Introduction to the special section: innovative perspectives on systems of sustainable consumption and production

Abstract

This introductory article to the special section first provides a cursory overview of the history of sustainable consumption and production as a policy issue dating back to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. While sustainable production has been absorbed over the past three decades into prevailing societal commitments, governance structures, and business models, the companion notion of sustainable consumption has struggled to garner equal attention. The article then reviews the delimited framing that has been adopted to ameliorate the social and environmental effects of contemporary systems of provision. This conception has involved emphasis on consumer education, information dissemination, and behavioral nudging. These “weak” modes are deemed inadequate and need to be supplanted by initiatives that catalyze processes of system innovation as part of efforts to facilitate sustainability transitions of underlying socio-technical systems of consumption and production. This article also provides brief overviews of the four contributions that comprise this special section.

Keywords:

• Sustainable consumption and production
• strong sustainable consumption
• system innovation
• socio-technical transition
• system change

The challenge of sustainable consumption and production crystalized during the lead-up period preceding the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (popularly known as the Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Agenda 21, the flagship document of the event adopted by 178 national governments, observed that “[w]hile poverty results in certain kinds of environmental stress, the major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment is the unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in industrialized countries, which is a matter of grave concern, aggravating poverty and imbalances” (United Nations 1992).

After the passage of nearly three decades, it can be difficult to appreciate the controversy that mere mention of reforming consumption and production processes incited at the time. In particular, the further assertion that “[d]eveloped countries should take the lead in achieving sustainable consumption patterns” generated considerable rancor during the weeks prior to the conference. Most infamously, it provoked the ire of then president of the United States, George H. W. Bush who, while making final preparations to depart for the conference in Brazil, intoned, “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period” (see Deen 2012).

Given these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that the years following the Earth Summit were fraught with protracted conflict over the degree to which the most affluent countries of the world were indeed responsible for global environmental problems. This reframing represented a dramatic departure from the customary narrative at the time which assigned fault to the “explosive” fertility rates in developing countries. Concomitantly, major institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—continually reinforced the idea that the rich nations were best regarded as the engines of technological innovation and economic prosperity. To be sure, certain industrial byproducts were released in the wake of these pursuits, but prevailing thinking, especially as expressed in frameworks such as the Environmental Kuznets Curve, was that these consequences were ordinarily not major concerns and harmful pollutants could be adequately captured at discharge points (Stern 2004). Some critics at the time went much further, denouncing efforts to malign prevailing modes of production and consumption as the handiwork of misguided polemicists and irritably cautioning that such insinuations would turn back the clock on human progress (see, e.g., Beckerman 1996).

During the following years, it became increasingly evident that issues involving sustainable production were less contentious and could be more or less addressed by fine-tuning management priorities that were already part of the standard business toolkit: technological innovation, efficiency improvements, and optimizing existing products. To enhance the effectiveness of these measures proponents also outlined the need to embrace a new undertaking, namely to upgrade capacity for strategic communication. Three dimensions were regarded as critical—along supply chains, to shareholders and other financial interests, and with consumers—to create positive impressions that operations and products were being held to “greener” performance standards (Vermeulen and Ras 2006; Hartman, Rubin, and Dhanda 2007; see also Laufer 2003).

More challenging was how to chart a path forward with respect to sustainable consumption as it was widely recognized that encouraging drawdown of consumer purchases would be inimical to overarching political and economic prerogatives. To garner support for sustainable consumption as a policy program it would be necessary to ensure that constituent strategies offered the prospect of environmental improvement without upending the established entitlements of business as usual. An early initiative was a symposium held in Oslo in 1994 under the auspices of the Nordic Council (Norwegian Ministry of Environment 1994; see also Nordic Council of Ministers 1995). At this event, participants defined sustainable consumption as “the use of goods and services that respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life, while minimizing the use of natural resources, toxic materials and emissions of waste and pollutants over the life cycle, so as not to jeopardize the needs of future generations.” This formulation was widely agreeable and its similarity to the Brundtland definition of sustainable development codified a few years earlier is probably not surprising. Of further significance is the fact that the authors deftly finessed direct allusion to biophysical limits to growth, resource constraints, and equitable allocation of energy and materials.

Also important at the time was a collaboration between the Royal Society of London and the United States National Academy of Sciences which sought to develop a scientific agenda regarding sustainable consumption (RSL-USNAS 1997). A joint report issued by the two scientific bodies observed that

Scientists can help to understand the causes and dynamics of consumptive behaviour. They can also develop indicators that track environmental impacts and link them to consumption activities, build understanding of how environmental and social systems respond to stress, and analyse the effectiveness of different strategies for making and implementing policy choices in the presence of uncertainty.

