Promoting lifestyle changes for sustainability through participatory research

This paper examines whether participatory approaches can catalyze radical lifestyle changes consistent with strong sustainability. We analyze the ecoclubs format—participatory, peer-led research groups where university students meet regularly to develop sustainable consumption habits. Drawing on cooperative inquiry methods and 38 interviews across seven implementation waves (2021–2025), we investigated how peer-based learning influences lifestyle change. Our findings reveal a significant gap between participatory aspirations and transformative impact. While participants reported positive immaterial changes—increased environmental awareness, critical consumption attitudes, and strengthened nature connections—material changes remained limited to incremental adjustments like eco-friendly product switches or packaging reduction. Absent were transformative changes essential for strong sustainability: e.g. eliminating air travel, adopting plant-based diets, or fundamentally reducing consumption. Key barriers included perceived high costs, missing infrastructure, and crucially, the absence of interventions enhancing reflection and action on broader consumption patterns. We argue that purely participatory design, while creating supportive peer learning environments, fails to question the growth-consumerist paradigm. Without challenging dominant value systems, ecoclubs inadvertently reinforce weak sustainability—optimizing choices within existing systems rather than transforming the participants’ lifestyles toward strong sustainability. The study argues that designing highly impactful behavior change programs requires, on the one hand, embracing the potentially productive tension between participatory methods, which drive engagement and socialization of norms, and, on the other hand, often demanding, strong sustainability oriented interventions. Programs should combine peer support with deliberate provocations, fact-based guidance, and critical facilitation that explicitly addresses structural barriers.