Everyday Ecology and the Moral Economy of Eco-Responsibility

Axis 2 or 3
Among critical consumption movements and alternative lifestyles, an important strand regards ecological
issues and the project of dealing with climate change. In order to become « disruptive » of
the capitalist organization of society and help save the planet from the environmental crisis, sustainable
practices need to diffuse beyond the sociologically restricted circle of white high cultural capital
consumers constituting the vast majority of their practitioners (Carfagna et alii, 2014). The
dominant literature on such practices has not only privileged an individualistic perspective, it has
also mainly focused on militants who voluntarily engaged in an ecological transition (Balsiger,
2010). It thus reduced the range of inquiry to a limited strata of the population and leaves apart
« ordinary » citizens who do not spontaneously transform their mode of consumption or lifestyle.
My intervention intends to address these two gaps by analyzing the mobilization of sustainable
practices movements which integrate the critique of the eliteness (Miller, 2001) and colorblindness
(Guthman, 2008) of green lifestyle and consumption. These movements consider it a key issue to
reach and empower lower classes communities (a growing concern among French SCMOs, visible
last Fall in mobilizations around the COP-21).
From November 2014 to July 2015, I conducted an ethnography of the work of volunteers missioned
to engage and support inhabitants of public housing residencies in the process of greening
their lifestyle and mode of consumption. In partnership with local town halls and social landlords,
the association (inspired from the Americorps program) targets modest neighborhoods in 38 cities
across France and aims at raising environmental awareness among working class families. To influence
their behavior towards a more « responsible » lifestyle, the 500 volunteers it mobilizes
yearly are positioned in the residencies for 9 months and knock on doors to speak with them. The
association claims to support more than 1700 families and approach more than 25 000 a year.
I spent 9 months with the volunteers operating in two different poor neighborhoods in Paris’s suburbs.
I observed the formations they received, the public reunions and activities they organized in
the neighborhoods and the home visits they paid to the residents who accepted to enter the program.
I also conducted formal interviews with the major actors coordinating the mission and was
able to attend steering committees, both at a national and local level.
The data I collected offers a different perspective on sustainable lifestyles and consumption. What
can be learned from those citizens who are not spontaneously engaging in sustainable consumption
and lifestyle but are encouraged and incited to ?
First and foremost, the action of the association provides a case study to critically reflect on the
methods SCMOs could use to reach larger publics. Concretely, the core activity of the volunteers
consists in documenting the daily practices of the residents based on a 80 questions survey (How
much time do they shower ? Do they eat organic and local ? Do they separate wastes ? etc.) and
providing personalized ecological advice accordingly. It includes tips on how to reduce water and
electricity consumption, the distribution of shower timers, tap aerators and reusable bags, incitement
to buy organic, lightly wrapped products or proposals to register to the local CSA. The advice
and its reception are always accompanied by a symbolic gratification or sanction, which sometimes
becomes material (diplomas of « responsible citizen », CSA baskets, more reusable bags, etc.).
This responsibilization to eco-friendly consumption and lifestyles thus takes the shape of a moral
reform and falls within a longer history of vice squads and regulation of the working class (Dean,
1991; Hunt, 1999). A negative representation of the targeted population underlies the action of the
association, the town halls and social landlords, who are persuaded that inhabitants of poor neighborhoods
have a weak (or inexistent) environmental moral sense. They are thus inclined to focus
on the psychological drivers of everyday behavior and try to act on such levers to foster change.
On the contrary, wouldn’t « re-embedding the social » consist in inscribing these behaviors in the
structure of social practices and try to act on them (by creating time banks, building CSA or car
sharing networks, etc.) ? A theoretical proposition of my intervention will be to distinguish between
SCMOs which aim at collectively transforming individual decisions of consumption and lifestyle
(using, mostly, psychological and moral levers) and the ones which aim at transforming the collective
structure of practices (Warde, Southerton, 2012). Both options seem to embody alternative
political projects regarding the way society deals with the environment.
A second contention of my presentation is to underline that this type of individual empowerment
which overlooks behavior’s social determinants is actually socially embedded itself. Drawing on
Fassin’s use of the concept of moral economy, defined as « the production, distribution, circulation
and use of moral sentiments, emotions and values, and norms and obligations in social
space » (Fassin, 2009) I will seek to situate individual responsibilization in the current moral configuration
of environmental issues.
Volunteers and coordinators both insist very much on the importance of the responsibility each and
everyone of us holds towards the planet. The sense of responsibility has been largely documented
among green lifestyle militants and consumers (for example Connolly, Prothero, 2008), but I would
like here to describe how it is distributed among citizens and circulates through the action of the
association. The volunteers recognize the residents as holders of a twofold responsibility : they
confront them with the guilt associated with the pollution they emit daily (causal responsibility)
but also with the power they have to vote with their dollar (responsibility of action). By asserting
that everyone is responsible, the volunteers organize an equal distribution of responsibility among
citizens. Through three short ethnographic scenes, I will show that this perspective can be critically
assessed, from the point of view of the residents, as unfair (for not attributing the burden of action on those who have the highest causal
responsibility), inequitable (for promoting solutions to which citizens have an uneven access, creating
uneven chances of being recognized « responsible ») and practically unequal (for placing a
disproportionate burden on women).