Abstract
The efficiency approach of moving towards sustainable consumption through mainly technological solutions, which dominates environmental policymaking, has overall failed to reduce the adverse environmental impacts caused by unsustainable consumption patterns. Increasingly, it is recognised that efficiency needs to be coupled with sufficiency, which aims to reduce absolute levels of consumption. While the public policy realm continues to be linked to the efficiency approach, environmental non-governmental organisations have an important role in promoting sufficiency-oriented lifestyles and culture. Through interviews, participant observations and a media review, we analysed campaign strategies applied by environmental non-governmental organisations to promote sufficiency in material goods through less use, increased care and maintenance of products. This article contributes with insights on how sufficiency activities could attract a broader target group, as well as the various challenges and contradictions resulting from this process. To explain these challenges and contradictions, this article creates a conceptual distinction between market- and non–market-based sufficiency activities. The distinction elucidates how environmental non-governmental organisations are promoting activities ranging from those that can be applied within the current market arrangements to those dealing with social relations and non-commercial values beyond market exchange in order to gain cultural resonance.
Highlights
Critical sustainability researchers argue that addressing the ecological damage caused by unsustainable consumption patterns requires technological innovation and efficiency in production processes and absolute reductions in resource use (e.g., Alfredsson et al, 2018; Jackson, 2017; Schneider et al, 2010)
Extending the framing – from non–market- to market-based sufficiency activities In Section 2.3, we described how environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) can extend their original framing of one concern to include another to become more influential, sometimes as a response to perceived interests among the general public
We have shown that the two ENGOs being studied adopted two different methods for disseminating non–market-based sufficiency activities: the Swedish Society for Nature and Conservation (SSNC) provided practical knowledge enabling people to repair their own items, while Responsible Consumption (RC) focused on highlighting the problematic nature of conspicuous material consumption
Summary
Critical sustainability researchers argue that addressing the ecological damage caused by unsustainable consumption patterns requires technological innovation and efficiency in production processes and absolute reductions in resource use (e.g., Alfredsson et al, 2018; Jackson, 2017; Schneider et al, 2010). Efficiency-based approaches have dominated environmental policies and politics in recent decades but have largely been ineffective at achieving sustainable consumption (Bengtsson et al, 2018) and will likely continue to be insufficient on their own (Spangenberg and Lorek, 2019). This is due to the lack of historical evidence that technological advancements have decoupled production and consumption from environmental harms at the scale needed to avoid dangerous environmental breakdown If we are to fulfil the Paris Agreement (Alfredsson et al, 2018) and ensure ‘a good life for all within planetary boundaries’ (O’Neill et al, 2018), it is necessary to deploy sufficiency strategies among relatively affluent societies and social groups
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