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Green consumption – a state responsibility?

Ingrid Sælensminde

Western Norway Research Institute

P.box 163 Sognahallen, 6851 Sogndal, NORWAY

Tel. +47 99031716

isa@vestforsk.no
Introduction

The aim of this paper is to highlight some challenges that states may face if involving in consumer citizenship education. I present two consumer initiatives that are regarded by the Norwegian Ministry of Environment as tools for the state for educating consumers. Following the discussion on these initiatives I argue that before a state involves in such consumer organisations it should take democratic principles into account, and consider under what conditions such organisations may receive popular support.
In order to meet several environmental goals, developed countries have to change their pattern of production and consumption (see e.g. UNEP, 2009). In Norway, the government recognises the need for a substantial change in consumption patterns throughout the 21^st century (Ministry of Environment, 2007). Addressing consumption patterns is, however, a difficult task, not the least when it comes to individual consumers and households. In the Norwegian Official Report on how to reduce climate gas emissions in Norway, the commission stated that even though a radical shift in citizens’ lifestyles would lead to major reductions in emissions, they chose not to discuss this any further (NOU, 2006: 18). This was because “among other things we believe it would be politically impossible to realise such a task”. Therefore, the main focus in the Norwegian climate policy is on production, not on consumption. At the same time, since policies aimed at changing consumption patterns are believed to be unpopular among citizens, the Ministry of Environment (hereafter referred to as the Ministry) attempts to change the population’s attitudes through the “back door”, by using initiatives for consumer education as a tool. Two semi-governmental organisations that appear to the public as “grassroot” initiatives have been financed, and even shaped, by the Ministry in order to strengthen the population’s support for a more environmental friendly consumption pattern. These two organisations are Green Living and 07-06-05.

In this paper I discuss these two organisations⁴⁸, which are interesting to study for two main reasons. First, they touch upon discussions on the role of voluntary organisations in democracy. They have a semi-governmental organisational form, meaning that they are somewhere in between a voluntary organisation and a state organ. This way of organising reflects changes in the voluntary sector, and in the relation between the state and civil society, which started in Norway in the 1980s (See e.g. Bortne et al., 2002). There is a need for studies on how these newer changes influence democracy and democratic participation. Second, these two organisations are relevant for the studies of consumer education, because they shed light on the role of the state in this issue. They demonstrate some challenges that emerge when a state involves in “grassroot” organisations in order to educate citizens. The following question is examined: Are these top-down consumer initiatives compatible with democratic principles, and are they able to strengthen citizens’ involvement with environmental issues?

I argue that Green Living and 07-06-05 are part of a negative trend for democracy, where the state increasingly controls voluntary organisations, and where bureaucracy enters the organisations’ domain of shaping public opinion. Further, the singular focus on the individual in these organisations may lead the debate away from important societal questions, and unintentionally send a signal to the citizens that climate change and other environmental problems are not that serious after all.

The paper is divided into six parts. First, I define central concepts and outline the method. Second, I give a presentation of Green Living and 07-06-05 with focus on how they are organised and the purpose of the organisations. The next three parts discuss, based on the empirical findings, three challenges that the state face when using such organisations as tools. There is a tendency in Norway that the state involves more directly in political participation and opinion building, and this may have implications for the democratic role of the organisations. Finally I outline some political implications of these findings.

Studies of concepts such as the state, civil society, and democracy step into a “conceptual minefield” (Dryzek et al., 2003:12). I will therefore make clear what I mean by these concepts. I use a simple definition of the state as “the set of individuals and organizations legally authorized to make binding decisions for a society within a particular territory” (Dryzek et al., 2003). Here, politicians and civil servants act as a group, with common collective interests that are more than the sum of their individual interests. Civil society is considered a third sphere in society, the two other spheres being the state and the market (Cohen and Arato, 1992). Cohen and Arato define civil society as “a sphere of social interaction between economy and state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication”. By organisation I mean a set of stable, social relations created in order to meet a goal (Stinchcombe, 1965:142). Voluntary organisations are ideally built upon voluntary membership, organised independently of the state, and established in order to promote the members’ common interests (Sills, 1968:362). In Norway there has always been close ties between the state and voluntary organisations (Bortne et al., 2002). This is why I use the term “voluntary organisations”, and not “non-governmental organisations” (see Grendstad et al., 2006). As I will explain in more detail later, these ties are getting tighter, resulting in the emergence of semi-governmental organisations.

