In a 29^th April 2010 post, Jon draws a key distinction between consumption and Consumerism. And elsewhere on this blog, guest Jules Peck, over at Citizen Renaissance, argues that the mix between consumerism and citizen action for sustainable development needs to be reconfigured in favour of the citizen.

We can expect that these kinds of musings will be key underlying themes in our new UK coalition government as it seeks to redefine the relationship between citizen and the state; however hard to sell David Cameron’s grand idea of ‘The Big Society’ might have been on doorsteps.

“We all consume.  And we always will”; Jon opens in his post, and goes on “There is a very important difference, though, between consumption and Consumerism.  If consumption is the act, Consumerism is the social system which exists when that act becomes defining of a society.  And it’s Consumerism that causes the problems.  Consumerism takes the act of consumption and turns it into the defining act of our role as social beings, rather than one expression of that role.  We all consume, but in a healthy society, we should also participate to an equally significant extent in social groups and relationships that are beyond consumption.  We should produce, and we should be citizens. But in a Consumerist society, these other roles fade into the background…” 

Jon suggests that: “With Consumerism, we no longer have real responsibility as citizens, because we become merely the Consumers of the political parties.  Our role in representative democracy as it stands in this country today is merely to be marketed to, and if we are sufficiently wooed, to choose the best value for ourselves as individuals.  We have no responsibility even to vote, and many – even most of us – do not.”

Arguably, our recent UK general election offers just the right sort of jolt. And if it’s not too trite, I might add that almost as never in living memory we’re now collectively sensitised, for good or for ill, to the range of possible immediate consequences of our votes as citizens; and deeply aware of the likely imminent restrictions on our ability to consume as the inevitable and looming cuts begin to bite.

It’s perhaps more useful, as I suggested in a post back in October last year, to view the links between consumption (Consumerism) and citizenship as a continuum rather than as inherently competing polar opposites. Indeed, in a 2003 paper for Renewal magazine, “Consuming ideals: sustainable consumption, behaviour change and active citizenship”, Ian Christie argues that “The sharp distinction between ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’ makes sense as a shorthand for regret that neo-liberal policies over the past twenty-five years have led to an under-valuing of public goods and the public sector, and may have played some part in the decline of public engagement and trust in formal politics. But beyond that, a strong distinction between ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’ is not especially helpful.”

 A more ‘blended’ approach could potentially encompass the entirety of peoples’ engagement with the public realm issues that make up sustainable development. But the potential of ‘blended consumer-citizenship’ would not stop at ethical or sustainable consumption or public service delivery. It could also be about scaling up the impacts of real people’s behaviour on sustainable development by finding new ways to align responsible consumption and citizen-led community action in the public realm.

The missing ingredient then – on the path to transformative action for sustainable development – might be a sense of connection between our acts as consumers, our attachment to Consumerism if you like, and the entirety of our (peoples’) engagement with the public realm issues that make up sustainable development.

It’ll take the skills of some of the marketers and advertisers who frequent The Conservation Economy, though, to help ensure that this sentiment doesn’t meet the same dismal doorstep reaction as Prime Minister Cameron’s Big Society. And it’ll take some real social and civic entrepreneurship to find meaningful ways to breathe life into it, so that it becomes more than pious sentiment; so that it becomes a way of thinking that is directly and closely connected to the times and spaces where we feel ourselves most actively citizens.

The entry is also posted here.

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By Jules Peck

As we remain firmly rooted in our Western economic bath-tub and emerge from the dusts of Copenhagen, it seems ever clearer that Citizens are the missing link for 2010.

Politics continue to fail us and fail to recognise, let alone confront and overcome, the greatest challenges of our time.

The message we put out starting 18 months ago with Citizen Renaissance, is now being taken up by the business community. Even the relatively conservative World Business Council for Sustainable Development is reporting on the need for a shift away from rampant consumerism to more citizen-centric values.

The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2010 report, just out and widely reported in places like CNN and Scientific American, is titled “from Consumerism to Sustainability” and echoes the Citizen Renaissance call for an end to consumerism. The report says “Many of the environmental and social problems we face today are symptoms of a deeper systemic failing: a dominant cultural paradigm that encourages living in ways that are often directly counter to the realities of a finite planet.”

