28  The social handprint of sustainable citizenship¹

Bronwyn Hayward

Introduction

This chapter examines the implications of a turn to active citizenship for sustainability, captured in the shift from ecological “footprints” to “handprint” imagery. I critique the way handprint metaphors are increasingly used in environmental education, environmental movements and the green economy, highlighting the limiting assumptions about “individual agency” which are implicit in many of these images of personally responsible citizenship. I then sketch an alternative concept of a “social handprint” as collaborative citizen action across space and time, offering this as more effective and democratic response to global power, social injustice, intergenerational inequity and dangerous environmental change.

Footprints and handprints

In 1996, Wackernagel and Rees published their ground-breaking Ecological Footprint model, a tool that graphically represented the physical space required for meeting the needs of a given population through manufacturing, distribution, consumption and waste (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996: 51–52). The model sparked other novel ways of measuring human consumption and impact on the environment, including carbon or water foot printing footprints (see for example Hoestra and Chapagain, 2007; Wiedman and Minx, 2007; Druckman and Jackson, 2009).

These footprint models have also inspired a variety of more recent handprint metaphors in environmental education, social campaigns and the green economy. In each case citizens are urged to reduce their ecological footprint and increase their handprint. In this context the use of handprint imagery suggests it is morally imperative and possible for individuals to take effective action to address environmental and social injustice. The handprint symbols carry an implicit if not explicit message, “if environmental degradation or social injustice is the negative effect of my life style … my handprint is what I do about it” (see for example, Edinburgh University Transition, 2010).

To give three examples, first, handprint images are increasingly used in environmental education programs. One of the earliest and most prominent education handprint models was launched at the Fourth International Environmental Education Conference in 2007 (UNESCO, 2007), and subsequently refined at the Knowledge Conference in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia in 2008 as a “hands for change” program (CEE, 2008a, 2008b; Gunawardene, 2008). The Centre for Environmental Education (CEE) program aimed to raise awareness about sustainability and assist individuals to assess the efficacy of their actions to address ecological degradation and social injustice. CEE developed an online web tool to measure individuals, ecological handprint, asking for example,

Used in this way in environmental education, handprints represent an individual’s “action competence”, that is the capability and skills of individuals to effect desired change (Jensen and Schnack, 1997; Bishop and Scott, 1998). The CEE “handprint calculator”; allocates more “positive agency points” for sustainable actions taken by individuals than actions taken on city, community, nation or state level (CEE, 2008b).

Second, handprints symbols are increasingly used by non-governmental organizations in campaigns to mobilize citizen action. For example the “Your positive handprint campaign” aimed to “commit 1 million people globally to look beyond reducing their carbon footprint, … to take positive action towards helping restore the environment” (Hickman, 2009). Similarly Catholic peace and justice organization CAFOD mobilized members join a protest march with handprint imagery arguing “our climate is in our hands” in London before the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009 (CAFOD, 2009).

Third, handprint imagery is also often used in the green economy. For example the company Carbon Handprint UK argues, “Your carbon footprint is your effect on our planet, your handprint is what you do about it” (Carbon Handprint UK, 2009). The website encourages consumers and business to enlarge their “carbon handprint” by engaging in a range of actions to offset carbon consumption from “off setting Christmas shopping” to adopting an “Eco-code” in the work place (Carbon Handprint, 2009) or investing in pro-environmental technology development to reduce carbon (Viridian, 2006).

Understanding the politics of handprint imagery

The political implications of these handprints images are ambivalent. In the Aristotelian vision, wellbeing is achieved by active participation in public life (Barry, 1999). Seen in this light the emerging handprint models resonate with the powerful political symbolism of citizen agency (the ability to both imagine and effect change in desired directions), which has inspired a long tradition of civil rights and indigenous people’s movements. As Barry (1999) notes, this approach differs from the dominant yet passive views of citizen action as voting or ethical consumption.

However, individual handprint images can also reinforce unexamined notions of self-help citizenship, whereby individuals attempt to “fix” environmental symptoms in ways that leave systemic causes of these problems unchallenged. Some models of the handprint (for example, those promoting green consumers or local “civic gardeners”) merely cajole citizens to purchase environmentally-friendly products or engage in local, small-scale ecological restoration projects. These efforts may be worthy and important, but largely ineffectual if their effect is to leave wider systemic patterns and processes of unjust investment, consumption and economic or social inequality unquestioned (Seyfang, 2005).

