From Business Models to Modes of Provision: Framing Sustainable Consumption and Production

Abstract

Practices of production and consumption shape the ways in which societies currently perform in terms of sustainability. The way we conceptualize these practices has an effect on the options we can conceive for changing them to improve their sustainability. This chapter argues that the currently dominant framing of production and consumption in terms of business models (as the intersection of practices of production and consumption) has emerged as a consequence of recent trends in advanced industrial economies. While facilitating an understanding of these trends, the business model framing needs to be challenged as it limits our view on practices of consumption and production that are not based in a business logic. For this reason, the language of modes of provision is put forward to replace, or at least complement, the business model discourse.