Sustainable Consumption

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1 Sustainable Consumption KIM HUMPHERY RMIT University, Australia The term sustainable consumption is subject to a range of definitions, though all of them identifyaneedforchangeinconsumption practices, especially in affluent economies. This perspective is driven primarily by a concern for the environmental impact of the consumption of goods and services in terms of both the depletion of unrenewable natural resources and the production and disposal of consumer waste. Some definitions attend also to issues of global economic equity and social and psychological wellbeing in challenging the logic of high-consumption economies and lifestyles. Beyond such generality, there are widely varying conceptions of how consumption should be transformed. Dominant policy approaches to sustainable consumption tend to emphasize informed consumer choice and improved production processes as vehicles for altering consumption patterns. This does not seek to challenge a global consumer capitalism, but to incrementally manage its environmental and social consequences. Less circumscribed approaches seek to change not only the patterns but the levels of consumption characteristic of affluent economies, as well as the values or conventions that drive unsustainable consumption practices. These approaches variously emphasize individual lifestyle change, collective and local forms of market provision, and/or transformations in the sociotechnical infrastructures and everyday conventions underlying consumption routines. The terminological, if not conceptual, emergence of sustainable consumption can be conveniently traced to a specific historical moment. Unlike the related notions of ethical and green consumption, which have an ostensibly less definitive history, it is broadly acknowledged that it was the Agenda 21 report arising from the 1992 United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development the so-called Rio Earth Summit that popularized the term sustainable consumption and gave birth to an international policy discourse. This was not so much invention as development: the Agenda 21 report built significantly on earlier attempts in The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) and particularly Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987) to identify consumption patterns as integral to addressing problems of global environmental sustainability. More broadly, a critique of affluence and overconsumption was hardly news by the 1990s but was a consolidated theme of public intellectual and environmentalist critique, especially through the writings ofcriticssuchasj.k.galbraith,fredhirsch, E. F. Schumacher, Tibor Scitovsky, William Leiss, and André Gorz. Nevertheless, many commentators have identified the Rio Summit as heralding a key shift.asmauriej.cohenhasnoted,untilthe early 1990s Western industrialized nations had, in international forums, delimited discussion of global environmental degradation and uneven economic development to a problem of population growth. The Rio Summit (through the agitation of developing nations and nongovernment organizations) explicitly challenged this by placing Western consumption practices center stage. The The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Thomas Cook and J. Michael Ryan John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: / wbeccs222

2 2 SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION result was that consumption gained new stature, especially in European nations, as an organizing theme with which to interpret the widening gap in global economic equality and the environmental impact of consumer lifestyles (Cohen 2001, 22). Indeed, as a newly minted concept with a UN imprimatur the imperative to render consumption sustainable quickly began to shape mainstream environmental policy rhetoric in the West, and a number of commentators have usefully traced the rise and consolidation of this policy terrain, mostly concentrating on United Nations and European initiatives which have been at the forefront of change (see Cohen 2001, 2010; Jackson 2006; Seyfang 2009; Hinton and Goodman 2010). Internationally, UN agencies have, over the past two decades, continued to drive the further mainstream formulation of the sustainable consumption agenda through the Rio+5 Conference in 1997, by way of the 1998 Human Development Report (United Nations Development Programme 1998) and through the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in The latter gathering gave rise to a 2003 International Expert Meeting in Marrakech which inaugurated a 10-year framework of interventionist programs for sustainable consumption and production thus dubbed the Marrakech Process. The United Nations Development Programme has also maintained since 1998 the information sharing and policy-oriented Sustainable Consumption and Production Network. Beyond the UN, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was quick to set up a working group in the 1990s on sustainable consumption and production designed to foster environmental policy initiatives by member states (see OECD 1997). A number of OECD countries have worked in tandem with this process (see OECD 2008). In the UK, for example, the sustainable consumption policy agenda has been driven through a series of government reports and bodies, especially centered on the establishment in 2002 of the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC). A year later, the UK government adopted a sustainable consumption strategy articulated in the Changing Patterns report (Defra 2003) though this essentially carried forward earlier UK approaches, particularly the notion that sustainable consumption could be achieved by decoupling economic growth from environmental damage (Jackson 2006; Hinton and Goodman 2010). A more innovative move was the establishment in 2004 of the UK Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption which, through the SDC, published a number of influential reports including what would become the 2009 bestseller, Prosperity Without Growth by the British environmental economist Tim Jackson (Jackson 2009). Other key European players in the field include the Netherlands. Indeed, from as early the 1970s the Dutch government adopted the language of critical consumption and responsible living in relation to environmental concerns, while from the mid-1990s both Dutch government agencies and environmentalist organizations targeted the citizen-consumer as central to altering consumption patterns (see Martens and Spaargaren 2006). Despite these initiatives and many others not mentioned in this brief discussion governmental interventionism and commitment in relation to sustainable consumption has been highly circumscribed. ThiswasclearlyevidentatthemostrecentUN Earth Summit in While this Rio+20 gathering promoted green economies as an overriding issue, the final outcome document The Future We Want (United Nations 2013) simply reiterated the Agenda 21 commitment to sustainable consumption

