Consumer Protest: Environment

Consumers are increasingly aware of what choices are available to them and the impact that their choices can have, both environmentally and socially, and are ever more cognizant of the “ethical” dimension in their consumer purchasing habits. As such, awareness-raising campaigns—through various forms of either direct or indirect actions—are seen to have had a measurable impact on consumer behavior. This is particularly the case in relation to raising awareness about the environmental impact of both the production and consumption of goods, which has often involved diverse and imaginative forms of consumer protest and wider sorts of activism. This activism is often directed in two principal ways: first, it is directed at raising awareness among individual consumers, in the hope that they may be persuaded to change the ways in which they shop, either permanently or for a designated period of time, or in relation to a particular product or company; and second, it is directed at changing the practices of businesses and multinationals by raising awareness about the environmental impact of the production and trade of goods and services and subsequently increasing the pressure for far greater corporate social responsibility. The successes and failures of consumer activism and various forms of consumer protest in achieving these ends has been the subject of recent debate and analysis (Glickman 2009; Hilton 2009; Kendall, Gill, and Cheney 2007). To get a better sense of what's involved, it is useful to briefly survey some of the main forms of consumer protest that have been informed by concerns for the environment.

Perhaps the most renowned form of consumer protest is the phenomenon of the boycott. Monroe Friedman has defined a boycott as attempts “by one or more parties to achieve certain objectives by urging individual consumers to refrain from making selected purchases in the marketplace” (1995, 198–199). And, as Matthew Hilton has shown in his 2009 landmark work, consumers have protested against the abuses of the market by boycotting [Page 302]certain products and services and, in so doing, have challenged the very meaning of consumerism by raising awareness of how it increasingly shapes our social, cultural, and political life, as well as the more obvious area of our economic well-being. In essence, then, a boycott involves the act—or rather nonact—of refraining from purchasing certain goods and services from a particular organization or sector of the marketplace, typically as an expression of disaffection for the practices of those involved in their production or provision. Any given boycott can last for an indefinite length of time, although they tend to be unitary in the sense that they concern a single issue or problem, and the boycott will cease once this has been addressed by those targeted. That said, consumer boycotts are becoming increasingly more organized—especially with the advent of enhanced communications technology—and are beginning to focus on longer-term changes in the buying patterns of consumers to have a greater impact and thus more change of success in meeting the global challenge of climate change and protecting the environment. Useful examples of consumer protests via boycotts today can be found at the Ethical Consumer website on the Current Consumer Boycotts page.

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