Rethinking Ecological Citizenship: The Politics and Practice of Care for the Environment

2Most of the scholarly work on the politics of global environmental problems tends to focus on interna-tional treaty negotiations, institution building, and transnational coalitions. At the same time, public debates and popular culture have increasingly embraced personal lifestyle politics as a site where global environmental change is played out. Underscoring these trends, the notion of ecological citienship has emerged as one of the most important contributions to advancing green political thought in recent years. This book combines Dobson’s (2003) work on ecological citienship with the ethics of care, ecofeminism, and environmental ethics to rethink ecological citienship as a relational concept that takes into account embodied experiences, affect, and skills as part of the repertoire of environmental care activities and experiences. This book shows that by embracing anthropocentrism and overlook-ing prevalent gender inequalities in care-taking, the current definitions of ecological citienship are often based on an inadequate theory of practice. To address this issue, the authors enlist Bourdieu’s (1990) work on habitus, or routinied, embodied practices that are nevertheless embedded in the broader political organiation of society. The second part of the book focuses on two illustrative cases examining how environmental care is negotiated and performed in Lithuania, which has undergone dramatic political changes over the last thirty years, making it easier to grasp the potential and limits of green citienship. The first case is an ethnography of urban farming in Vilnius; the second case fo-cuses on public debates surrounding the popular global waste clean up campaign Let’s Do It World!

Indexed in Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85087687962