Book review

Reisch, L.A. & R⊘pke, I. (eds) (2004). The Ecological Economics of Consumption. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. ISBN: 1-84376-512-8. Hardcover, £65, 288 pp.

Reviewed by: Jeroen van den Bergh, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, & Institute for Environmental Studies, Free University, Amsterdam

To many economists, sustainable consumption has an inappropriate sound, because consumer sovereignty reigns high in their world. Nevertheless, it is increasingly recognized that a full package of policies aimed at fostering an environmentally sustainable development requires direct incentives for consumers. Producer-oriented policies and technical progress have so far turned out to be insufficient in trying to meet certain national and global environmental goals. Moreover, making consumers aware of environmental problems can cause individuals in their different roles—as employees, employers, parents, teachers, citizens, and voters—to contribute to a change in the social and political atmosphere in the direction of sustainability.

What kind of approach should research and policy in this area adopt? One may be tempted to become moralistic and in this way miss the target. The edited volume by Reisch and R⊘pke seems a good test case for the direction this field is taking. This book consists of 12 chapters, which offer insights from a range of disciplines.

The first chapter by the editors provides a short historical background of the literature coming from various disciplines. What is surprisingly lacking here is a thorough motivation of making consumption a direct target of environmental policy. In a slightly undirected second chapter, Richard Wilk tries to make the term ‘consumption’ precise and provides a broad overview of why people consume against their own interest. The third industrial-ecology-oriented chapter by Joachim Spangenberg discusses methods to assess and compare the environmental impact of alternative consumption options. Here, it comes as a surprise that no serious attention is given to LCA. Inge R⊘pke argues in chapter 4 that work-related consumption drivers and consumption at work should receive more attention in the debate on sustainable consumption. Unfortunately, she does not offer any data and indicators to motivate the relevance of this issue. Instead, she enters into very abstract and rather distant discussions about ecology versus economy, and production versus consumption.

A fairly long chapter 5, by Tim Jackson, Wander Jager and Sigrid Stagl, provides a very thorough and informative discussion of two related concepts, namely ‘needs’ and ‘lexicographic preferences’, while it also draws deserved attention to the notion of ‘capabilities’, which was originated by Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen. Somewhat missing here, however, is reference to the recent empirical literature in economics and psychology on rivalry and adaptation in consumption and income growth.

Chapter 6 by Elizabeth Shove overviews the literature on ‘environmental consumption’ by distinguishing between three positions, namely consumers as decision-makers, as citizens, and as practitioners. This approach is rather ad hoc as it does not take account of the psychological literature discussed in the previous paragraph. Next, she devotes attention to indoor comfort, such as related to indoor temperatures, but here the (normative) objective is not very clear. All in all, this chapter lacks a good theoretical and literature basis. Kristen Gram-Hanssen considers in chapter 7 electricity use by households for the purpose of electric appliances. This is the first chapter in the book that actually presents quantitative empirical information. It is not clear that the results and conclusions are substantiated by the data and the limited descriptive statistical analysis (only correlations are presented). For example, important factors of electricity use are not controlled for or not even captured by the data (e.g. family size, age of children, income level, partners with or without a job, regional temperature). Chapter 8 by Mikko Jalas touches upon an interesting and specific theme, namely the relationship between time use and (un)sustainable consumption. He argues that it is useful to connect good data on time use to those on consumption. One advantage of time-use studies is that they allow a unique insight in consumption activities relating to the informal economy. The author's brief introduction to this literature is very informative. He presents a very useful set of alternative time-use-based classifications of consumption, which allows for different types of environmental analysis.

Chapters 9 – 11 deal with policy issues. Lucia Reisch, in a very short chapter 9, describes the nature of consumer-oriented policies in Germany. It is not always made clear, however, as to what extent policies are merely on paper or have already been implemented. Claudia Empacher and Konrad Götz in Chapter 10 argue that the notion of social-ecological lifestyle can play a useful role in framing sustainable consumption policies. This notion has turned out to be effective in marketing. The authors present results of an empirical case study in Germany. I wonder if it was necessary, as the authors do, to use an exogenous classification of lifestyle, instead of letting the data endogenously ‘decide’, e.g. through factor analysis, how the consumers can best be classified. Unfortunately, no quantitative data or derived indicators are presented, so it is not very clear what the empirical analysis really entailed. Chapter 11 by Laurie Michaelis deals with the problem that consumption is collectively determined. As a solution, the notion of ‘reflexive processes’ is proposed, meant as processes set in motion by organizations and communities to explicitly develop sustainable lifestyles. Three cases are discussed in detail, namely the ‘Global Action Plan’, ‘The Religious Society of Friends’ (Quakers), and the ‘Permaculture Association’. This chapter partly meets some of my criticism on neglected topics in chapter 5. The final chapter 12 by Jesper Jespersen on macroeconomic consequences of sustainable development deviates a little from the main theme of the book. In particular, he examines whether reduced material production is consistent with full employment. But he seems to confuse reduced material production with zero GDP growth. Moreover, GDP growth is not relevant at all because it has been sufficiently made clear that GDP cannot be regarded as a useful indicator of anything (certainly not of aggregate well-being or progress).

Design of policies oriented towards sustainable consumption requires particular information about the sensitivity of consumption to determinants that can be influenced or controlled by policies. Within economics, many applied econometric studies have addressed this issue using empirical data, in particular for residential use of energy and water, and generation of solid waste (OECD 2005). A main weakness of the book is that it does not pay any attention to this literature, and therefore inevitably is rather qualitative in its advice regarding policies for sustainable consumption. Another aspect may require attention. Just knowing that certain types of consumption are bad for the environment is insufficient information for policy. Policy design should also take into account the well-being impact of certain types of consumption, which requires empirical data and analysis as well. For this purpose, expertise on empirical subjective well-being or happiness may be helpful (see Veenhoven 2004).