This study builds upon qualitative interviews with leading actors in the two organisations and with civil servants in the Ministry, six interviews altogether. The advantage of qualitative interviews is that they highlight the central actors' version of a subject, and try to grasp their perception of reality and their reasons for doing what they do (Hellevik, 1999:110). This is fruitful in the study of this top-down way of educating consumers, because it gives an impression of why these organisations were started and how they are intended to address consumer and environmental issues. The interviews were unstructured in order to avoid influencing the informants’ perspectives, and in order to let them introduce new aspects. As a supplement to the interviews I studied documents, namely the organisations' websites, yearly reports, plans, and correspondence with the Ministry. The written material was not analysed systematically, but served as supplemental information about the organisations, their self-evaluation, and of the Ministry’s expectations and demands. This empirical material is studied in light of international and Norwegian research on the relation between state and civil society, and on studies of citizen education and citizen involvement in political processes.

Green Living and 07-06-05 have a unique combination of two features, being semi-governmental organisations deliberately looking like independent “grassroot” consumer initiatives. They are not the only semi-governmental organisations or foundations in Norway, but they are the only ones among this type of organisations that address individual consumers and citizens by appearing like initiatives coming from below. At the same time, they differ from voluntary organisations in the sense that the Ministry of Environment defines them as tools for public policies, so that their purpose is to implement, not to influence, the state’s environmental policy. As I will come back to, these features illustrate important developments in voluntary organisations in Norway, and in the relation between the state and civil society.

Organisations are shaped by the period in which they were created (Stichcombe, 1965:143). Green Living and 07-06-05 are rather new organisations and reflect developments that have taken place since the 1980s, in the organisations and the state alike (Grendstad et al., 2006). This is part of a general tendency seen all over Western Europe, where neo-liberal thoughts have increased the faith in market solutions (See also Furre, 1993:422; Bortne et al., 2001:177). In this section, I will show how Green Living and 07-06-05 are organised, how this strategy is defended, and how these choices and arguments are parts of this general trend.
Green Living: A voluntary organisation with close ties to the Ministry

Green Living was created in 1991, in a time when there was a lot of attention to environmental problems (See e.g. Endal, 1996). The initiative of establishing Green Living came from the biggest environmental organisation in Norway, and it was funded in its entirety by the Ministry of Environment. The Ministry’s funding of the project was a part of the following-up of the World Commission for Environment and Development, lead by the Norwegian Prime Minister Brundtland. In the Commission’s report from 1987 it was stated that since the environmental problems are global and complex, all levels of society must make an effort for sustainable development; the international, national, local and individual level (Brundtland et al. 1987). Green Living gives information about how individuals can contribute to sustainable development, for example by recycling or saving energy.

Green Living is a hybrid between an umbrella organisation and an organisation addressing individuals. It has 15 member organisations that work in order to promote environmentally friendly habits among their members. Most of these organisations are not primarily environmental organisations. The individual “members” are called “participants”, and are not members in the usual sense of the word. In order to become participants, people must check on a form some activities they will try to do in order to improve the environmental performance in their household. The entire household then becomes a participant. There is no membership fee or other obligations connected to being a participant, and Green Living is not a democratically built organisation allowing the participants to elect the leaders or to influence the organisation’s means or goals. This is done by a steering committee with representatives from the member organisations. The organisation is rather centralised, concentrated on five regional offices with paid employees (Green Living, 2006).

The organisational form of Green Living reflects that it is a top-down project. The aim is to educate citizens, not to represent and canalise members' views into the political debate. The representatives of Green Living explain in the interviews that the organisation aims at making people more politically interested in environmental issues by starting with a small and simple tasks (interviews with Bugge, Endal, and Hareide, 2006).The Ministry now supports the organisation with about 7.5 million NOK every year (about 860 000 €), which is more than half of Green Living's income (Green living, 2006). Green Living is totally dependent on this funding, and the Ministry attaches several conditions to it. First, Green Living must focus on consumer issues that are prioritised by the Ministry. Second, the Ministry influences how the organisation work. However, the organisation is formally led by its member organisations, and the ministry cannot make decisions on behalf of Green Living.

