The Green Party aims to create a just, equitable and sustainable society. The Stafford and Stone Green Party is an independent branch of the Green Party. Working Closely with the North Staffordshire Green Party we represent the constituencies of Stafford & Stone.
Articles by Author
We are currently collating a number of articles, by local prominent Green Party members, to appear on this page...
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Professor Andrew Dobson(Professor of Politics) |
Mike Shone(Former Mayor)
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Mark Binnersley(Journalist - 'Our Man in Beijing') |
John Gale(Organic Gardener)
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Damon L. Hoppe(Post-Grad Researcher)
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Next elections can't come too soon
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On China: |
Go to: www.damonhoppe.uk.tt |
Articles by Professor Andrew Dobson
News: Professor Andrew Dobson to speak at Stafford & Stone Green Party AGM. October 29th.
Next elections can't come too soon | Environmental Citizenship
Next elections can't come too soon
Nothing Margaret Thatcher ever said in her long and deeply controversial political career has resonated through recent history as much as the remark she made in 1987: *"There is no such thing as society."*
Her party certainly tried to make this true; by breaking the unions, depleting the social housing stock and selling off the UK's heritage of publicly owned utilities. Coupled with their aggressive pursuit of individual wealth creation, this led to a massively increased gap between the haves and have nots and the de-mutualisation of so many of our building societies.
Since 1997 Labour (New Labour) has slavishly followed conservative principles. Now that power and water companies are owned by profit-making companies our bills are sky-high. It's nearly impossible for young people to get into social housing, not because of immigration as the right-wing would have us believe but because it was sold and not replaced. Every one of the de-mutualised building societies has ceased to exist – absorbed by banks, sold to European financial institutions or under government control. People are losing their homes and the rest of us are left in fear of complete economic collapse.
The next General Election can’t come too soon. It is indeed time for a change - but not back to a conservative regime. The conservatives claim that they will mend society, but rest assured they won't tackle the causes of our current problems. It is time for a real change, time for a government that does not pander to the super rich of this country: the richest 5% of our population possess as much wealth as the poorest 50% and wield nearly all of the influence. Our next government must truly embrace society, and it must work to ensure that all people within our society are healthy and happy.
Professor Andrew Dobson
There is an alternative – environmental citizenship
by Prof. Andrew Dobson - North Staffordshire Green Party.
Published in Green World (summer 2008)
Time
after time, surveys reveal that the public's concern about
climate change is not matched by a willingness to change
everyday behaviour. Given that it’s pretty much agreed that
changes in the behaviour of individuals and institutions are
required if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided, it’s
really important for us to work out how are these changes are to
be brought about.
The standard UK policy response is to think in terms of fiscal incentives and disincentives, so people are rewarded for good environmental behaviour and punished for bad. This policy response thinks of people as private consumers, only motivated by self-interest.
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that fiscal prompts do indeed work - congestion charges, for example, can change travel behaviour almost overnight. But there are also potential drawbacks to the 'green tax/incentive' approach to changing behaviour which we ought to take into account.
First, it’s subject to the direction of the political wind: green taxes can be rescinded as quickly as they can be imposed. What happens then? If the London congestion charge were to be removed, for example, would people keep their cars out of the centre of London, or would they drive them straight back in again? In the absence of a commitment to the principal that lies behind the charge, as opposed to fear of the charge itself, we’d have to be worried that people will get right back into their cars.
The second problem is that surveys suggest that very big rises in the cost of air and road travel would be required to change behaviour to the required degree. Is there the political will to impose such costs on the electorate? At the time of writing the government is wavering over both the 2p increase in fuel duty and the proposed rise in car tax due to come into force in April 2009. What’s the point in having a policy tool if it’s impossible to use?
Third, the social model on which such policy is based - individuals as rationally self-interested actors – is far too narrow. This is because there is evidence from other areas of environmental behaviour study (e.g. waste management) that individuals are sometimes motivated for other-regarding reasons. Such individuals commit to pro-environmental, pro-social behaviour because they think it’s the right thing to do, not because of fear of pain or expectation of gain. The real worry is that these people can be paradoxically de-motivated by the fiscal incentive approach. And this is especially important as these individuals are often the 'champions' who motivate step-changes in the behaviour of others. np An alternative approach is to think of individuals as citizens as well as consumers. There is evidence to suggest that this is a vast untapped resource in the fight against climate change. For example there is the ‘Sustainable Households; Attitudes, Resources and Policy’ (SHARP) programme in Sweden. This project has investigated the correspondence between environmental policy intentions and the environmental values and attitudes held by households, and it involved a mail survey of 4000 householders in 4 counties in Sweden. The researchers found that while what they call ‘external motivations’ (like green taxes/rewards) are, as they say, ‘highly relevant for the promotion of ecological sustainability’, they also found that ‘people tend to ascribe far greater importance to the motivational values contained in the self-transcendence cluster (altruism) … than to the opposing values of self-enhancement (egoism)’. np In another piece of fieldwork carried out in British Columbia, researcher Johanna Wolff found that her respondents ‘perceive an individual responsibility for their incremental contributions to climate change’. This gives them a set of reasons for pro-environmental behaviour which are the complete opposite of those that inform mainstream policy-making. Respondents refer to their ‘civic duty’ to consider the effects their behaviour has on the poor and vulnerable both in their own country and beyond – and on future generations.
Judging by the overwhelming predominance of the fiscal dis/incentive paradigm in environmental policy making these sorts of real-world findings are ignored by mainstream policy makers. The penny doesn’t seem to have dropped that there’s a need for policy that responds to a wider range of motivations than those assumed by the fiscal incentive, self-interested rational actor model of human behaviour. np In truth, British political culture might be poorly placed to make the most of the potential of environmental citizenship as a way of encouraging individual and institutional behaviour change. Decades of dog-whistle politics, aimed at appealing to people’s basest motivations, have become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Thatcherite dictum that there is no such thing as society and the resolute belief that self-interest is the engine for collective improvements have left the cupboard of ‘civicness’ and of a commitment to the public good very bare indeed. In the words of sociologist Richard Sennett we are very much ‘bowling alone’ in Britain today. It is significant that the examples of environmental citizenship, above, come from Sweden and BC, Canada – places where ‘the public’ as idea and as practice live on.
All this suggests that pro-environment policy might need a much longer run-up in Britain. The fight against catastrophic climate change is at once technological, political, economic and cultural - and the biggest cultural change a government could effect would be to expand and defend the public sphere. In too many places, however, governments are pushing their citizens in the opposite direction: private-finance initiatives, individual learning contracts, council-house sales, declining library budgets, and even the demise of the public convenience. All these are potent indicators of the corrosion of the public realm and public interest in Britain. np The biggest casualty of the rush to privatisation, enclosure and the withering of the public sphere may well be the climate itself. It's time for a change of outlook - one which will make so many other things, hitherto unimagined, suddenly possible.
Andrew Dobson
