Contradictions of citizenship and environmental politics in the Arabian littoral

This article scrutinizes the limitations of environmental citizenship among citizens and non-citizens in the Arab Gulf states, with a focus on the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There are particularly heightened concerns about water scarcity, food security, marine pollution, and dependence on oil and gas industries and how states can address these challenges in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Yet environmental citizenship in the Indian Ocean's Arabian littoral remains poorly understood both in terms of theoretical and grounded questions. This article considers how labor relations and discourses relating to citizenship, environment and sustainability enable or foreclose environmental reform in GCC countries. It shifts the technological and economic focus predominant in literature on sustainability in the GCC to take a more social perspective and examine distinctions between citizens and non-citizens and the depoliticising of environmental claims and national industrial legacies.