Environmental citizenship is a nationally and internationally stated objective and can be modelled as a product of interacting facets of personality, socio-demographic factors and participation opportunities. The 1992 UNCED Declaration called for the widest possible citizen participation, stating that each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment, thus placing the provision of public information as a cornerstone 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 the outcome of chance factors. Furthermore, a series of information barriers are identified, which include personnel, agency isolation, cost, geographical, dissemination and technical language barriers, and we conclude that if the involvement of communities in the sustainable development process is to be achieved, then the Rio slogan 'think globally; act locally' perhaps needs to be modified to 'think globally; cooperate locally'.