Collective Sustainable Consumption

Sustainable Consumption: Key Issues provides a concise introduction to the field of sustainable consumption, outlining the contribution of the key disciplines in this multi-disciplinary area, and detailing the way in which both the problem and the potential for solutions are understood. Divided into three parts, the book begins by introducing the concept of sustainable consumption, outlining the environmental impacts of current consumption trends, and placing these impacts in social context. The central section looks at six contrasting explanations of sustainable consumption in the public domain, detailing the stories that are told about why people act in the way they do. This section also explores the theory and evidence around each of these stories, linking them to a range of disciplines and approaches in the social sciences. The final section takes a broader look at the solutions proposed by sustainable consumption scholars and practitioners, outlining the visions of the future that are put forward to counteract damage to environment and society. Each chapter highlights key authors and real-world examples to encourage students to broaden their understanding of the topic and to think critically about how their daily lives intersect with environmental and ethical issues. Exploring the ways in which critical thinking and an understanding of sustainable consumption can be used in daily life as well as in professional practice, this book is essential reading for students, academics, professionals and policy-makers with an interest in this growing field.

In the face of climate change and resulting environmental and social crises, sustainable consumption has become a widely discussed issue and a key plank of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The majority of the sustainable consumption research uses the SDG framework, but this only serves to reinforce an individualistic, efficiency-based approach and it does not sufficiently cover the specific situation of transition economies. In contrast, this volume promotes a collective approach to sustainable consumption, and combines general theoretical issues with empirical examples from the Polish economy. The first part of the book presents a theoretical approach to collective consumption which has the core concepts of justice and human nature at its heart. This approach emphasises the role of collective rationality and categorises aspects of sustainable consumption as a common and public good. The second part investigates diversified aspects of sustainability, including socio-economic inequalities as barriers to sustainable consumption, consumer sovereignty in the context of current legal regulations, and the impact on employees of changes to the types and conditions of work. It also examines the sharing economy and the legal conditions of its development. The third part adopts a political perspective focusing on the state policies enhancing the role of investment in public goods, analyses photovoltaic programmes which promote prosumption and indicates challenges to sustainability faced by many countries such as the energy crisis, sustainable finance, and cooperative platforms. This book will be of great interest to researchers and scholars interested in sustainability and consumption issues in economics, management, law, public administration, and political science.

This book brings together a number of recent case studies from the broad field of sustainable consumption. As they evaluate the promises, myths, and critiques of sustainable consumption, these essays can also be categorized into a range of different societal perspectives, from the individual to collectivities. The first chapters explore the personal consumer, discussing how individual consumptive choices relate to lifestyle and culture, and how choices are reflected in the carbon footprints of consumers and vehicles like the automobile. The ongoing phenomenon of outsourcing production and thus the emissions of cities—in more affluent countries—and the resulting “low-carbon illusion” of cities is analysed, as is the inefficiency of density policies to mitigate these emissions. The volume then moves on to consider community-based resource sharing, environmental entrepreneurs, spillover effects and learning possibilities. Also investigated are intentional communities born of alternative economic thought, suburban neighborhoods, and questions of whether cultural activities can be considered within the field of sustainability in lower-income city outskirts. The third part of the book analyzes different social movements in sustainability, as well as the limits of policy, government regulation, and the potential for mainstreaming sustainable consumption. In each chapter, scholars explore sustainability, from the individual to the collective, in order to improve understandings of consumer lifestyles and provide critiques of the processes of societal transition toward more sustainable human-environmental life.

This book provides a broad understanding of whether law plays a role in influencing patterns of sustainable consumption and, if so, how. Bringing together legal scholars from the Global South and the Global North, it examines these questions in the context of national, transnational and international law, within single and plural legal systems, and across a range of sector-specific issue areas. The chapters identify how traditional legal disciplines (e.g. constitutional law, consumer law, public procurement, international public law), sector-related regulation (e.g. energy, water, waste), and legal rules in specific areas (e.g. eco-labelling and packing) engage with the concept of sustainable consumption. A number of the contributions describe this relationship by isolating a national legal system, while others approach it from the vantage point of legal pluralism, exploring the conflicts and convergences of rules between multiple international treaties (or guidelines) and those between the rules of international and transnational law (or both) vis-à-vis national legal systems. While sustainable consumption is recognised as an important field of interdisciplinary research linking virtually all social science disciplines, legal scholarship, in contrast, has neglected the importance of the field of sustainable consumption to the law. This book fills the gap.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Sustainable Consumer Behavior" that was published in Sustainability

Putting Sustainability into Practice offers a robust and interdisciplinary understanding of contemporary consumption routines that challenges conventional approaches to social change premised on behavioral economics and social psychology. Empirical research is featured from eight different countries, using both qualitative and quantitative data to support its thesis. Given the complex and systemic nature of contemporary ecological issues like climate change, a rapidly growing group of scholars is seeking new explanations of behavioral patterns and behavioral change. These new accounts clarify why patterns of consumption and waste continue to be unsustainable despite a wealth of information proving sustainability's importance. In particular, social practice theories offer a way of understanding how material consumption is built into the everyday work of belonging and shaping one's social life. Putting Sustainability into Practice contributes to the rich scholarship developed to date by applying social practice theories to case studies. These case studies are likely to be especially valuable to readers who are relatively new to the social practice perspective. The volume also includes research that advances social practice theories, moving the study of sustainable consumption into novel terrain such as sustainable finance, collective action, and social policy. This book offers multiple empirical applications of social practice theories in sustainable consumption, advancing this research area in such a way that will attract academics to its findings. Those teaching classes in the environmental social sciences will find this introduction suitable for the classroom as well. It offers a rare account of the history of social practice theories and provides numerous case studies to which one can apply these approaches. Graduate students will also find this a useful guide to conducting empirical research on sustainable consumption and civic engagement from a social practices perspective. Contributors: J. Backhaus, S. Barr, T. Bateman, F. Forno, M. Gismondi, C. Grasseni, M. Jaeger-Erben, D. Kasper, R. Kemp, J. Marois, J. Rückert-John, M. Sahakian, C. Schelly, S. Signori, D. Straith, H. Wieser

Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life within Sustainable Limits explores how to enhance peoples’ chances to live a good life in a world of ecological and social limits. Rejecting familiar recitations of problems of ecological decline and planetary boundaries, this compact book instead offers a spirited explication of what everyone desires: a good life. Fundamental concepts of the good life are explained and explored, as are forces that threaten the good life for all. The remedy, says the book’s seven international authors, lies with the concept of consumption corridors, enabled by mechanisms of citizen engagement and deliberative democracy. Across five concise chapters, readers are invited into conversation about how wellbeing can be enriched by social change that joins "needs satisfaction" with consumerist restraint, social justice, and environmental sustainability. In this endeavour, lower limits of consumption that ensure minimal needs satisfaction for all are important, and enjoy ample precedent. But upper limits to consumption, argue the authors, are equally essential, and attainable, especially in those domains where limits enhance rather than undermine essential freedoms. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and environmental and sustainability studies, as well as to community activists and the general public.

Putting Sustainability into Practice offers a robust and interdisciplinary understanding of contemporary consumption routines that challenges conventional approaches to social change premised on behavioral economics and social psychology. Empirical research is featured from eight different countries, using both qualitative and quantitative data to support its thesis.