Debate Ecological Citizenship: Justice, Rights and the Virtue of Resourcefulness TIM HAYWARD University of Edinburgh, UK Andrew Dobson, 1 in his recent work and particularly in his book Citizenship and the Environment (1), has engaged in far-reaching exploration of the meaning that might be assigned to the idea of ecological citizenship. His central theoretical thesis is that ecological citizenship has to be understood as a radically new form of citizenship. My aim in this article, however, is to defend a contrasting thesis, namely, that ecological citizenship should be understood as giving distinctive substance to a more conventional understanding of citizen- ship. In the first section I explain why I find Dobson’s theoretical construction of a new form of citizenship problematic, and in the second I offer a brief sketch of my alternative understanding. My concluding claim is that while on major points of normative substance the difference between Dobson’s view and the alternative I sketch is not great, the theoretical difference between them could be of some significance in terms of persuading the wider community of political theorists, as well as fellow citizens, that the pursuit of ecological citizenship is a desirable and viable project. Dobson’s Sui Generis Conception of Postcosmopolitan Ecological Citizenship The idea of citizenship normally refers, inter alia, to a status which arises with membership of a polity and confers on citizens a set of reciprocal responsibilities and rights. Each of the features referred to by the terms in italics, however, is argued by Dobson not to be a necessary condition of citizenship in the sense he gives to the idea of ecological citizenship. On a conventional understanding, therefore, what Dobson calls ‘citizenship’ would not count as such. If we are to investigate whether Dobson’s conception is intelligible as a conception of citizenship, however, we cannot simply invoke standard assumptions about what features citizenship has to have to be intelligible, as doing so would beg the question of whether Dobson really has formulated a radically distinctive Correspondence Address: Tim Hayward, School of Social and Political Studies, Adam Ferguson Building, George Square, Edinburg, EH8 9LL. Email: tim.hayward@ed.ac.uk Environmental Politics, Vol. 15, No. 3, 435 – 446, June 2006 ISSN 0964-4016 Print/1743-8934 Online/06/030435–12 Ó 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09644010600627741