint of the coltan supply chain provides a novel quantitative analysis. Future research will include more recent data sets studying the supply chain of coltan, applying this methodology to other social indicators for supply chain management and identifying effective ways to seek environmental justice in the supply chain.

Notes 1

Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center, ‘Applications for Tantalum’, accessed 24 August 2012. http://tanb.org/tantalum. 2 US Geological Survey, ‘Tantalum Mineral Commodity Summary 2013’, accessed 24 August 2012, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/niobium/mcs2013-tanta.pdf. 3 Michael Nest, Coltan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 99-109. 4 Tom Meltzer, ‘40 Unexpected Facts about Mobiles’, The Guardian, accessed 4 April 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/03/forty-mobile-phone-facts-cell phones-dialling.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5

World Bank and e-Transform Africa, eds., The Transformational Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa (New York: World Bank, 2013), 6-17. 6 World Bank and e-Transform Africa, The Transformational Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa, 6-17. 7 Stephen Foley, ‘Apple Must Learn from Nike and Get Tough on Causes of Supply Chain Abuse’, The Independent, accessed 10 April 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/apple-must-learn-from-nik e-and-get-tough-on-causes-of-supply-chain-abuse-7624749.html. 8 Glen Lehman, ‘Disclosing New Worlds: A Role for Social and Environmental Accounting and Auditing’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 24, No. 3 (1999): 217-241. 9 Paul Harris, ‘Apple Hit by Boycott Call over Worker Abuses in China’, The Observer, accessed 3 May 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jan/29/apple-faces-boycott-workerabuses. 10 Thomas Kompas, ‘Conservation and Profits: Always in Conflict?’, The Solutions Journal 4, No. 1 (2013): n.p., accessed 14 April 2013, http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1211. 11 Karen Hayes and Richard Burge, ‘Coltan Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo: How Tantalum-Using Industries Can Commit to the Reconstruction of the DRC’, Flora & Fauna International Conservation Reports (Cambridge, UK: Flora & Fauna International, 2003). 12 United Nations Security Council, ‘Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’ (New York: United Nations, 2001). 13 Ibid. 14 Nest, Coltan, 60-75. 15 Karl Vick, ‘Vital Ore Funds Congo’s War’, Washington Post, 19 March 2001, A01. 16 Christopher J. Ayres, ‘The International Trade in Conflict Minerals: Coltan’, Critical Perspectives on International Business 8, No. 2 (2012): 178-193. 17 United Nations Security Council, Report, 2001. 18 Ayers, ‘The International Trade in Conflict Minerals: Coltan’, 179; Daniel Moran et al., ‘Global Supply Chains of Coltan: A Hybrid LCA Study Using a Social Indicator’, Journal of Industrial Ecology (2014), accepted. 19 Thomas Wiedmann et al., ‘Application of Hybrid Life Cycle Approaches to Emerging Energy Technologies: The Case of Wind Power in the UK’, Environmental Science and Technology 45, No. 13 (2011): 5900-5907; Clark W. Bullard, Peter S. Penner and David A. Pilati, ‘Net Energy Analysis: Handbook for

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__________________________________________________________________ Combining Process and Input-Output Analysis’, Resources and Energy 1 (1978): 267-313; Shinichiro Nakamura, ‘Hybrid Input-Output Analysis as a Tool for Communication among Scientists of Different Disciplines’, Journal of Industrial Ecology 15, No. 5 (2011): 661-663. 20 Manfred Lenzen et al., ‘International Trade Drives Biodiversity Threats in Developing Nations’, Nature 486, No. 7401 (2012): 109-112. 21 Moran et al., ‘Global Supply Chains of Coltan: A Hybrid LCA Study Using a Social Indicator’, Journal of Industrial Ecology (2014), accepted. 22 Thomas Gaudett and Simon Thompson, ‘Modern Slavery’, Harvard Political Review 38, No. 1 (2011): n.p., accessed 10 April 2013, http://harvardpolitics.com/covers/women-in-the-world/modern-slavery-the-plightof-women-in-the-middle-east/. 23 Walk Free, accessed 13 April 2013, http://www.walkfree.org/about. 24 As stated by then Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard in her speech on International Women’s Day in 2013, the Australian government is committed to ensuring that there is no slavery or people trafficking in the supply chains to government. Accessed 13 April 2013, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-08/julia-gillard-delivers-international-women s-day/4560198. 25 UN Security Council, ‘Follow-up to the Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’ (New York: United Nations, 2003). 26 United Nations Global Compact and World Business Council for Sustainable Development, ‘Joint Report to the High Level Panel of the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda’, accessed 15 April 2013, http://www.unglobalcompact.org/docs/issues_doc/development/Joint_Report_HLP .pdf. 27 Lehman, ‘Disclosing New Worlds: A Role for Social and Environmental Accounting and Auditing’, 217-241. 28 Resolve, Tracing a Path Forward: A Study of the Challenges of the Supply Chain for Target Metals Used in Electronics’ (Washington DC: Resolve, 2010), accessed 15 April 2013, http://eicc.info/documents/RESOLVEReport4.10.10.pdf. 29 Ayres, ‘The International Trade in Conflict Minerals: Coltan’, 185. 30 World Bank and e-Transform Africa, The Transformational Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa, 6-17. 31 Simon Neville, ‘Waitrose Reports Sales Surge after Avoiding Horsemeat Scandal’, The Guardian, 3 May 2013, accessed 5 May 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/may/03/waitrose-sales-avoiding-horse eat-scandal.

