Sustainable Consumption

Key Issues

Lucie Middlemiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317239819
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Sustainable Consumption: Key Issues provides a concise introduction to the field of sustainable consumption, outlining the contribution of the key disciplines in this multi-disciplinary area, and detailing the way in which both the problem and the potential for solutions are understood.

Divided into three parts, the book begins by introducing the concept of sustainable consumption, outlining the environmental impacts of current consumption trends, and placing these impacts in social context. The central section looks at six contrasting explanations of sustainable consumption in the public domain, detailing the stories that are told about why people act in the way they do. This section also explores the theory and evidence around each of these stories, linking them to a range of disciplines and approaches in the social sciences. The final section takes a broader look at the solutions proposed by sustainable consumption scholars and practitioners, outlining the visions of the future that are put forward to counteract damage to environment and society. Each chapter highlights key authors and real-world examples to encourage students to broaden their understanding of the topic and to think critically about how their daily lives intersect with environmental and ethical issues.

Exploring the ways in which critical thinking and an understanding of sustainable consumption can be used in daily life as well as in professional practice, this book is essential reading for students, academics, professionals and policy-makers with an interest in this growing field.

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Part 1

Introducing sustainable consumption

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1 Introduction

Every January I have the privilege to stand in front of a new cohort of sustainable consumption students at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. This is always an exciting moment for me. Most of my students are third years, about to finish their undergraduate degrees, but they are a diverse bunch. Many come from other university departments than my own: earth and environment. Over the years, I have encountered business students, engineers, physicists, human geographers, environmental social scientists, biologists and more. My students have come from five continents of the world, some on exchange programmes from their home university. I have taught students who are environment or human rights activists, and others who are aiming for graduate programmes in big corporations. Each of my students comes with their own perspective on the world, and that perspective is often the starting point for their studies.

Indeed, the beauty of studying sustainable consumption is that it is about bringing academic understanding together with everyday life. Everyone has experience of everyday life, so this is an easy starting point. The connection with everyday life makes the academic work that we do on sustainable consumption – the theory – more approachable. If we take an example from our own life and think it through using theory, we not only understand how that theory works, but also start to get a sense of its shortcomings, to think about what it does and does not explain. When we talk about the theories of everyday life, we also begin to reveal the assumptions that are made in the world about what makes people act in particular ways.

Another great thing about studying sustainable consumption is that it brings together a wide range of social science disciplines to look at possible solutions to environmental and social problems. From the beginning, these disciplines disagree. An economist does not understand the problem of unsustainable consumption in the same way that a psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist does. Very often the disagreements between disciplines amount to a disagreement in politics: a difference of opinion on what the problem is and what should be done about it. As a result we encounter questions such as ‘what is most important – individual freedom or the well-being of society?’, or ‘how should access to environmental resources be distributed?’, or ‘who bears responsibility here?’ By the end of this book, you will have a flavour of how each of these disciplines works, and a sense of which (if any) chimes most closely with your own way of thinking.

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The best way to approach this topic is to start with an open mind, and be prepared to challenge your own assumptions and beliefs. This is likely to involve thinking about what kind of a background you have, your gender, age and ethnic heritage, and attempting to understand how this makes you think in particular ways. It also might mean that you need to be honest about the basic beliefs that you have about why people do what they do, and be prepared to revise these. When teaching this topic, the best moments for me are when people have to confront the fact that they hold inconsistent views, and decide what they will do about this. I hope that, after reading this book, you will have understood the wide variety of approaches to sustainable consumption, and worked out where you stand on this topic. In the Conclusion, I will also offer you some advice on how you might want to approach the world given your standpoint.

What is sustainable consumption?

Consumption, in its simplest sense, means using up resources in order to live our daily lives. We all need to consume in order to survive, there are still many people on the planet that consume too little. Researchers, policy-makers and practitioners who work on sustainable consumption, would agree that high-consumption lifestyles have negative impacts on the environment and on other people (UNEP, 2001; Cohen and Murphy, 2001b; Jackson, 2006; Seyfang, 2009; Lorek and Vergragt, 2015; Urban Sustainability Director’s Network, 2016). By ‘high consumption’, I mean lifestyles which use a lot of resources and create a lot of waste, the kinds of lifestyles that many people in the global North, and more affluent people in the global South tend to live (see Chapter 2). The impacts of high-consumption lifestyles are often indirect: we consume goods and services, and as a result, either the environment, other people, or both, are adversely affected (at some point in the chain of production, purchase, use and disposal). In its simplest sense, the term ‘sustainable consumption’ refers to efforts to understand how these impacts on environment or on other people might be avoided.

Box 1.1 Summary: what is sustainable consumption?

For the purposes of this book the study and practice of sustainable consumption concerns:

• Understanding the impact of high-consumption lifestyles on the environment and on other people, through the intersection of people’s daily lives with environmental problems.

• Exploring the opportunities for consuming less (for e.g. less resource intensity, longer product life, energy efficiency and sufficiency) and consuming differently (for e.g. sharing not owning, replacing one practice with another) with regards to the purchase, use and disposal of stuff.

• Understanding the way in which high-consumption lifestyles are embedded in the material, social, cultural and political world.

(See also Jackson, 2006; Lorek and Vergragt, 2015.)

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In other words, the key question here is: how might our current consumption patterns be made more environmentally and socially sustainable? To be more specific, people working in the field of sustainable consumption are aiming to answer some important questions about the world, including:

• What impacts do our high-consumption lifestyles have on the environment and on other people?

• Why do people consume in the way they do?