07-06-05 was started in 2000 by the Ministry, as a reaction to studies that indicated that the population’s attention to environmental problems had decreased throughout the 1990s (see e.g. Hellevik, 2006). The project focused on consumption, and aimed at tempting citizens to consume less by stating that shifting the focus from material to immaterial values could increase the quality of life. There was a hope that such a shift in values would lead to political mobilisation and a demand on the politicians for doing more for the environment. The name 07-06-05 refers to June 7^th, 2005, the 100^th anniversary for Norway’s independence, the day by which they hoped to mobilise citizens to plea for a new kind of independence - an independence from stress and materialistic values. The project ended on this date, without having become the large social movement it intended to be (see e.g. 07-06-05, 2005).

Even though 07-06-05 was a state-driven project, it had similarities with voluntary organisations. 07-06-05 deliberately avoided to mention that it was lead and funded by the Ministry, in order to get the legitimacy of a civil society initiative. It called itself "a project of change", an "invitation", a "meeting point", or the like. It was led by a secretariat consisting of two public servants that during the project period formally worked independently of the Ministry. They appealed to the citizens using commercials, adds, concerts, exhibitions, and a website. On the website, people could sign a petition, and by signing they could agree to receive an e-mail from 07-06-05 once a month. Apart from this the project did not have members of any kind.
A closer relation between the state and civil society

Green Living and 07-06-05 reflect several developments that have taken place in voluntary organisations, in their relation to the state, and in the role of bureaucracy, throughout the last three decades (Bortne et al., 2002; Rothstein, 2005). First, the organisations have experienced a professionalisation and an effectivisation inspired by the market sector (Bortne et al., 2002). Earlier, voluntary organisations aimed at recruiting as many members as possible in a structure of internal democracy, because the members gave the organisation strength. Since the 1980s, all new environmental organisations have been created without internal democracy, with permanent leaders, and with paid employees. Organisations are less focused on recruiting members and aim at acting quickly, getting attention in the media, and basing their arguments on expert knowledge (Gundersen, 1996:72). New information technologies also change how the organisations work (Bortne et al., 2002:131). This new way of organising is found in Green Living and 07-06-05: In the ministry, informants argue that voluntary organisations are not efficient enough, and that the state therefore must improve this situation by creating or supporting new organisations that are more appealing to modern citizens.

Second, even though the Norwegian state has always supported voluntary organisations economically, this is now done in a way that gives the state more influence on the organisations (Selle, 1998). Whereas the state used to give economic support to organisations without trying to influence their work, there is now a "culture of contract" where the state increasingly tries to make the organisations implement public policies by attaching conditions to the economic support. This may lead organisations to gradually becoming "arms of the state" (Bortne et al., 2002:148-152: Grendstad et al., 2006:168-169). Green Living can be interpreted as an example on this. With 07-06-05 this tendency has gone even further, by the fact that the ministry actually created and shaped it.

Third, the influence from market thinking has changed the state’s view on bureaucracy. Rothstein (2005) studies how bureaucracy itself has started to participate in political debate and opinion building. Rothstein's study is on Sweden, but the development is recognisable in Norway as well. He registers how several new state organs from the 1990s were created mainly to produce ideologies, and not to implement the policies decided by the politicians. 07-06-05 is an example on such a state organ. It got a role that differs from bureaucracy’s traditional role as implementers of political decisions. Instead, 07-06-05 was given the freedom to try to shape the opinion of the citizens and politicians.

Following the definition of voluntary organisations in this paper, Green Living may be considered a voluntary organisation whereas 07-06-05 is a state initiative. However, in both of them it is difficult to see where the voluntary ends and the state begins. I argue that this new way of organising, reflecting the changes in the state and in civil society described in the previous section, may be considered a negative trend for the direct democratic role of voluntary organisations and bureaucracy. When the aim of the organisations is defined top-down, they do not work as links between the state and the citizens in the same way as more independent voluntary organisations do. Green Living and 07-06-05 give the state an opportunity to send their message to the population, but they have no mechanisms for letting citizens address their opinions or concerns to the state. Further, Green Living and 07-06-05 can hardly be able to work efficiently as arenas for public debates or discourses. Because they work in order to promote the state’s perspective on environmental issues, not to question or debate it directly, they have a limited possibility of debating the Norwegian consumer or environmental politics, or of promoting alternative views that breaks with it. Thus, Green Living and 07-06-05 will only to a limited extent fill a function that is crucial for limiting the concentration of power in society, namely securing that other views than that of the state is heard in the debate. A development where the state increases its influence on voluntary organisations may therefore be considered a negative development for democracy.