During the 1990s, several multilateral organizations also launched research programs devoted to “consumption issues and demand-side management.” One of the more conspicuous efforts was undertaken by the OECD (1997) which sought to

[R]eflect a shift away from a purely supply-side perspective, the traditional focus of environmental policy” and would enable “a more comprehensive view of the economy as a “system” causing environmental stress and [provide] the means to take a systems view of both the micro-economic influences on firms and households, as well as the macro-economic influences on the economy.

Playing a prominent role at the time and contributing to subsequent initiatives at the international level was the United Nations Development Programme which observed in a formidable report issued in 1998 that in the affluent nations consumption had become a “runaway train” (UNDP 1998).

At roughly the same timeframe, a handful of national governments—most visibly the UK—created their own domestic research programs to explore how to incorporate sustainable consumption into their policy frameworks (DETR 1998; see also Sustainable Consumption Roundtable 2006). This work was additionally committed to tentatively exploring how the public might react to more consumption-oriented environmental policies.

Meanwhile, over the next twenty years, the field of sustainable production continued to expand with development of robust research centered on cleaner production, industrial ecology, and ecological design as well as sector-specific issues pertaining to, for example, agriculture, energy, and building construction. These endeavors were mostly uncontroversial because they were compatible with prevailing economic suppositions and focused on facilitating modest, incremental improvements centered on technological modifications that could be pursued along established innovation pathways. By contrast, sustainable consumption remained divisive and underappreciated, typically pushed to the margins and rejected by mainstream political actors as outside the bounds of pragmatic policymaking.

This lamentable situation was not for a lack of effort. For instance, initially bold schemes like the European Sustainable Consumption and Production Industrial Policy Action Plan adopted in 2008 were undermined by influential industries (Nash 2009). The United Nations launched (after a protracted delay) a Ten-Year Framework of Programs on Sustainable Consumption and Production in 2012, but this initiative struggled to maintain influence (United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 2013; Hobson 2013). The frequently lauded Sustainable Development Goals devote consideration to sustainable consumption (Goal 12 focuses on “Responsible Consumption and Production”) but its underlying detail lacks ambition and is overwhelmingly devoted once again to efficiency improvements (Bengtsson et al. 2018). In general, actual achievements implementing successful sustainable consumption policies have not matched the ambitious commitments heralded by policy plans and international accords (Honkasalo 2011; Koide and Akenji 2017). Research regarding this lapse suggests that a critical weakness has been the hesitancy of parliamentarians, government officials, and business leaders to support in public the same convictions that they voice in private (Berg and Hukkinen 2011; Ahvenharju 2019).

There exists widespread overestimation of the extent to which eco-labeling schemes, enhanced consumer education, and gentle behavioral nudges can improve consumption efficiencies while achieving absolute reductions in resource utilization (Horne 2009; Akenji 2014; Lehner, Mont, and Heiskanen 2016). The unfortunate paradox is that these ineffectual measures are at present judged to be the only politically practicable way to address the demand-side dimensions of sustainability (Pettersen 2016; Morgan, Tallontire, and Foxon 2017). Limiting the adverse effects of climate change, curtailing biodiversity loss, decreasing soil toxicity, reducing ocean acidification, and ensuring progress on other biospheric problems will likely require more resolute interventions that are termed “strong sustainable consumption (and production)” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005; de Bakker and Dagevos 2012; Lorek and Fuchs 2013, 2019; O’Rourke and Lollo 2015).

What might prompt this revivified commitment? Contemporary provisioning systems—agro-food supply chains, energy sources, housing and community planning, and mobility services—are experiencing substantially suboptimal performance, exacerbating inequality and compounding ecological burdens. Furthermore, both the scale and scope of the activities contributing to this social and environmental strain are likely to intensify in coming decades, making it necessary to purposefully catalyze processes of systemic reinvention (Chappells 2008; Heiskanen et al. 2009; Hall 2013; van Gameren, Ruwet, and Bauler 2015; Geels et al. 2015). Innovation will need to be social and institutional as well as technological and occur in ways that enhance global equity, reduce unequal access to resources, and enable people to lead flourishing lives (Greene 2018). We will additionally need to envisage and encourage social change that is cognizant of planetary boundaries and recognizes that the Earth system imposes limits on material ambitions (Lebel and Lorek 2008, 2010; Heijungs, De Koning, and Guinée 2014; Röös et al. 2016; Bowles, Alexander, and Hadjikakou 2019).

These transformations will require commitment to the cultivation of transdisciplinary competence of researchers, policy makers, entrepreneurs, activists, and others. It furthermore will entail consideration of the boundary conditions that shape the prevailing system including economic growth, business models, working hours, compensation policies, advertising and marketing, occupational know-how, technical training, and much more (Spangenberg 2014; Schroeder and Anantharaman 2017). It will also likely require the formulation of altogether different problem framings with which to understand and engage with the dilemmas that we are facing (Jensen et al. 2019). To move beyond education, information, and nudging it will be necessary to foster local experiments that actuate a more sustainable future by simultaneously empowering individuals and organizations and facilitating transition dynamics and processes of social learning while investing in new infrastructures to enable sustainable lifestyles (Liedtke et al. 2015; Keyson, Guerra-Santin, and Lockton 2016; see also Sterman 2016).

