Paradoxes of increased individuation and public awareness of environmental issues

Since the 1990s, politicising the environment has often involved the development of green concepts of citizenship. Informed by these concepts, cultural anthropology is used to examine prevailing ideas and practices of stakeholder citizenship. Of central concern are conditions wherein heightened individuation coincides with increased awareness of environmental issues. In the prevalence of stakeholder citizenship norms, the social task of addressing the ecological challenge is represented as individual opportunities and personal responsibilities. One upshot of this is that, as stakeholders, citizens are led to feel personally responsible for resolving socially created problems. In such contexts, increased awareness of environmental issues has the paradoxical effect of compromising citizens' ethical commitments within the ecosphere. By privileging managed consultation over motivating citizens politically, the normalising of stakeholder citizenship poses a problem for green politics by making it difficult to put sustainability into practice, while obscuring the unsustainability of much social activity.