From sustainable consumers to ecological citizens : elucidating attitudes towards individual environmental action in Sweden

As the discourses of ecologically sustainable development point towards the active involvement of individuals in the environmental work as an important prerequisite for targeting the sources of environmental degradation, one of the main foci for contemporary environmental policy is the need for individual lifestyle-changes. However, most policies targeting environmental work at the individual level both in Sweden and in other countries is directed towards targeting individuals as consumers, and the corresponding active involvement is therefore primarily framed as a move towards sustainable patterns of consumption. As an alternative to this rather narrow interpretation of what individual environmental action comprise, suggestions for an Ecological Citizenship, straddling the private - public; national - global; and present - future divides, has recently been granted a central position in research on political ecology. As this novel conception, however, is considerably more wide-ranging than a change in consumption-patterns, the prospect of legitimately realising or rhetorically framing individual environmental action as ecological citizenship has been strongly questioned. Even so, recent research indicates that people might hold values in line with those of the ecological citizen. Based on mass-surveys to a total of 4000 Swedish households, this article investigates the values and attitudes established among the citizenry, in order to elucidate the seed-bed for cultivating ecological citizens in Sweden. What are the possibilities for environmental action in the shape of ecological citizenship in Sweden today? Do people in general hold values and attitudes in line with what is expected of the ecological citizen? If so, how? If not, why?Godkänd; 2008; 20080826 (simon_m