Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

Although consumption is recognized as bringing pleasure, comfort, and convenience, environmental side effects can cast dark shadows over consumption, turning it into an overall negative phenomenon. Confronting consumption for many social analysts (e.g., Princen, Maniates, and Conca 2002) means developing a critical analysis of the “treadmill of consumption” as implied in the capitalist foundation of our modern production-consumption organization. Among the myriad goods and services delivered to citizen-consumers to help organize their everyday lives, the car and the hamburger stand out as the negative icons of modern consumer culture. Together with plastic throwaway bags and coffee cups, long-distance flying, and the use of air conditioners and Jacuzzis, they are used by environmental scientists to develop their critical discourse of unsustainable consumption, the dark side of our consumption pleasures. By consuming these products, citizens especially of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries help reproduce a political and economic system that at the global level combines serious environmental deterioration with increased inequalities between social classes, countries, and regions, rendering (distant) people and ecosystems into seemingly powerless victims of our global consumption culture.

The main contribution of environmental social sciences refers to exposing, discussing, and criticizing the dark side of consumption. Up until now, most social scientific analyses of (un)sustainable consumption focus on identifying and diagnosing the root causes of the environmental impacts of consumption. They aim at gaining a better understanding of the drivers behind consumption growth and the increased environmental impacts of modern lifestyles. Among the wide variety of causes discussed in the literature are the “work and spend” culture and its exclusive focus on materialist values, as analyzed by Juliet Schor; the global spread of the car system as documented by John Urry, in particular; the concentration of power in the hands of transnational food retail chains; the lock-in effects of cheap-oil-based energy systems; the lack of awareness and information from the side of individual citizen-consumers; and the inherent tendency of social groups to use goods for distinction and social positioning.

Because of the almost exclusive focus on the shadow side of consumption and on the drivers behind the enhanced environmental footprints of our daily lives, the environmental social sciences literature does not deliver many insights when it comes to analyzing solutions to environmental problems. Most of the time, a penetrating analysis of the problem is followed by a general conclusion that we need to consume less or that a fundamental transformation of the present system of production and consumption is asked for. When compared to the extensive and deep-digging analyses of environmental deterioration and decay, there is only a modest amount of work [Page 539]done on positive environmental change, on processes of environmental improvements as, for example, the reduction of the footprints of our households, the improvement of the environmental performance of food retailers, the dematerialization of consumption, or the greening of lifestyles and everyday-life consumption practices.

In this entry, some of the major themes and theories within the environmental social sciences are presented, discussing the societal roots of environmental risks and decay, on the one hand, and the development of (policy) approaches toward the proper management of these risks and problems by governments, companies, households, and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), on the other. It is argued that both environmental deterioration and environmental management or control need to be studied as societal phenomena, using a multidisciplinary, policyrelevant, and global perspective. Throughout the entry, the central focus is on consumption as a crucial topic within the broader environmental agenda. A selective overview of the different schools and discipline-bound theoretical perspectives in environmental studies are presented, arguing that this field is of recent origin and still very much under construction. This area of environmental studies is shown to mirror some of the conceptual issues and dilemmas characteristic of the general social sciences disciplines. For each school or perspective, its relevance for the study of sustainable consumption is indicated in a general way, with respect to both theoretical and empirical contributions made in the past. In conclusion, a few key themes and issues crucial for the future study of (un)sustainable consumption are mentioned.

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