Citizens, consumers and sustainability: (Re)Framing environmental practice in an age of climate change

Recent moves by national and local policy makers have sought to encourage individuals to engage in a wide range of pro-environmental practices to address both discrete environmental problems and major, global challenges such as climate change. The major framing device for these developments is the notion of ‘citizen–consumers’, which positions individual ecological responsibilities alongside consumer choice logics in a Neo-liberal socio-economic framework. In the environmental social sciences, there have been recent moves to interpret the citizen–consumer through adopting a social practices approach, which advances the notion that in understanding environmental commitments, a deeper appreciation of underlying norms, values, identity politics and consumption is required to uncover the complex processes that lead to environmental practices in specific contexts. This paper argues that whilst these approaches have considerable utility in tracing the normalisation of established and discrete environmental practices in particular contexts, the issue of climate change represents an independent and over-arching discursive conflict between new and embedded practices that challenges the ability of citizen–consumers to act as agents for change. Accordingly, the data presented in this paper suggest that climate change can be seen as an unsettling and dynamic issue that generates discursive conflict in its own right around fundamental issues of knowledge, responsibility, scale and place. The paper therefore argues that a new and more critical perspective is required within environmental social science to understand (conflicting) discourses of sustainable living between the ‘passive’ normalisation of conventional environmental practice and the ‘contested’ ambiguities of climate change.

► Climate change presents a conflict when considering new environmental practices.
► This can be observed through issues of knowledge, responsibility, scale and place.
► Politically, the ‘citizen–consumer’ construct is problematised by this conflict.