Framing Sustainable Consumption and Production: The Past and the Present

Transcription

1 Presentation for the conference Sustainable Consumption and Production How to Make it Possible? Vilnius, Lithuania, March 2008 Framing Sustainable Consumption and Production: The Past and the Present Maurie J. Cohen Sustainability Research Institute School of Earth and Environment University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT United Kingdom

2 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption and Production We are gradually coming to understand that a key sustainability challenge entails reforming current systems of consumption and production.

3 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption and Production Beginning in the early 1970s, the primary conceptual model for addressing environmental issues was centered on limiting overt forms of pollution from production through legislative mandates.

4 Flaws in Classical Understanding 1. The focus on pollution control favored implementation of end of pipe technologies that generally only transferred pollution from one media to another.

5 Flaws in Classical Understanding 2. Policy makers ignored the fact that there is an unavoidable and symbiotic relationship between production and consumption.

6 Flaws in Classical Understanding 3. Consumers were treated as trivial and inconsequential to the cause of environmental improvement.

7 Sustainable Production The sustainable production side of the SCP equation is generally regarded to consist of a number of overlapping approaches that began to develop during the 1980s.

8 Sustainable Production Pollution Prevention (P2)/Cleaner Production

9 Sustainable Production Integrated Product Policies/Extended Producer Responsibility

10 Sustainable Production Supply-Chain Greening/Sustainable Supply-Chain Management

11 Sustainable Production Product Efficiency Enhancements

12 Sustainable Production Closed-Loop Manufacturing (including Demanufacturing, Remanufacturing, and Inverse Manufacturing)

13 Sustainable Production Life-Cycle Engineering/Design for Environment

14 Sustainable Production Industrial Ecology

15 Sustainable Production Factor Four/Factor X

16 Sustainable Production Ecological (Product) Design

17 Sustainable Production On the positive side, there is little that is controversial about these strategies. There is though enormous inertia slowing their widespread uptake and implementation.

18 Sustainable Production On the negative side, the current menu of strategies that currently constitutes sustainable production embodies only a weak understanding of sustainability.

19 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption

20 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption Action is needed to meet the following broad objectives: (a) To promote patterns of consumption and production that reduce environmental stress and will meet the basic needs of humanity; (b) To develop a better understanding of the role of consumption and how to bring about more sustainable consumption patterns. All countries should strive to promote sustainable consumption patterns.

21 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption This call for the public regulation of consumption proved to be very contentious and prompted sharp reactions from virtually all developed countries.

22 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption During the 1990s, the Nordic Council and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development played key roles managing this reaction and formulating the outlines of a constructive policy program.

23 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption Joint Statement by The Royal Society (UK) and the National Academies of Science (USA), Towards Sustainable Consumption (1997) Scientists can help to understand the causes and dynamics of consumptive behaviour. They can also develop indicators that track environmental impacts and link them to consumption activities, build understanding of how environmental and social systems respond to stress, and analyse the effectiveness of different strategies for making and implementing policy choices in the presence of uncertainty.

24 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption This period also saw initial development of a research community around the study of sustainable consumption (e.g., sociologists, ecological economists, political scientists, environmental scientists).

25 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption The 2002 Johannesburg Summit called for the creation of a ten-year framework of programs in support of sustainable consumption (and production).

26 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption It is in connection with this effort to develop such a framework that the Marrakech Process was launched in 2003.

27 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption Separate from the Marrakech Process a number of governments and transnational organizations have developed their own national sustainable consumption plans.

28 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption The European Union has also been active in launching a number of initiatives around the notion of sustainable consumption.

29 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption It is useful though to distinguish between how mainstream policy makers have come to engage with sustainable consumption and how certain parts of civil society have embraced the concept.

30 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption The tendency in mainstream circles has been to encourage initiatives that enhance the level of information placed at the disposal of consumers without much of an understanding of how (or if) it will be used.

