‘Globalisation, Cosmopolitanism and Ecological Citizenship’

Abstract Globalization is patently changing our understanding of environmental politics. It relates to environmental problems in two ways. First, environmental problems and their effects are global, and hence solutions beyond the remit of nation states are required. Second, globalization may benefit local – global relationship and contribute to the realization of a sustainable society. These points obviously influence green political theory since one of its tasks is to understand the transformation of political community in the context of the global scope of environmental problems. One route is through laying the foundations for an autochthonous idea of citizenship namely, ecological or environmental citizenship. The goal of this article is to explore the connections between cosmopolitan reflections on citizenship on the one hand, and green political theory's attempts to develop its own idea of citizenship, on the other. It is argued that although the idea of ecological citizenship may be regarded as a kind of cosmopolitan or global citizenship, its features and current degree of development move towards a new kind of citizenship. Acknowledgements This article is part of a broader research project that the author started at Keele University, UK, in 2000–01, thanks to a grant from the Subprogramme for Spanish Researchers' Visits to Spanish and Foreign Research Centres (PR2000-0361). He would like to thank Andrew Dobson for his support on the occasion of that visit and for the observations he has made on the author's work since then. An earlier version of this article was presented at the ‘Citizenship and Environment’ workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions (Uppsala, Sweden, 13 – 18 April 2004). I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for comments on a previous version.