Citizenship and Environmental Sustainability - A Survey Study on Swedish Lund University Students

Sammanfattning: Throughout the pursuit of environmental sustainability, the attention placed on governments’ responsibility to reduce environmental degradation has progressively decreased and rather, began focusing on the attitudes and behaviours of individuals. Overtime, this increasing attention placed on the individual highlighted the central role which citizens have in creating and pushing for a sustainable society. Scholars such as Dobson and Micheletti have come up with new forms of citizenship which showcase the strive for environmental sustainability. By using environmental, ecological, and sustainable citizenship as foundations, this thesis aimed at developing a mode of citizenship on which to research environmental attitudes of Swedish Lund University Students. Sweden is often referred to as one of the most progressive countries in the fight for climate change and environmental awareness, and through derived categories of ecologically sustainable citizens and a quantitative methodological approach, surveys have been used to empirically identify if ecologically sustainable citizenship can be found within the sample, and which practices respondents had embedded in their everyday life. The results have shown that although none of the respondents belong to the established categorization of ecologically sustainable citizenship, the identified behaviours and attitudes showcase that the development of norms with a pro-environmental orientation are affecting the multi-faceted nature of citizenship.