From Knowledge to Action—New Paths Towards Sustainable Consumption

Abstract

In March 2011, the Journal of Consumer Policy published a special issue on sustainable consumption. The main focus of that issue was on how the different relevant actors (consumers, business, government, and NGOs) are “putting sustainable consumption into practice” (Schrader and Thogersen 2011). That issue continued a row of special issues on sustainable consumption (and production) in 2010 by the Journal of Industrial Ecology (in January/February, edited by Arnold Tukker, Maurie J. Cohen, Klaus Hubacek, and Oksana Mont), the Natural Resources Forum (in February, edited by David Le Blanc), the Journal of Macromarketing (June, edited byWilliam E. Kilbourne), and the Journal of Consumer Behaviour (November/December, edited by Iain Black). The calls for these special issues were well received in the research community and so were the published articles. This, together with the ending of a number of large research projects on sustainable consumption in 2011, convinced the editors of the Journal of Consumer Policy that they should once more support the development of this fertile research field by offering space for another special issue on sustainable consumption, just 1 year after the previous one. The backcloth of the stream of research reported in these special issues is a shared understanding that changes in consumer behaviour are crucial if we are to move to a sustainable development path. Research has shown ways through which it might be possible to fulfil consumers’ needs without harming the ecological, social, and economic well-being of people today and in the future. However, the prevailing consumption patterns in modern societies are still far from being sustainable (EEA 2010). For example, the Global Footprint Network has calculated that it takes the Earth 1 year and 6 months to regenerate what we currently use in a year (Pollard et al. 2010). The imminent J Consum Policy (2012) 35:1–5 DOI 10.1007/s10603-012-9188-7