• What can we do to reduce negative environmental and social impacts of high-consumption lifestyles?

• What are the opportunities for transformation towards a more just, environmentally benign world?

These questions also suggest that sustainable consumption research, policy and practice sits somewhere between the environmental, social and economic worlds. In general, work on sustainable consumption does not question whether environmental problems exist; instead we focus on how consumption impacts on these problems, and what can be done to reduce these impacts.

Sustainable consumption is a topic which we can access through thinking about daily life. Very often, we are talking about the mundane realities of people’s everyday lives, such as how they choose to live, or how they are constrained by their circumstances, what values they hold and how these play out in their decisions, and the influence that personal identity has on a person’s practices. When I say ‘mundane’, I do not mean that this is dull – quite the opposite! For me, thinking about sustainable consumption is exciting because it makes us connect the details of people’s daily lives to bigger ideas about society, and theories of how the world works. In my experience, this topic makes theory very accessible to students like yourself, as many of the examples we draw on to explain theory come from people’s daily lives, and these are instinctively understood.

The precise term ‘sustainable consumption’ is most at home among policy-makers, particularly at an international and national level, where changes in consumption patterns are talked about in more abstract terms, with the objective of reducing impacts. Some academics also use the term ‘sustainable consumption’ to talk about these issues, and the international Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative, with its associated conferences, events and networks is a good example of this (SCORAI, 2017). This is a multi-disciplinary field, however, and academics from different disciplines use a very wide range of concepts and associated theories in thinking about this topic, including pro-environmental behaviour (psychology), practice (sociology), ethical consumption (business studies and cultural studies), and environmental citizenship (political science). Practitioners engage an even wider range of concepts to talk about their activities in this area, concepts specific to their particular field of interest. A transport planner might talk about ‘travel mode change’ for instance, or an energy efficiency advisor about ‘alleviating fuel poverty’.

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In this book, I take a very broad view of ‘what counts’ as sustainable consumption, including all of the concepts listed above and more in my understanding of the term. I do this for several reasons. First, because pragmatically there is value in engaging with all these different disciplinary, policy and practitioner perspectives, in order to gain both a deeper understanding of these problems, and the possible solutions to them. If I just looked at thinking, policy and practice that called itself ‘sustainable consumption’ I would miss out a lot of interesting and useful work. Second, because in writing this book I am encouraging you to develop a critical perspective on this field. By helping you to understand what sustainable consumption means from a variety of perspectives, I hope this will also help you understand the merits and shortfalls of each of these perspectives. Indeed all of the chapters will include a critical commentary on the assumptions that each perspective takes, and the limitations that these assumptions place on us understanding and addressing the problem. Note that taking such a broad definition is rather risky: plenty of authors would argue that even ethical consumption is too broad to be definable (Lewis and Potter, 2011; Littler, 2011). It also situates this book, and indeed the topic of sustainable consumption as a multi-disciplinary endeavour, which starts with a real-world problem (the unsustainable use and distribution of resources) and attempts to understand it using all the academic tools at our disposal.

By taking both a multi-disciplinary starting point, and by looking at this work rather critically, I also expose the fact that this is a topic of contention: that there is no ‘right answer’ to the many questions that this topic raises. In this book, you will see that different people have very different perspectives on what the ‘real problem’ is, what causes that problem, and how it might be resolved. For instance, the problem of unsustainable consumption is explained variously as a problem of individuals not meeting their responsibilities, a problem of structural, social forces preventing people from acting how they would like to, or a problem of people not understanding the need for change. For me, this reveals sustainable consumption to be a highly political topic: how you see the problem, its causes and its solutions will depend very much on what you think is important (your politics). I hope you can use this book to develop your own opinions, and indeed your own politics on this topic.

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Box 1.2 Why ‘sustainable consumption’?

To start as we mean to go on, it is worth thinking critically about why this book is called ‘sustainable consumption’ at all. As an academic working in this area, I feel quite ambivalent about the term: on the one hand, it does not really do justice to the range of work done in this area; on the other hand, it connects me to a community of scholars and practitioners who have common interests. I list some of the advantages and disadvantages of the term here:

Advantages:

• The term ‘sustainable consumption’ is multi-disciplinary. As such, it does not ‘take sides’ in the way that other terms would (e.g. if the book was called ‘pro-environmental behaviour’, you would expect to read only psychological insights).

• The term ‘sustainable consumption’ is where international and national policy-makers often start to engage with this topic. This means work conducted under this label attracts their attention.

• Consumption is a social science category, not a natural science category like energy, food or water. The term therefore tends to bring together social scientists to talk about sustainability issues, and to help us see how consumption of energy and water (for instance) might have things in common.

Disadvantages:

• The word ‘consumption’ tends to make people think of shopping, rather than the vast range of interactions people have with the environment and with other people. I include political activism, boycotts, voluntary simplicity and all of resource-consuming daily life in the category of sustainable consumption, but many would restrict their definition to ‘shopping’.

• The word ‘consumption’ tends to be interpreted as ‘using up resources’. This can become a very technocratic framing of the problem: which focuses on which resources are used, losing sight of the people using the resources, and the power structures that impact on the distribution of resources.

• The word ‘consumption’ may also imply that we are only interested in individuals and how they choose to live according to their values. As you will see, this is not at all the case! Many scholars of sustaina...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Sustainable Consumption
• Key Issues in Environment and Sustainability
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Introducing Sustainable Consumption
• Part 2 Explaining Sustainable Consumption
• Part 3 Visions of the Future in Sustainable Consumption
• Index