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__________________________________________________________________ 32

EICC, ‘Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition’, accessed 14 April 2013, http://www.eicc.info/; OECD, ‘Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas’, accessed 14 April 2013, http://www.oecd.org/fr/daf/inv/mne/mining.htm. 33 Eliza Strickland, ‘Cracking Down on Conflict Minerals’, Spectrum, IEEE 48, No. 12 (2011): 11-12. 34 Emilia Diaz-Struc and Joseph Poliszuk, ‘Venezuela Emerges as New Source of ‘Conflict’ Minerals’, Center for Public Integrity, 2012. 35 Solutions for Hope project, accessed 15 April 2013, http://solutions-network.org/site-solutionsforhope/. 36 Fairphone history, accessed 29 August 2013, http://www.fairphone.com/#phone.

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__________________________________________________________________ Hayes, Karen, and Richard Burge. ‘Coltan Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo: How Tantalum-Using Industries Can Commit to the Reconstruction of the Drc’. In Flora and Fauna International Conservation Reports, edited by Flora and Fauna International. Cambridge, UK: Flora and Fauna International, 2003. Kompas, Thomas. ‘Conservation and Profits: Always in Conflict?’, The Solutions Journal 4, No. 1 (2013): n.p. Accessed 14 April 2013. http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1211. Lehman, Glen. ‘A Legitimate Concern for Environmental Accounting’. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 6, No. 5 (1995): 393–412. —––. ‘Disclosing New Worlds: A Role for Social and Environmental Accounting and Auditing’. Accounting, Organizations and Society 24, No. 3 (1999): 217–241. Lenzen, Manfred, Daniel Moran, Keiichiro Kanemoto, Barney Foran, Leonarda Lobefaro, and Arne Geschke. ‘International Trade Drives Biodiversity Threats in Developing Nations’. Nature 486, No. 7401 (2012): 109–112. Meltzer, Tom. ‘40 Unexpected Facts about Mobiles’. The Guardian, 3 April 2013 2013. Moran, Daniel, Darian McBain, Keiichiro Kanemoto, Manfred Lenzen, and Arne Geschke. ‘Global Supply Chains of Coltan: A Hybrid LCA Study Using a Social Indicator’. Journal of Industrial Ecology (2014). Accepted. Nakamura, Shinichiro. ‘Hybrid Input–Output Analysis as a Tool for Communication among Scientists of Different Disciplines’. Journal of Industrial Ecology 15, No. 5 (2011): 661–663. Nest, Michael. Coltan. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011. OECD. ‘Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas’. OECD, 2013. Resolve. ‘Tracing a Path Forward: A Study of the Challenges of the Supply Chain for Target Metals Used in Electronics’. Washington, D.C.: Resolve, 2010. Simon, Neville. ‘Waitrose Reports Sales Surge after Avoiding Horsemeat Scandal’. The Guardian, 3 May 2013.

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__________________________________________________________________ Strickland, Eliza. ‘Cracking Down on Conflict Minerals’. Spectrum, IEEE 48, No. 12 (2011): 11–12. Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center. ‘Applications for Tantalum’. Accessed 24 August 2012. http://tanb.org/tantalum. UN Security Council. ‘Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’. 2001. —––. ‘Follow up to the Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’. 2003. United Nations Global Compact, and World Business Council for Sustainable Development. ‘Joint Report to the High Level Panel of the Post-2015 Un Development Agenda’. 2013. US Geological Survey. ‘Minerals Yearbook: Columbium (Niobium) and Tantalum’. 2001. —––. ‘Tantalum Mineral Commodity Summary’. 2013. Vick, Karl. ‘Vital Ore Funds Congo’s War’. Washington Post (19 March 2001): A01. Wiedmann, Thomas O., Sangwon Suh, Kuishuang Feng, Manfred Lenzen, Adolf Acquaye, Kate Scott, and John R. Barrett. ‘Application of Hybrid Life Cycle Approaches to Emerging Energy Technologies: The Case of Wind Power in the UK’. Environmental Science & Technology 45, No. 13 (2011): 5900–5907. World Bank and e-Transform Africa. ‘The Transformational Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa’. Edited by e-Transform Africa: World Bank, 2013. Darian McBain is conducting research on social indicators for supply chain analysis at the University of Sydney, Australia. Darian has many years of experience consulting to business and government in the areas of strategy, sustainability and supply chain management.