Researchers working from a variety of perspectives have advanced valuable insights on how to transform socially inequitable and environmentally untenable systems of provision, but three conceptual approaches have in recent years become particularly salient. First, theories of practice posit how material resources, tacit knowledge, and common understandings converge to reproduce regularized routines (Røpke 2009; Brand 2010; Maller and Horne 2011; Kennedy, Cohen, and Krogman 2015; Foden et al. 2019). Second, arrangements for enabling consumption and production have been usefully conceptualized as socio-technical systems with the aim of identifying strategies that could enable their transition to more sustainable alternatives (Stengers 2011; Cohen, Brown, and Vergragt 2013; Werbeloff, Brown, and Loorbach 2016; Marvin et al. 2018; Raven and Walrave in press). Finally, it has become increasingly common to envisage the advent of a circular economy both in conceptual and practical terms as the basis for more sustainable provisioning systems (Williams 2019; Bolger and Doyon 2019).

The four articles comprising this special section of Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy seek to expand current conceptions regarding how to enable new systems of sustainable consumption and production. These contributions set aside singular emphasis on individual behavior change and assign responsibility for overcoming unsatisfactory performance not on dissociated consumers but rather on the organizational structures that perpetuate—and in some cases mandate—outsized volumes of energy and materials throughput.

The first article in this collection by Dijk et al. (2019) is entitled “Policies tackling the ‘web of constraints’ on resource efficient practices: the case of mobility.” This contribution draws on a larger European Commission-funded project called “Policy Options for a Resource Efficient Economy” (POLFREE) and stresses the need to redesign socio-technical systems rather than incrementally improving the functioning of discrete environmental technologies. The analysis is based on research conducted in three countries—Austria, Hungary, and the Netherlands—and the authors report here specifically on their mobility-related findings. Employing a social practices approach, they highlight the interconnections between individual actions and collective frameworks and develop illustrative causal-loop diagrams demonstrating how to encourage more resource-efficient mobility at the level of the overall system.

Welch and Southerton (2019) then turn attention toward the Paris Climate Agreement and assert, as noted above, that individualized modes of consumer adjustment are unlikely to achieve the scale necessary to meet prevailing greenhouse gas-reduction targets and hence contend that we need to pursue radical changes in systems of consumption and production. Doing so requires recognizing that the activities of consumers are embedded in entrenched social, cultural, economic, and material configurations. The authors explain how unequal distributions of income and wealth impel consumerist lifestyles by incentivizing status-aggrandizing forms of accumulation. Under such circumstances, sustainable consumption is fundamentally a matter of reducing inequality and improving fairness. They maintain that in the absence of awareness of this system characteristic, we are unlikely to make much progress limiting the adverse effects of climate change.

The third article in this special section is by Frezza et al. (2019) and is entitled “Spillover effects of sustainable consumption: combining identity process theory and theories of practice.” The authors observe that researchers have to date devoted insufficient attention to the interconnections between employment routines and household practices. Because people navigate daily between these two realms the authors suggest that there are likely opportunities to create “spillover effects” that can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. The article interrogates sociological theories of practice and identity process theory (as the latter has been developed within the field of psychology) and demonstrates how procedures established in work settings can contribute to new household norms. A key insight is to make more tangible the inseparability of individual and structural aspects of routinizing sustainable lifestyles.

The final contribution in this special section is “Bridging citizen and stakeholder perspectives of sustainable mobility through practice-oriented design” by Hasselqvist and Hesselgren (2019). The authors describe an experiment involving three families in Stockholm that explores more sustainable mobility practices over the course of a year. This process of inquiry led to development of four design concepts of how a city like Stockholm could welcome more car-free families. The alternatives included a scooter, a four-wheeled motorcycle, a cargo bicycle, and a conventional bicycle. The methodology also involved consultations with local policy makers and private-sector stakeholders. The authors provocatively describe their practice-oriented designs as “learning machines” that give future provisioning systems a contemporary and tangible practicality. A further innovative element of this contribution is an accompanying video that features discussions with project participants.

As the future unfolds, and in particular as climate change continues to exact its capricious toll more quickly and destructively than most scientific assessments initially thought possible, it will become more difficult to deflect attention from the need for system innovation of present-day modes of consumption and production. While necessary, technological improvements on their own will never be adequate to achieve absolute reductions in resource throughput and to decouple energy and materials utilization from economic growth. The reinvention of our provisioning systems will under such circumstances become the irrefutable primary objective of sustainability policy and practice.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Magnus Bengtsson, Charlotte Jensen, Mia Hasselgren, Sylvia Lorek, and Patrick Schroeder for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.