From Resource Efficiency to Responsible and Dematerialized Societies

Abstract

The topic of a sustainable use of natural resources, often understood as resource efficiency, has made its way up on the political agenda. But so far a fundamental change towards a sustainable use of resources has not been achieved. Not only the resource consumption is still growing and destroying more and more the ecosystems but also too often the exploitation of natural resources is still a story of violation of human rights and of intra- and intergenerational unfairness. This chapter describes in a first step the current resource policy landscape, then identifies challenges on the way to further progress and finally outlines next steps for addressing the challenges of the management of natural resources in the context of sustainable development. The analysis of the resource policy landscape shows three clusters of resource policies. The more operational the approaches are the more they are neglecting the inter-linkages amongst the various natural resources and/or the general requirements of sustainability. The challenge is to broaden the perspective of these more implementation oriented resource efficiency concepts into approaches which manage natural resources within a framework of sufficiency, fairness and responsibility, consistency and resilience. Important steps are seen in deeply rooting these principles into the public and private sector, in changing the institutional settings towards a more sustainable resource management. But also in a more systemic thinking, which addresses the nexus of the various resources and in implementing sustainable resource use in the civil society as a practice of daily life.