With growing awareness of environmental deterioration, atmospheric pollution and resource depletion, the last several decades have brought increased attention and scrutiny to global consumption levels. However, there are significant and well documented limitations associated with current efforts to encourage more sustainable consumption patterns, ranging from informational and time constraints to the highly individualizing effect of market-based participation.
This volume, featuring essays solicited from experts engaged in sustainable consumption research from around the world, presents empirical and theoretical illustrations of the various means through which politics and power influence (un)sustainable consumption practices, policies and perspectives. With chapters on compelling topics including collective action, behaviour-change and the transition movement, the authors discuss why current efforts have largely failed to meet environmental targets and explore promising directions for research, policy and practice.
Featuring contributions that will help the reader open up politics and power in ways that are accessible and productive and bridge the gaps with current approaches to sustainable consumption, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable consumption and the politics of sustainability.
List of Figures
List of Tables
Author Biographies
Introduction
Power, Politics and Unsustainable Consumption
Lucie Middlemiss, Cindy Isenhour, Mari Martiskainen
Section I: On Political Economy and Sustainable Consumption
A Consuming Globalism: On Power and the Post-Paris Agreement Politics of
Climate and Consumption
Cindy Isenhour
Practice Does Not Make Perfect: Sustainable Consumption, Practice Theory and
the Question of Power
Dennis Soron
Sources of Power for Sustainable Consumption: Where to Look
Doris Fuchs, Sylvia Lorek, Antonietta Di Giulio, Rico Defila
Section II: On Governmentality and the Notion of the Subject in Sustainable
Consumption
Pro-environmental Behaviour Change and Governmentality: Counter-Conduct and
the Making up of Environmental Individuals
Tom Hargreaves
Freedom, Autonomy and Sustainable Behaviours: The Politics of Designing
Consumer Choice
Tobias Gumbert
The Double Dividend Discourse in Sustainable Consumption: A Critical
Commentary
Lucie Middlemiss, David Wingate and Anna Wesselink
Section III: On the Politics of Identity and Difference in Sustainable
Consumption
Housing as a Function of Consumption and Production in the United Kingdom
Mari Martiskainen
Power and Politics in the (Work-Life) Balance: A Mixed Methods Evaluation of
the Risks and Rewards of Downshifting
Jacob Hammond & Emily Huddart Kennedy
Who Participates in Community-Based Sustainable Consumption Projects and Why
Does It Matter? A Constructively Critical Approach
Manisha Anantharaman, Emily Huddart Kennedy, Lucie Middlemiss and Sarah
Bradbury
Index
Cindy Isenhour is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, USA.
Mari Martiskainen is a Research Fellow at Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, UK
Lucie Middlemiss is Associate Professor in Sustainability, and Co-director of the Sustainability Research Institute, in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, UK.
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