ABSTRACT A mounting body of scientific evidence emphasizes the necessity of sufficiency as a sustainability strategy in view of intensifying global ecological crises. To enable and promote sufficiency implementation with the necessary speed and scope, efforts at all policy levels are needed. This includes the municipal level, which has received relatively little attention from sufficiency scholarship thus far, and when it has, the rural context has been excluded. To address this research gap, we pose the following questions: What sufficiency policies can we identify in rural municipalities and, more specifically, which sectors, sufficiency types, and policy measure types are covered? What are the enablers and barriers for sufficiency policies in rural municipalities? Taking Switzerland as an example, we conducted 46 semistructured expert interviews with decision‐makers from 46 rural municipalities and analyzed the data using qualitative content analysis. We identified and categorized 542 municipal sufficiency policy measures in various sectors, encompassing different types of sufficiency and policy measures. Most of these relate to the mobility sector and employ the instrument of public spending. Enablers of sufficiency policy include pro‐environmental attitudes and individual resources of elected politicians, co‐benefits of sufficiency measures, and appropriate communication and participation. The barriers we identified include a lack of municipal resources, low acceptance—and the apprehension thereof—among local citizens, social norms, and habits opposing sufficiency, and the absence of a legal mandate. Despite the large number of small‐scale measures, a general policy orientation toward sufficiency cannot be identified.
Iten et al. (Fri,) studied this question.