Consumption Corridors

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.

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.

With growing awareness of environmental deterioration, atmospheric pollution and resource depletion, the last several decades have brought increased attention and scrutiny to global consumption levels. However, there are significant and well documented limitations associated with current efforts to encourage more sustainable consumption patterns, ranging from informational and time constraints to the highly individualizing effect of market-based participation. This volume, featuring essays solicited from experts engaged in sustainable consumption research from around the world, presents empirical and theoretical illustrations of the various means through which politics and power influence (un)sustainable consumption practices, policies and perspectives. With chapters on compelling topics including collective action, behaviour-change and the transition movement, the authors discuss why current efforts have largely failed to meet environmental targets and explore promising directions for research, policy and practice. Featuring contributions that will help the reader open up politics and power in ways that are accessible and productive and bridge the gaps with current approaches to sustainable consumption, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable consumption and the politics of sustainability.

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 is a comprehensive guide on how to teach sustainable consumption in higher education. Teaching and Learning Sustainable Consumption: A Guidebook systematizes the themes, objectives, and theories that characterize sustainable consumption as an educational field. The first part of the book discusses approaches to teaching and learning sustainable consumption in higher education, including reflections on how learning occurs, to more practical considerations like how to set objectives or assess learning outcomes. The second part of the book is a dive into inspiring examples of what this looks like in a range of contexts and towards different aims – involving 57 diverse contributions by teachers and practitioners. Building on the momentum of a steady increase in courses addressing sustainable consumption over the past decade, this guidebook supports innovative approaches to teaching and learning, while also bringing to the fore conceptual debates around higher education and sustainability. Overall, this book will be a seminal resource for educators teaching about sustainability and consumption. It will help them to navigate the specifics of sustainable consumption as a field of scholarship, and design their teaching approaches in a more informed, competent, and creative way.

This open access book seeks to understand why we consume as we do, how consumption changes, and why we keep consuming more and more, despite the visible damage we are doing to the planet. The chapters cover both the stubbornness of unsustainable consumption patterns in affluent societies and the drivers of rapidly increasing consumption in emerging economies. They focus on consumption patterns with the largest environmental footprints, including energy, housing, and mobility and engage in sophisticated ways with the theoretical frontiers of the field of consumption research, in particular on the ‘practice turn’ that has come to dominate the field in recent decades. This book maps out what we know about consumption, questions what we take for granted, and points us in new directions for better understanding—and changing—unsustainable consumption patterns.

With diverse contributions from over 100 authors around the globe, this comprehensive Encyclopedia summarises the developments of ecological economics from the fundamental contributions to the more recent methodological debates in the field. It provides an expansive list of topics including sustainable development, the limits to growth, agroecology, implications of thermodynamic laws for economics, integrated ecologic-economic modelling, valuation of natural resources and services, and renewable and non-renewable resources management. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

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