Psychologist Albert Bandura (2007: 14) illustrated the underlying limitations of consumer-citizenship in particular when he argued:

Bandura suggested however that citizens can and should be encouraged to reconnect lifestyle practice with time and spatial consequences of their agency, a link disconnected through globalization and export economies that make it difficult for people to consider the indirect effects of their choices and everyday practices on countless distant others (Bandura, 2007).

The strength and limits of individual agency

Individual handprints are therefore potentially powerful if ambivalent images. One implicit suggestion in this imagery is that individual actions to ameliorate environmental degradation and social injustice are possible, effective, and morally desirable. We cannot deny personal responsibility matters. The sociologist Zgymunt Bauman reminds us democracy depends on the courage of individuals to think critically and act morally in the face of pervasive injustice (see Bunting 2003). Yet excessive focus on personal responsibility fails to account for the way the actions and choices of individuals may also be constrained or mediated by their context, including social institutions, norms, habits and the structures of the economy (Seyfang, 2005; Jackson 2008; Giddens, 2009; 50–57). Despite their best efforts and intentions, citizens may find themselves wearing ill-fitting “institutional shoes” that distort the size of their ecological footprint, or “social gloves” that hamper their ability to effect change. Viewed in this light, for citizens to flourish, their capability for taking action also needs to be supported (Nussbaum, 2011).

The image of an individual handprint also risks shifting the focus of our attention towards the responsibilities of individuals and thus blinding us to the responsibilities of other actors (including private companies and public institutions). Individual handprints also risk depoliticizing our vision of agency, diminishing the potential of creative democratic action to “pro-environmental behavior” or “choices” made by citizen-consumers. This impoverished view of citizenship as individual responsibility for private action in the market can be understood in light of many years of neo-liberal policy. Neo-liberalism is used in a variety of ways, but commonly refers to an ideological project which aims to extend free market values (including values of efficiency, competition and choice) to new areas of public life including citizenship (Larner, 2000; Ong, 2004; O’Brien and Hochachka, 2010; Hayward, 2012). Neoliberalism equates the “good” citizen with a citizen-entrepreneur or citizen-consumer, at the expense of visions of social citizenship, communitarianism and the common good (Dobson, 2010b; Wolf, 2011).

With an excessive emphasis on citizenship as personal responsibility, our shared responsibility for creating a common future for human security may be lost from view. An overemphasis on personal responsibility can also divert attention from the complex systemic causes of problems. For example, handprints are often considered to be incriminating evidence at the scene of a crime. This direct assignment of blame is unhelpful, however, if it restricts our sense of responsibility to our immediate local environment or community, or impoverishes our understanding of our shared responsibility for effecting change. Likewise, the temptation to play ecological detective, identifying “whodunit” in environmental crimes, can distract our attention from the more challenging task of unraveling and putting right, the complex chains of responsibility that caused a local injustice. Accountability in decision making is important, but simply centering blame for complex ecological problems on bad managers or greedy bankers when things go wrong risks diverting our focus from the wider structural or systemic nature of injustice or risk rendering local struggles irrelevant (Young, 2006; Hayward, 2008). The centered symbol of a handprint narrows our idea of shared responsibility away from the vision of suffering as a complex chain of human interactions (Barry, 2005; Dobson, 2007: 64–5; Young, 2011). In this respect, work by McNeill and St. Clair (2009) helpfully reframes blame as “response-ability,” reminding us that some have greater capability to respond more effectively than others because of their privileged economic and social position in a complex social world.

Individual handprint imagery in sustainability politics also potentially overstates the value of agency as action at the expense of imagination and reflection (Hayward, 2012). While no one denies that we have to do something, John Elliot (2009) recently argued after Arendt (1958) that taking time to pause and create space to engage in dialogue is also a critical way of exercising agency. Making room for listening and thinking seems a prudent strategy if we wish to develop an idea of “determinative morality,” or a vision of what we ought to do and not to do (Dobson, 2003, 2007). Making space for reflection before launching into action is vital, given the wide reach and strong grasp of some citizens. Aided by global communications and strengthened by financial investment and international infrastructure, the capacity of some to define the problem, identify solutions and leave indelible handprints on the futures and pasts of distant others is both inestimable and undesirable. For example, although Restoration of the Earth calls for citizen action to rescue “great ecosystems,” mobilizing a global campaign also threatens to marginalize the values of small indigenous communities (Hayward, 2008).

