Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant restrictions on lifestyles and consumption everywhere. Many consumer practices have been disrupted due to the shutting down of economic and social activities, limiting of mobility in public places, closing of shopping centers and non-essential stores, and closing of borders. These restrictions have had a significant impact on climate emissions. Much public and scholarly attention has been given to the question of whether the pandemic also offers a window of opportunity for long-term sustainability transformation. The article elaborates on this issue by specifically discussing progressive non-growth policies for sustainable lifestyles and reduced consumption. What potential for long-term transformative change results from lifestyle changes like these? How can societies be restructured to take advantage of the experiences from the pandemic? Bottom-up drivers and possibilities for top-down enforcement are both important to consider. The article limits its focus to top-down policy measures with transformative potential related to sustainable lifestyles (reduced consumption) by summarizing and discussing some key policy lessons identified in recent COVID-19 literature. It considers the need to address likely rebound effects and the vested interests in bouncing practices back toward the previous unsustainable “normality.” The argument is generally inspired by post-growth and degrowth perspectives, as the dominant pro-growth, neo-liberal doctrines are seen as unable to transform societies and guide them onto sustainable paths.
Highlights
Everywhere around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant restrictions on lifestyles and consumption
Great public and scholarly attention has been given to the question of whether the pandemic offers a window of opportunity for—and possibilities to enforce—sustainability transformation (e.g., Cohen, 2020; Lidskog et al, 2020; Perkins et al, 2021)
There is an overall decline in transport modes such as aviation (Gössling, 2020) and public transportation (De Haas et al, 2020; Eisenmann et al, 2021), a sharp decline in consumption related to tourism, and in consumption of commoditized leisure services related to the hospitality industry (Ehgartner and Boons, 2020; Jones and Comfort, 2020; Jo et al, 2021)
Summary
Everywhere around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant restrictions on lifestyles and consumption. Because of rebound effects and existing traffic infrastructure, digitalization alone will not decrease car dependency This is because the public has been forced or driven toward individual modes of transportation during the pandemic, which necessitates policies counteracting the expected increase in car dependency (Zhang et al, 2021). Other job-related measures that can have an impact on worklife balance, contribute to a reduction of consumption and promote more sustainable lifestyles are facilitating home-based work and workweek reduction The latter is a core degrowth policy, which in addition to reducing production and consumption (by lowering income) can reduce stress and time-poverty, free up time for cultivating alternative practices (repairing, gardening, etc.) and enhance quality of life (Schor and Thompson, 2014; Kallis et al, 2018). Changing patterns of demand and intentionally slowing down growth must go hand in hand with measures to combat inequality
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