Equity Within Ecological Limits: Grand Challenge for Sustainable Consumption

Three decades have passed since the UN Conference for Environment and Development identified unsustainable patterns of consumption as a major cause of environmental deterioration as well as an issue aggravating poverty and imbalance. Consequently, in the conference outcome, Agenda 21, the so-called developed countries were addressed to take the lead in achieving sustainable consumption patterns and developing countries were asked to avoid unsustainable patterns in their development process (United Nations, 1992). According to Agenda 21, consumption patterns include consumption by industries, governments, households, and individuals. In the years and decades following Agenda 21, mainly the consumption of individuals and households got specific attention and were addressed in policy and research under the term “sustainable consumption.” This created a shift from previously recognizing humans mainly as victims of environmental degradation and pollution resulting from industry and their production processes to sources of such problems through the increasing demand of resource intensive products and services. Since then, science, policy, and practice searched for paths toward more sustainable, and respectively less wasteful, modes of consumption. To a broad extent, emphasis was—and still is—given to encourage consumers to buy more sustainable products and/or services and to shift behavior toward more sustainable and less wasteful modes of consumption. Research, however, has shown, that appealing predominantly to consumers does not lead to the required change (Mont et al., 2013), it just makes consumers the scapegoats for further unsustainable consumption and production patterns (Akenji, 2014). The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) again highlighted the need for sustainable consumption through the formulation of SDG 12 “Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns” (UN, 2015). It goes a bit further than Agenda 21, as it lines out the need for substantial changes in patterns of consumption and production—at least in its headline and parts of the seven targets. Other targets, and especially the indicators of SDG 12, however, only provide a partial conceptualization of sustainable consumption focused predominantly on efficiency and waste reduction. This reveals a substantial gap between current scientific understanding of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) and how this field is articulated in political and societal debates (Bengtsson et al., 2018).