But surely the idea of green behaviour change is nothing new? We seem to hear continually from governments how if we will only change our light bulbs everything will be ok. But seeking merely to consume differently or ‘greener’ won’t make the grade.

George Monbiot has written that  “Our power comes from acting as citizens – demanding political change – not acting as consumers.”

Confronted as we are by the Scylla and Charybdis of Climate Change and Peak Oil and with, at best static levels of wellbeing, change is badly needed. But micro-level policy and incremental tweaks of business-as-usual will not suffice.

As Professor Tim Jackson of the Government’s Sustainable Development Commission has shown, to reach a peak level of 450 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050, bring 9 billion people out of poverty and keep to our current growth rates, the carbon content of economic output would need to be reduced to just 2% of the best currently achieved anywhere in the EU.

Clearly this is an impossible task. And those figures are based on a 450ppm target which is now agreed to be far too high if we are to hope to remain below 2 degrees global warming. Many suggest 350 ppm would be the highest safe limit for 2050 peak.

 
In ground-breaking work, WWF’s Dr Tom Crompton has shown that, apart from being entirely inadequate in scale of response, green consumerism and appeals to shallow, short-term individualistic extrinsic values also undermine a more sophisticated appeal to citizen-centric intrinsic values which could bring about sustainability and the flourishing of all. 

Copenhagen serves as both a historic watershed and a powerful metaphor for the failure of our current systems. Entrenched political positions, inertia and vested interests mean that we must now re-focus hope and enlightenment on ourselves. We the citizens will need to lead the way.

Johann Hari’s article in The Independent in late 2009 offers a stark and powerful warning: “buried deep in our subconscious, there still lays the belief that our political leaders are collective Daddies and Mummies who will – in the last instance – guarantee our safety.” That illusion is now surely ending. Leadership has been – and will continue to be – democratised and trust earned on multiple levels from multiple sources. We can no longer look to the top of an elitist pyramid of political authority, when the pyramid itself is crumbling. We, the citizens, have the power both to grant trust to those who earn it from us, and to pressurise those who fail us – and to remove our trust in them altogether.

Many of our politicians have failed also as citizens. Der Spiegel’s Christian Schwägerl  wrote, post-Copenhagen, that “Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely his country’s addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change”. And yet it was Obama himself who ushered in, at his inauguration, “a new era of citizenship and responsibility”.

Here lies a dichotomy and contradiction that needs to be urgently addressed. The world needs Obama to deliver his vision into reality.

Citizenship and Responsibility are happy and vital bedfellows. Doyenne of the eco-activist movement Tamsin Omond commented in January 2010 that “Copenhagen failed because the politicians still don’t accept that climate change is the defining issue of our generation. What Copenhagen told me was to stop focusing on trying to change the politicians and start winning over the general population. The revolution will not happen unless everyone is invited.”

Now, in 2010, as we enter a new year and a new decade, more and more voices are joining up and calling for a shift away from individualistic consumerism to collective citizenship.

The message is echoing around the developed as well as the developing world, with a January 2010 article in the Times of India saying “Indian needs to avoid repeating the West’s mistakes. Only enlightened citizens can show the way towards a more viable economy by putting pressure on government, stressing India’s success should not be measured by GDP growth rates and spending habits alone. Nor should it aspire to become like the US or China.”

I strongly believe that 2010 will be remembered as the start of the Decade of the Citizen. New sets of citizen-values will come to the fore and help usher in a shift to a post-growth wellbeing economy wellbeing economy. The Transition Town movement is just one example of where this is already happening. My hope – and belief – that this will become a movement of scale and open to the many, not the few. Another organisation to watch is the now four million-strong www.avaaz.org citizens’ movement, which has declared 2010 ‘The Year of People Power.’

In late December 2009, Brian Davey echoed this call, saying (in response to the failures of Copenhagen) that “climate change calls for a mobilisation of the population that alters our structure of motivations. It requires an eco-informed citizenry. Eco-citizenship will have to be a lifestyle choice of large numbers of people – or humanity has very little chance of surviving”.

