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Strong Sustainable Consumption Governance is needed
Sustainable consumption has become an important issue on the global governance agenda. At least in theory and on paper it is agreed: Unsustainable consumption patterns and levels, in particular in industrialized countries, are a major cause if not the major cause of environmental degradation in the world today. Without sustainable consumption, therefore, sustainable development is impossible. However, individual governments face severe constraints in the pursuit of sustainable consumption in a globalizing world.
In 1994, the Oslo Roundtable defined sustainable consumption as “... the use of services and related products which respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life while minimizing the use of natural resources and toxic materials as well as the emissions of waste and pollutants over the life cycle of the service or product so as not to jeopardize the needs of further generations”. This might be a proper description but it does not say too much about the way how to reach it.
In the eyes of many sustainable consumption practitioner and researchers moving towards sustainable consumption will require two developments: First it requires an increase in the efficiency of consumption, of cause, which can be reached via technological improvements. This means a reduction in resource consumption per consumption unit due to improvements in production processes or an efficiency friendly design, for example. Often, these improvements are win-win scenarios. So improving the efficiency of consumption can be seen as the necessary prerequisite for achieving sustainable consumption. However, existing limits to Earth’s resources and to its capacity to serve as a sink for pollutants mean, that efficient consumption can only be a weak version of sustainable consumption.
Unfortunately research on the so-called rebound effect has documented, achievements based on efficiency alone are very often overcompensated by a growth in consumption volumes. In consequence, a second development needs to take place to provide a sufficient condition for sustainable consumption: changes in consumption patterns and reductions in consumption levels in industrialized countries. This sufficient condition requires changes in infrastructures and choices as well as a questioning of the levels and drivers of consumption. This could be called strong sustainable consumption.
It is the issues associated with strong sustainable consumption that are politically highly controversial, of course. Yet, it is these issues that a focus on sustainable consumption – rather than sustainable production or sustainable development – highlights.
Since the Earth Summit in 1992 only weak sustainable consumption has received some attention, while strong sustainable consumption is almost entirely absent from political debates. Today, strong sustainable consumption exists only in marginal sectors of society and research, or as a symbolic reminder in official documents. International governmental organizations (IGOs), in particular, have avoided strong sustainable consumption issues. Using a global governance framework, this development can best be explained by the weakness of IGOs and the alignment of consumer and business interests against strong sustainable consumption measures. The most that the latter actors (and therefore national governments) are willing to support in the name of sustainable consumption are (often marginal) improvements in eco-efficiency. Hence, it should be viewed with considerable scepticism when official claims tying the failure to address strong sustainable consumption to a lack of understanding of the different conceptual facets of sustainable consumption. These official claims would suggest that further conceptual discussion will allow progress in strong sustainable consumption governance. But time for further discussion is limited. So in contrast, the only chance to reintegrate the issue on the global political agenda lies in changing the political strategies of those few actors currently committed to strong sustainable consumption.
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This contribution is based on recent work from Doris Fuchs and Sylvia Lorek. In-depth analysis can be found in
Fuchs, D., Lorek, S. (2004) Sustainable Consumption – Political debate and actual impact, SERI Background Paper 4, SERI: Vienna, http://www.seri.at/Data/seri/publications/documents/SERI%20Background%20Paper%204.pdf
The Journal of Consumer Policy accepted the article: Fuchs, D. Lorek, S. (2005) Sustainable consumption governance – a history of promises and failures, forthcoming. Preliminary version on request sylvia.lorek@seri.de
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