International conference on sustainable consumption announced

Sustainable Consumption – Towards Action and Impact

November 6th - 8th 2011

Hamburg, Germany
 

The scientists of the inter- and transdisciplinary research programme «From Knowledge to Action – New Paths towards Sustainable Consumption», funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education since 2008, invite the international and interdisciplinary scientific community to present and discuss new research findings on sustainable consumption. The conference will take place in Hamburg, European Green Capital 2011.

In modern societies, private consumption is a multifaceted and ambivalent phenomenon: It is a ubiquitous social practice and economic driving force, yet at the same time its consequences conflict with important social and environmental sustainability goals. Finding paths towards "sustainable consumption" has therefore become a major political issue. But, despite considerable knowledge about the unsustainability of current consumption patterns and in spite of numerous initiatives in the field of consumer information, a general trend towards sustainable consumption is not recognisable.

Focussing on consumer behaviour, its social and cultural embeddedness, and its interdependencies with economic, physical and political frameworks, the international conference will provide a platform for an in-depth interdisciplinary debate on questions such as:

• What are the key psychological, socio-cultural, economic and physical factors that influence consumer behaviour? Which conditions facilitate or inhibit sustainable consumption?
• What are the most promising ways to promote the transformation of consumption patterns towards sustainability? Which designs and mixes of policy instruments are effective? How can consumer initiatives, public policy, and business strategies be coordinated to enhance sustainable consumption?
• What are the impacts of different consumption patterns on sustainability and how can they be assessed?
• What theoretical and methodological research approaches are adequate to produce robust knowledge on sustainable consumption?

The call for papers will be issued in late February 2011.

Reducing inequality will help make our society more sustainable

A recent report and article in the British Medical Journal by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett highlight the relationship between sustainability and income inequality. They find that happiness and life expectancy are no longer related to wealth. The graphs below from the report show that we have well and truly passed a point of diminishing returns where large increases in wealth have relatively little effect on life expectancy or happiness.
 

However, relative incomes within a society are strongly related to health and wellbeing outcomes (see more graphs from the report below - there are many more examples in the report). They argue that this is related to status differentials rather than material benefits. 

Greater inequality leads to competitive consumerism, as people compete for material displays of status, which in turn leads to much higher greenhouse gas emissions (see graph from the report below).

They conclude that achieving a more equal, sustainable society will require "people's willingness to act for the common good" rather than "private greed, short termism and sectional interests" (p45). We need to focus more on developing social capital; and less on economic growth. 

Can status-seeking drive sustainable behaviours?

A recent study by Griskivicius et al. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has linked peoples' preference for green consumer products to status seeking behaviour. Their experiments showed that people were more likely to choose less luxurious green products after reading a short story that activated their status motive. This effect increased when the choice was made in public rather than in private, and when the green products were more expensive than the non-green products. They explain their findings using evolutionary psychology - costly signalling theory, which suggests that conspicuous conservation behaviours show others in a social group that a person a) is pro-social rather pro-self, and b) that they have the spare capacity to sacrifice resources (time, money, etc) to choose the less personally-beneficial product.

These findings have implications for corporations who are marketing green products - although the idea of increasing prices to make green products more attractive may have undesirable outcomes from an equity point of view! These findings are also interesting when imagining the role of private enterprise in a sustainable society - it may be false to assume that status-seeking behaviours inevitably lead to poor environmental outcomes.