Polycentricity and Citizenship in Environmental Governance

Citizenship in conserving the environment and natural resources has become a topic of increasing interest to policy makers and scholars, as the capacities of governments to meet the escalating conservation challenges of the Anthropocene become increasingly stretched (Chen et al. 2009). In much of the world since the late nineteenth century, the role of citizens in democratic societies has been understood conventionally through the paradigm of 'political modernism'. This paradigm viewed centralized modes of governance (wherein all significant public policy decisions are made by central governments and then implemented through a bureaucratic chain of command) as ideal, and the appropriate involvement of citizens in these processes as therefore limited to voting periodically in elections for political representatives (V. Ostrom 1991).