Abstract
While the number of theoretical concepts surrounding sustainable citizenship, political consumerism and ethical lifestyles is rising continuously, this article is interested in how citizens themselves delineate sustainable citizenship through their practices. Asking which contours real-world sustainable citizenship has, we draw on the practice turn. From this perspective, sustainable citizenship might be an empirical nexus of material practices, like buying organic products or sharing goods. These practices rely on dispositions that include practical rules, attitudes and political values. With survey data from Germany (N = 1350) and using principle component analysis, we reconstruct sustainable citizenship through stable and widespread real-world patterns. The results suggest that sustainable citizenship is a relatively coherent, nonetheless hybrid bundle of performances and dispositions. Real-world sustainable citizenship most resembles political consumerism, but consists overall of three distinct practices: sustainable purchasing, reduced consumption, and green mobility. All three are shown to be connected to engaged citizenship norms and the intention to advance social-ecological change. However, social class seems to prevent some citizens particularly from applying sustainable purchasing, while age and infrastructures constrain green mobility. Altogether, our results show that citizens from all social backgrounds practice sustainable citizenship. Yet they do so through different forms of practices, adjusted to their capabilities.
Highlights
It is a widely accepted fact that urgent action is needed to tackle climate change and global social inequality (e.g., UN Sustainable Development Goals 2020)
While we acknowledge that there is a deep philosophical and methodological abyss between statistical research and the practice turn, we argue that statistics offers a kindred methodology, namely principal component analysis (PCA)
Inspired by the practice turn, two main questions result: What is sustainable citizenship in terms of a widespread stable social practice as a social entity? And, second, which related practices empirically attain the status of key cultural practices, which distinguish themselves from other ways of life in terms of their goals, values and political attitudes?
Summary
It is a widely accepted fact that urgent action is needed to tackle climate change and global social inequality (e.g., UN Sustainable Development Goals 2020). This article approaches the question of ecological (Dobson 2003) or sustainable (Micheletti and Stolle 2012) citizenship from a new perspective, claiming that much of the literature focuses too much on the theoretical and deductive modeling of the two sides. Rather than proposing another ideal of sustainable citizenship (see Bell 2005; Dean 2001; Barry 1999), we attempt to identify how its real-world shape is delineated in practice, and to learn from this what sustainable citizenship is and on what it is grounded
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