Ciudadanía ecológica

Abstract

Citizenship, as a concept, is about the rights and duties of individuals (usually) in a given political territory (e.g., the state). In its participatory guises, it is normally associated with activity in the public sphere, and it may or not entail the cultivation and exercise of certain virtues. It is the specific design of this general architecture that gives us what we might call «adjectival citizenships» -e.g., liberal citizenship, republican citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship-. Each of these types of citizenship interprets the architecture in different ways. So liberal citizenship tends to focus more on rights than on duties, republican citizenship speaks in the language of duty and of virtue, and cosmopolitan citizenship calls into question the territorial underpinnings of both these types of citizenship. This article explores the way in which ecological citizenship fills out the architecture of citizenship, before outlining the importance of ecological citizenship to the project of achieving sustainable development.