Consumption: the elephant in the room: Understanding, changing, and reducing consumption for sustainability

Abstract

The consumption of goods and services is an understudied key contributor to the climate and environmental crises. In this dissertation we investigated how to change and reduce consumption for sustainability, from a broad multi-disciplinary perspective. First, based on a ten-discipline review of what influences consumption, we present a framework emphasizing that consumption, much more than driven by “consumers”, is a complex phenomenon that arises from the (inter)actions of multiple agents and contexts. Governments, businesses, marketers, producers, and media are some of these actors. They influence and are influenced by social, cultural, geographic, infrastructural, technological, political, institutional, economic, and historical contexts. Historical research indicates that the shift to a consumer society was a deliberate process set with the intention of stimulating the growth-economy. As a next step we investigated what it takes to reduce consumption. We concluded that it requires abstaining from consumption, but also consuming differently (e.g., second-hand, good-quality, non-disposable), engaging in low-consumption practices (e.g., sharing, repairing, self-provisioning) and contexts that enable low-consumption living. The remaining chapters of the dissertation focused on how to change food systems for sustainability, by investigating in detail actors and contexts of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs). We interviewed organisers of AFNs in three countries (Portugal, Poland, and the Netherlands) to understand the factors that support or hinder the development of diverse types of AFNs. Finally, in a case-study of a non-profit food co-op supermarket we studied how food waste is managed (quantitatively and qualitatively) and showed how it differed from conventional retail.