Ecological Citizenship

Abstract

This article explores the main features of ecological citizenship and explains why this form of post-national citizenship is better adapted to facing current environmental issues than traditional forms of bounded citizenship. It draws on Andrew Dobson's Citizenship and the Environment (2003), one of the most sustained attempts to examine citizenship from an ecological perspective, but also suggests modifying and complementing this influential account using three approaches: cosmopolitanism, limitarianism, and the planetary boundary framework. These three elements could contribute to giving a fresh start to ecological citizenship, a notion that was much debated from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, but that has been gradually marginalized in discussions within citizenship theory.