Sufficiency between producers and consumers: A configurational analysis

Abstract

Sufficiency is a normative principle that aims to reorganise the configurations between production and consumption to reduce ecological overshoot and improve human well-being. At its heart is the notion of “living well on less,” recognising the need to restructure resource allocations between production and consumption hitherto unsustainable. Although sufficiency has gained attention from scholars and policymakers as a strategy to mitigate the climate crisis and resource management, evidence on its formation, causality, and antecedents remains fragmented. This paper reorders antecedents from three disciplinary roots of sufficiency: complementarity of capital, social metabolism, and altruism, to reorganise empirical evidence and examine the formation of sufficiency in producers and consumers. Through configurational analysis, we mapped the responses of Chilean producers and consumers to explore the conditions that enable the formation of sufficiency and the configurations that emerge as a result. Our findings reveal the prominence of three interrelated attributes for both agents: labour security, moral duty and intrinsic motivation, which, when combined, give rise to two complex and nonlinear approaches for producers and consumers, labelled aggregately as metabolic, limited and ecocentric configurations. These results suggest that intertwining different attributes allows actions and behaviours to be adopted regarding decreased resource use, drawing transformational leverage points towards sustainability.