1 Should ecological citizenship advocates praise the green state?

The state and citizenship in green political theory: a brief story The idea of an environmental account of citizenship emerged within the policy discourse before it entered the academic field of green political theory (Bell, 2005). In fact the term “environmental citizenship ” was first used in 1990 by a state body, Environment Canada (Szerszynski, 2006). The literature on ecological citizenship often presumes that states are, to a certain extent, responsible for creating the conditions and implementing the mechanisms for its practice (MacGregor and Pardoe, 2005; Dobson and Valencia Sáiz, 2005). Partly because most green theorists of citizenship live in liberal democratic states, partly because it is thought that any transformation of the political order shall emerge from existing institutions, attempts have been made to demonstrate that current neoliberal states can and should encourage more sustainable forms of citizenship (Bell, 2005; Hailwood, 2005; Valencia Sáiz, 2005; Dobson, 2003). There is a tendency to argue that states ’ resources and steering capacity can be used to promote green behaviors as a route to extend ecological citizenship, for instance, using tools like legal and monetary incentives (Connelly, 2006; Barry, 2006), substantive and procedural rights (Bell