Information for environmental citizenship

Environmental citizenship is a nationally and internationally stated object ive and can be modelled as a product of interacting facets of personality, socio-demographic factors and participation opportunities. The 1992 UNCED D eclaration called for the widest possible citizen participation, stating th at each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment, thus placing the provision of public information as a corn erstone of sustainable development strategies. However, this paper reveals that environmental information provision can be a haphazard affair and that whilst successful information retrieval is influenced by variables such as educational attainment and social class, it is nevertheless often simply t he outcome of chance factors. Furthermore, a series of information barriers are identified, which include personnel, agency isolation, cost, geographi cal, dissemination and technical language barriers, and we conclude that if the involvement of communities in the sustainable development process is t o be achieved, then the Rio slogan 'think globally; act locally' perhaps ne eds to be modified to 'think globally; cooperate locally'. Copyright (C) 19 99 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.