.png)
Introduction
It is well established that consumption patterns in high-income countries must change if we are to succeed with the necessary sustainability transformations. But consumption patterns have proved highly resistant to change, and environmental footprints continue to grow. We are clearly pushing planetary boundaries, but what about societal boundaries for excess consumption?
While there are significant differences across countries and areas of consumption, all societies have norms and ideas about what is enough or too much. However, these norms are often challenged as ever higher levels of consumption become normalised. Across the broad field of consumption and sustainability, there is increasing attention to how old and new ideas of sufficiency can be used in the name of sustainability.
Consumers are obviously central to sufficiency, but research has unveiled how consumption patterns are deeply embedded in broader social and material settings.
Programme
This seminar addresses these questions through two talks that focus on consumption and sufficiency in Sweden and Norway:
- How much can consumers do without systemic change?
- How do people navigate and negotiate sufficiency in high-consumption societies?
- And how does what’s enough differ across social classes and income groups?
1. Prefiguring sufficiency: The household as a generative socio-material site
Emmelina Eriksson (Lund University)
Building on in-depth interviews with Swedish households that aim to reduce and limit their everyday consumption, this talk focuses on how households engage in various acts of sufficiency-oriented consumption. In doing so, they take into account the planet, other people, future generations, and non-human beings, as well as their own well-being.
Recognising that individual-level changes are inadequate, and that large-scale systemic change is needed, they still emphasise taking responsibility to be a source of inspiration for others and show that a sustainable life is possible. In doing so, they prefigure alternative ways of living and consuming within high-consumption contexts. Households are positioned as sites of prefiguration that can mediate between the individual and the collective and, under certain conditions, generate sustainable change.
2. Performing sustainability and sufficiency across socio-economic groups in Norway
Ulrikke Wethal and Arve Hansen (Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo)
Drawing on different projects on consumption in Norway, this talk focuses on how consumers negotiate sufficiency within households and with broader socio-material settings in consumer society.
Importantly, the talk also focuses on a tension that is surprisingly often overlooked in research on consumption and sustainability: how different approaches to sustainability and sufficiency compare and contrast across social classes. By placing inequalities at the centre of the analysis, the talk reveals crucial new insights into the relationship between everyday consumption, sustainability efforts and structural unsustainability.
Registration
The seminar is open to all.
About the speakers
Emmelina Eriksson is a PhD candidate in consumption studies at the Department of Service Studies at Lund University. Her research focuses on sustainable consumption, with a particular emphasis on consumption reduction and sufficiency. She is interested in what a societal transition to less resource-intensive ways of living in affluent societies might entail and how such a transition could be better enabled. Her research also explores future imaginaries of a good life with less resource use and how imaginaries of the future shape, and are shaped by, practices in the present. Emmelina Eriksson - Lund University
Ulrikke Wethal and Arve Hansen are based at Centre for Global Sustainability at the University of Oslo, where they lead the centre’s research on sustainable consumption and energy equity. They have carried out a wide range of research projects on consumption and sustainability, including studies on food, waste and circularity.
About the seminar
This seminar is part of the Consumption and sustainability series. The seminar series focuses on the frontiers of research on consumption and sustainability. Through talks by leading scholars in the field, the seminar series addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges.
Organiser
The Research Group Sustainable consumption and energy equity, Centre for Global Sustainability