European Integration and Everyday Citizenship: The European Green Deal and Sami Ecological Lived Citizenship

The announcement of the European Green Deal (EGD) in 2019 was hailed as a paradigm shift in European Union’s (EU) response to the climate crisis. Not only does the EGD place environmental questions much closer to the operational center of the EU, but the sheer magnitude of the program also indicates the significant impact it likely to have on the citizens of member states. In order to analyze this, the chapter first constructs a conceptual framework of enacted ecological citizenship before reflecting on the relationship between the EGD and green citizenship in Europe. To what extent does the latter enable the former? To answer this question, the chapter turns to the case of the Sami, an indigenous people situated in the Northern reaches of Norway, Sweden and Finland. By exploring a Sami understanding of a lived ecological citizenship and contrasting this with the aims of the EGD helps to understand how informal practices of ecological lived citizenship can influence claims making in the context of formal citizenship, and in this way be constituted as core part of Sami citizenship practices.