Given the limits of our understanding, our aim should not always be to increase our handprint, but to ensure we have a light touch, taking action in ways that are reversible and humble rather than heroic, ensuring our actions should be taken with the consent of those affected (Freeden, 2009). The experience of indigenous communities also reminds us that sometimes no amount of “action” can “put right” a past suffering, loss or injustice (Walker, 2004). In these situations listening, empathy and compassion also matter. For example, the Australian Sea of Hands campaign for reconciliation aims to highlight shared responsibility for past injustices of war, colonization, domination and genocide (Sea of Hands, 2008). This campaign reminds us that actions do not always speak louder than words. Bearing witness in formal truth, justice and reconciliation tribunals is also important (Dobson, 2010a).

The social handprint: rethinking citizenship as decentred, collaborative agency

The return to Aristotelian concepts of active citizenship in the face of environmental change, symbolized in the emergence of handprint thinking, should be welcomed. However, I argue that our actions should not be measured as individual acts, taken at one place and time, but should be thought of as collective efforts across time and space, taken with others and with consent. Iris Young rightly reminded us that given power is decentered, our political strategies ought to be as well (Young, 2006). Examples of a decentered approach to agency are seen in the Occupy or Indignados movements. These loosely networked citizen actions challenge the traditional green mantra of “think globally, act locally” by suggesting effective action in the face of global injustice should be regional and global responses as well, and taken in ways that are tentative, mindful of the limits of our knowledge and informed by local consent.

Thinking about the potential for citizens to decenter their action and connect empathetically with others (Hayward, 2008, 2012), enriches our view of sustainable citizenship beyond autonomy, reminding us that citizenship can also be expressed in relationships of mutual dependency and human connectedness, perhaps better expressed in images of “holding hands” in our interdependency and vulnerability.

Rethinking the plethora of handprint models emerging in discussions about environmental change provides a chance to rethink our impact as citizens and ways our actions might advance social and ecological justice. Our handprint could be that of a community of stewards or guardians. Taking action at multiple levels helps ensure that our proposed solutions are not rendered irrelevant, isolated gestures, or that they simply displace or obfuscate the problems. Nongovernmental organizations, the media and citizens’ tribunals have a role to play in this process of decentering action and opening it to wider scrutiny. While endless deliberation can drain a local minority’s resources, informed public reasoning and inclusive deliberation help to ensure that our actions are taken in ways that are also sensitive and accountable to local communities and locally defined needs and concerns.

Viewed in this light, we have an obligation to ameliorate the wider harm we have caused (Pogge, 2002: 30–31), collaborating to make a difference “for good” (Dobson, 2003). In this broader and more politicized view of citizenship as shared responsibility, thinking about our social handprint is a way to raise awareness about our responsibility to collaborate, exercising agency in concert with others across space and generations to effect change.

Dobson argues that as citizens, our actions for sustainability should be motivated by moral reasoning and might have to be asymmetrical, that is we should not take action in expectation others will reciprocate, but simply because we think it’s the right thing to do, “I will even if you won’t” (Dobson, 2010b: 22–23). Dobson’s work around new forms of sustainable citizenship is rich and thoughtful; however at the risk of an overstatement of difference, my point of departure is grounded in the context of indigenous communities who have experienced the devastating legacy of actions by former colonial powers. I suggest citizen actions should be informed by the consent of local communities to whom we feel obligation (Pateman and Mills, 2007; O’Brien and Hochachka, 2010; Hayward and O’Brien, 2010). In the New Zealand situation, for example, a treaty and tribunal hearing process has proven to be a very important moral vehicle for on-going reflection about grievances of colonization and for legitimating the actions of amelioration (Hayward and Wheen, 2004; Walker, 2004). Acting without such mechanisms to ensure that any action has the consent of those we hope to assist to avoid simply exacerbating the original injustice.

The power of social handprints

The rise of the Occupy and Indignados movements illustrates the potential for decentered citizen action, yet the struggle of those movements to maintain momentum reminds us that decentering loosely networked citizen actions is never enough. If citizen efforts are not to peter out in the face of hostile defensive reaction or become co-opted by a dominant rhetoric of personal responsibility, we also need to nurture stronger communitarian bonds to sustain effective social action. The alternative social handprints sketched in this chapter are normative, and suggest an image of citizenship as communitarian agency and resistance.

A handprint can be a valuable metaphor for agency, reminding us of that in exercising our citizenship we discover our capacity to imagine and effect change. In exercising agency, however, our aim might not be to always “expand our individual handprints” but to take collaborative action that connects with others across space and time, recognizing our mutual interdependency (Hayward, 2012). In questioning our vision of citizenship as individual responsibility, I am not calling for a loss of courage to act but the vision to enlarge our field of compassion; seeing thoughtful, humble, networked actions as a means to secure the capacity for citizens to flourish on a finite planet.

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