A second issue concerning the direct democratic development is the entry of state organs in the political debate (Rothstein, 2005). Rothstein argues that this kind of ideology producing state organs may work to undermine the legitimacy of the political system. He underlines that all political systems need to have an administration that secures that the decisions of the democratic elected leaders are actually put through. In this way, civil servants are an important part of representative democracy (see also Olsen 1993 [1978]). Rothstein argues that it is problematic if public servants work in order to influence politics instead of administering and implementing it. It is the role of political parties, and also voluntary organisations, to make platforms for the citizens’ political will. If bureaucracy is in lead in political debates, parties are reduced to doing advertising for ideas coming from state organs. Bureaucracy may here underline the politicians’ inefficiency in environmental matters, and thereby contribute to undermining, not supporting, the political system.
Do these organisations have an indirect democratic role?

In the interviews the informants defended the use of Green Living and 07-06-05 as tools for consumer education by referring to their indirect democratic role. Their argument was that even though these consumer initiatives do not have a democratic structure, they do socialise citizens into important values in society. They stated that Green Living and 07-06-05 may increase citizens’ political interest for environmental issues within democratic norms and values, and contribute to making citizens well-informed and politically active. The indirect democratic role of the organisations is thereby intended to be twofold: They are to increase environmental knowledge among citizens, and to strengthen citizens’ political mobilisation.

This, however, presupposes that the two consumer initiatives may actually strengthen people’s knowledge on environmental matters, and that they will mobilise citizens. I do not state that Green Living and 07-06-05 cannot have a certain effect on habits and attitudes toward consumption. However, there are studies that indicate that Green Living and 07-06-05 may not be able to meet their goal of increasing the knowledge and strengthening the mobilisation on societal problems. This is due to their choice of strategy as top-down projects: Their singular focus on the individual as a means of appealing to the population.

First, these organisations face the danger of overloading the individual, leading the discussion away from the responsibility of the political system. Such a focus on the individual may contribute to derail the debate and give an impression that the individual has more possibilities and responsibilities of solving the environmental problems than they actually do (Straume, 2001). Sørensen (2004) argues that politically oriented consumer initiatives coming from below are legitimate, whereas they are not legitimate if they come from the state. A state initiative may lead responsibility away from the political system and put it on consumers and the market. This does not mean that citizens should leave all responsibilities on environmental issues to the state. However, it is problematic if the state does not have the courage or will to influence the development of society, and choose to appeal to consumers and market mechanisms instead. Green Living and 07-06-05 also send the message that citizens do not have to change their habits radically, but that they may contribute to sustainable development by doing smaller changes in their everyday lives. This is done in order to motivate people instead of scaring them away from discussions on sustainable development, but it may reduce environmental politics to becoming an administrative issue rather than the area of political conflicts and priorities that it really is (see e.g. Straume, 2001).

Second, Green Living and 07-06-05 may not be able to appeal to more than a limited part of the population. Several informants state that in order to appeal to the population it is necessary to have a moderate message, focusing mostly on people’s everyday lives and less on political debates on overaching questions. Næss and Ryghaug (2007) conclude in their study of environmental attitudes among citizens that people feel that they already do what they can for the environment within the society they live in, and that they are provoked by politicians that talk about individual moral, shaping the climate issue as a question of individual attitudes and responsibilities. According to Næss and Ryghaug, citizens blame politicians for not understanding that political actions send out a message about whether or not to take scientific information seriously. When politicians do not take action, this is a signal that the situation cannot be that serious after all. Næss and Ryghaug see this in relation to Beck’s (1992) Risk Society: Citizens need their own perceptions about risks in society, if not they may feel insecure and ambivalent. Instead, in the Norwegian environmental policy, they feel left alone by the authorities regarding what to do on the climate issue.
Conclusions

This discussion is relevant for initiatives on consumer education where the state is involved. I do not generally question organisations that focus on individuals and consumption. Neither have I criticised initiatives from the state aiming at informing and educating citizens on the environmental impacts of consumption. However, a state must consider in a democratic perspective what kind of organisations they legitimately may involve in, and how this may be done. Further, such top-down organisations face major challenges regarding how to inform and appeal to the population. I have indicated that in the Norwegian context the state seeks popular support on environmental issues by focussing on individuals, but that citizens may end up blaming politicians for leaving it all to them. Even though it has never been the intention, state-initiated consumer initiatives face the danger of being regarded as a disclaim of liability from the state, handing the responsibility over to individual citizens.

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