‘Are you a green Guide’? Conservation, environmentalism, and citizenship in the British Girl Guides Association, 1986-1992

ABSTRACT This article explores the meaning and significance of environmental education within the British Girl Guides Association (GGA) in the period 1986–92. It considers how the youth organization reconceptualized meanings of citizenship in the wake of increased public and political concern surrounding the world environment. In doing so, it builds upon our understanding of the organization, by exploring changing understandings of citizenship within the movement in the context of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. It argues that a growing awareness of environmentalism in the latter half of the twentieth century saw a move towards an ideal of planetary citizenship, with members being encouraged to become agents of environmental change through their engagement with environmental issues and humanitarianism. This marked a shift in an organization that had long emphasized nationalistic ideas of duty and service, as organizational periodicals played a significant role in establishing in popular discourse an idea of green citizenship, which crossed geographical boundaries. Yet the organizational focus on world conservation also reinforced traditional models of citizenship, with an emphasis on civic duty and individual responsibility, which were reinforced in the social and political climate of the 1980s. Indeed, the construction of green citizenship within the organization was forged within, and reinforced, Thatcherite discourses of active citizenship and consumer duty, which had underpinned Thatcher’s ‘green turn’. Moreover, reflecting the emphasis on traditional gender roles in the 1980s, the green citizen was a gendered concept with girls encouraged to prepare for their roles as both young green consumers and future green homemakers. Therefore, green citizenship, as it was mobilized in the GGA, was a nebulous entity that was underpinned by a variety of contemporary socio-political discourses and played out on a variety of spatial registers, from the global to the individual.