On the one hand this is a scary concept for many of us. Instead of waiting for big business or big government to ‘sort things out’ we have to get off our backsides and collectively become the catalyst and agents for change.

But it’s also a really empowering and exciting prospect for the new decade.

What to do? Well my advice would be to get together with your local community. Join a network of souls with like-minded, shared interests. Join a Transition group – or even better start your own for your street or your village. There is a mass of things going on out there, from which we can all learn.

The Citizen Renaissance message for 2010 is this: Be the change. Aspire not to have more but be more. Do more. Together.

The Consumer Citizenship Network describes a ‘consumer citizen’ as “an individual who makes choices based on ethical, social, economic and ecological considerations. The consumer citizen actively contributes to the maintenance of just and sustainable development by caring and acting responsibly on family, national and global levels”.

Alternatively, in a 2006 paper, Martin Powell, Shane Doheny and Ian Greene describe another approach in which the citizen is understood as a consumer of public services. They suggest, citing Harris – 1999, that the ‘consumer citizen’ is “a subject created by the New Right to form some kind of equivalence between the active citizen in the community and the citizen in receipt of social services.”

Neither of these approaches are particularly broad. But the idea of ‘consumer citizenship’ could go much further, to encompass the entire continuum of our action as citizens and our actions as consumers. An alternative framing of the essential idea might then go along the following lines:

• In democracies that in principle aspire to be highly market-oriented (such as that of the UK), many environmental and social challenges are understood as ‘market failures’ that demand market-based solutions. In this characterisation, we consumers – people and citizens who happen also to be market actors – are handed huge responsibility to signal our concerns directly to ‘the market’.

European consumers (and many others) are encouraged by a sometimes bewildering range of information, advertising, labels and certificates to spend our money in ways that are judged ‘responsible’ or ‘ethical’ by others, or to place our own ethical demands on the record with retailers or suppliers.

In other areas, we are offered public incentives and opportunities to consume or take up opportunities for environmentally responsible behaviour on a voluntary basis, thereby contributing to public resolution of recognised challenges. One example might be a decision to take up subsidised opportunities for home insulation as part of a government’s overall approach to tackling climate change. 

•  However, there is also a set of environmental and social issues that are slated for public decision-making and participation where people are characterised principally as ‘citizens’ – or rather ‘community members’. A public consultation process around a planning decision on whether to allow a wind-farm to go ahead would be one example.

These examples are very far from exhaustive; but I offer them simply to illustrate the distinction between our actions as ‘consumers’ and as ‘citizens’ or ‘community members’.

 One interesting question then is this: what could be the potential value of reframing the continuum on which ‘consumer-citizenship’ happens, so that it’s about much more than responsible consumption, encompassing the entirety of peoples’ engagement with the public realm issues that make up sustainable development? What could ‘consumer-citizenship’ in this broad sense offer?

 On the home-page of this website, we include a quote from UK environmentalist Sara Parkin, who argues that climate change should be treated, not as market failure, but as a failure of democracy.

 What might happen if rather more environmental or social challenges were understood as failures of democracy rather than failures of the market?

 Perhaps democracy (and our responsibility to engage as citizens in progressive decision-making for environmental or social change), rather than the market (and our responsibility to consume ethically), would be on top in our mental imagery.

 No doubt this all sounds a little abstract for the time being. More practically, Consumer International’s Director of Operations Bjarne Pedersen and I have agreed to swap notes on the potential of ‘consumer-citizenship’. We’d like to come up with some ideas that can help us to position our respective areas of work; Bjarne’s on sustainable consumption, mine on democracy; so that we get more ‘sustainable development bang’ for our ‘consumer buck’ or our ‘public or citizen participation’.

 The emerging potential of ‘consumer-citizenship’ doesn’t stop at ethical or sustainable consumption or public service delivery. It’s also about scaling up the impacts of real people’s behaviour on sustainable development by finding new ways to align responsible consumption and citizen-led community action in the public realm.