3 SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION 3 and production, while explicitly refusing to set goals and targets. For many observers this was a major lost opportunity, though hardly surprising. It has been noted often that the cost of sustainable consumption entering the mainstream policy realm was, from the outset, the dilution of its core message. As many critics have insisted, almost all of the policy documents pouring forth on sustainable consumption have predicated change on consumer-driven reforms, not on significant state intervention or infrastructural shifts and least of all on a challenge to increasing levels of global consumption. Thus consumer-focused green behavior change programs, ecolabeling, and household energy use measurement (coupled in the production realm with strategies for improving resource productivity and minimizing waste) have been the preferred governmental strategies. Indeed, sustainable consumption policy has largely been the story of appealing to rational and ethical consumers and of the technological fix, not of the abandonment of conventional, consumption-based economic growth. The tensions in the institutionalized rhetoric of sustainable consumption thus remain glaring and, as Gill Seyfang (2009) has noted, were originally embodied in the Agenda 21 report which both advocated a conventional use of market mechanisms to shift consumption patterns, while more radically suggesting the abandonment of conventional market notions of prosperity. This tension, as signaled in the opening paragraph, undergirds the division between an incrementalist and a more radical politics of sustainable consumption. As Cohen (2011, 176 7) has argued, a weak or mainstream approach to sustainable consumption is founded on notions of atomized consumer behaviour, whereas a strong or more encompassing approach seeks to foster transformational changes and adopts a broad conception of moral responsibility. In the latter case, addressing sustainability entails confronting the problem of aggregate overconsumption, particularly in the affluent world, and of consumer excess. Moreover, the impact of high and ever-increasing levels of consumption and an attendant consumer culture is understood by many critics as resulting not only in environmental damage, but in a loss of social cohesion, personal wellbeing, and ethical commitment to reducing global economic inequality. Thus, a more comprehensive sustainable consumption agenda, as Seyfang has argued, moves to challenge not only mainstream sustainability policy but the very notion of individualistic green consumerism ; while counterposed to this is the need for the radical realignment of social and economic institutions (2009, 2). In Seyfang s words, the policy agenda has narrowed from initial possibilities of redefining prosperity and wealth and radically transforming lifestyles, to a focus on improving resource productivity and marketing green or ethical products (Seyfang 2009, 3). Similarly, Emma Hinton and Michael Goodman (2010, 247) have observed, following arguments in relation to green governmentality, that sustainable consumption rests heavily on the responsibilization of the citizen and, like Seyfang and Cohen, they look beyond the mainstream to alternative understandings of consuming sustainably. These alternatives run from movements such as voluntary simplicity and slow food, to discourses of degrowth and new economics, to theoretical interventions relating to infrastructures of provision, alternative hedonism, and concepts of sufficiency. All this is not to imply a unity to the field of a more radical politics of sustainable consumption. On the contrary, there are significant theoretical and political differences between social movements advocating alternative forms of consumption, and especially

4 4 SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION between intellectual approaches focused on individual lifestyle change and those focused on collective economic responses and/or infrastructural transformation. One can also seek to temper some of the claims made by various opponents of overconsumption. A politics of ethical and green consumption, for example, is not easily characterized as simply mainstream. While it has been extensively co-opted by conventional sustainability policy, responsible consumer choice remains a field of political possibility. Similarly, a caution is needed in making assumptions about the social and personal meaning and impact of contemporary consumption practices and their supposed connection to a rampant consumer culture destructive of moral sensibility and social bonds. Nevertheless, drawing distinctions between the mainstream and the alternative is certainly useful as a way of identifying the political fault lines and the trajectory of political debate that has come to characterize the terrain of sustainable consumption as analysis, policy, advocacy, and activism. Indeed, arguments over the need for an increased role for the state in regulating and reframing the infrastructures of consumption and production in the interest of sustainability, for broader ways of conceptualizing political action beyond the individualized practices of consuming better, and for the adoption of alternative economic models of prosperity, remain paramount. Given the increasingly evident failure of much sustainable consumption policy worldwide, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that a more encompassing approach is urgently needed. SEE ALSO: Capitalism; Ethical Consumption; Green Consumption REFERENCES Cohen, Maurie, J The Emergent Environmental Policy Discourse on Sustainable Consumption. In Exploring Sustainable Consumption: Environmental Policy and the Social Sciences, edited by Maurie Cohen, Oxford: Elsevier. Cohen, Maurie J The International Political Economy of (Un)Sustainable Consumption and the Global Financial Collapse. Environmental Politics 19(1): Cohen, Maurie J (Un)Sustainable Consumption and the New Political Economy of Growth. In Beyond The Consumption Bubble, edited by Karin M. Ekström and Kay Glans, London: Routledge. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Changing Patterns UK Government Framework for Sustainable Consumption and Production. London: Defra Publications / environment/business/scp/pdf/changingpatterns.pdf. Hinton, Emma D., and Michael K. Goodman Sustainable Consumption: Developments, Considerations and New Directions. In The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, 2nd ed., edited by Michael R. Redclift and Graham Woodgate, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Jackson, Tim Readings in Sustainable Consumption. In The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Consumption, edited by Tim Jackson, London: Earthscan. Jackson, Tim Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. London: Earthscan. Martens, Susan, and Gert Spaargaren The Politics of Sustainable Consumption: The Case of the Netherlands. In The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Consumption, edited by Tim Jackson, London: Earthscan. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William H. Behrens The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Sustainable Consumption and Production.Paris:OECD. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Promoting Sustainable

5 SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION 5 Consumption: Good Practices in OECD Countries.Paris:OECD. Seyfang, Gill The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption: Seeds of Change. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. United Nations The Future We Want: Outcome Document Adopted at Rio United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report Oxford: Oxford University Press. WorldCommissiononEnvironmentandDevelopment Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. FURTHER READING Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappells, and Bas Van Vliet, eds Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION. World Summit on Sustainable Development. Address by Mr Koïchiro Matsuura

DG/2002/82 Original: English UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION World Summit on Sustainable Development Address by Mr Koïchiro Matsuura Director-General of the United Nations