Putting Sustainable Consumption into Practice

Abstract

Private consumption is increasingly blamed for environmental degradation and resource depletion (e.g., European Environment Agency 2005; Gardner et al. 2004). Affluent consumers’ choices are also seen as the root cause of unfair conditions for producers and production workers in developing countries, including child labour, unhealthy working conditions and unfair terms of trade (Micheletti and Follesdal 2007). On this background, it has been suggested that, in modern societies, it is neither possible nor ethically justifiable to pursue the traditional model of consumer sovereignty, focussing on individual utility maximization only. Consumers have at least co-responsibility for the consequences of their choices (e.g., Hansen and Schrader 1997). Others warn that policy makers and corporations often stretch the attribution of responsibility to consumers too far, given individual consumers’ limited ability to influence pollution, resource use, labour conditions, etc. (e.g., Thogersen 2005). In such cases, policymakers risk producing consumer helplessness, denial and reaction, and their procrastination results in lost momentum in terms of effectively dealing with the serious problems that we face. Along these and similar lines of argumentation, much has been said on the necessity and the constraints of sustainable consumption since its prominent consideration in the Agenda 21 at the Rio Conference in 1992. Indeed, sustainable consumption has attracted the attention of scholars from many different disciplines worldwide. Early publications on this topic focussed mainly on the significance of private consumption for sustainable development and on the clarification of sustainable consumption as a new concept (e.g., Hansen and Schrader 1997; Heiskanen and Pantzar 1997; Spaargaren 2003; Spangenberg and Lorek 2002). More recently, the volume and diversity of research on this topic has expanded rapidly, as reflected, among other things, in a large number of special issues on J Consum Policy (2011) 34:3–8 DOI 10.1007/s10603-011-9154-9