31 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption Eco-labeling

32 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption Ecological Taxation/ Green Taxation

33 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption Sustainable Public Procurement/Green Purchasing

34 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption Levers, Knobs, and Dials View of Public Policy

35 Policy History of Sustainable Consumption More thoroughgoing strategies have generally been disregarded in mainstream policy circles because they are deemed to be too politically controversial (as well as potentially economically risky).

36 Ethically Conscious Consumerism

37 Relocalization of Consumption

38 Lifestyle Retrenchment

39 Quality of Life

40 Does More Consumption Make Us Happier?

41 Sustainable Consumption and Production It has been difficult to develop pragmatic concepts and strategies that simultaneously address the sustainability dimensions of consumption and production.

42 Sustainable Consumption and Production

43 Product Service Systems

44 Product Service Systems Mobility Rather than Automobiles

45 Product Service Systems Energy Services Rather than Fossil Fuels

46 Product Service Systems Computing Rather than Computers

47 Product Service Systems Example: Recorded Music

48 Observations on the Current Status of the SCP Agenda 1. It is difficult to publicly critique prevailing consumption practices without inviting charges of interference with consumer sovereignty or the overarching goal of continuous economic growth.

49 Observations on the Current Status of the SCP Agenda 2. Despite growing recognition of the vital role of consumption in facilitating sustainable development, policy makers have been reticent to endorse initiatives that would impose explicit obligations on consumers.

50 Observations on the Current Status of the SCP Agenda 3. Policy makers have demonstrated a preference for strategies that seek to promote sustainable production and they have been decidedly less enthusiastic about sustainable consumption.

51 Observations on the Current Status of the SCP Agenda 4. Proponents of sustainable consumption have yet to arrive at a common understanding about whether their overriding aim is to modify the quality of consumption or to its reduce its quantity.

52 Observations on the Current Status of the SCP Agenda 5. Among proponents of sustainable consumption in developed countries, the aim is to address the problems of overconsumption by reducing the environmental impacts of human activity (e.g., as measured in terms of per capita ecological footprint).

53 Observations on the Current Status of the SCP Agenda 6. For many developing countries, sustainable consumption is a concept for drawing attention to chronic and persistent underconsumption around the world.

54 Observations on the Current Status of the SCP Agenda 7. The science of sustainable consumption remains contested and we are far from a consensus on how to determine economic or biophysical thresholds of what might constitute acceptable levels of consumption.

55 Overall Appraisal of SCP SCP as currently understood in mainstream policy circles is based on a combination of strategies that seek to impose technological fixes or to facilitate lifestyle greening.

56 Overall Appraisal of SCP Operationalized in such terms, SCP promises a certain degree of incremental improvement in environmental performance.

57 Overall Appraisal of SCP But it is unlikely to generate the multifold improvements that most sustainability analyses suggest are necessary

58 Overall Appraisal of SCP Moreover, mainstream conceptions of SCP are focused on ecological betterment rather than a more expansive notion of sustainability.

59 Transition Management There is growing awareness that sustainability proponents need to develop an understanding of SCP that is embedded within the concept of transition management.

60 Transition Management Transition management has emerged at the intersection of science and technology studies, innovation management, and the history of technology and is based on the concept of a sociotechnical system. Spatial infrastructure and structure of life Industry structure Culture and symbolic meaning Finance rules, interest rates Regulations and policies Sociotechnical configuration of e.g. TRANSPORT Maintenance network User practices Road infrastructure Vehicle/artifact Drive team Suspension Fuel infrastructure Accessoires Etc.

61 Transition Management The social and technological dimensions of such systems co-evolve and the challenge is whether we can learn how to steer transitions over a generational timescale.

62 Macroeconomics of SCP SCP may capture the attention of environment ministers, but it certainly does not speak to the interests of central bankers, economic policy officials, and trade representatives. The aims of SCP need to be connected to the high politics of macroeconomic policy making.

63 Macroeconomics of SCP Households have two essential choices regarding what to do with their income: spend it or save it.

64 Macroeconomics of SCP To the extent that the aim of sustainable consumption is to reduce the quantity of consumption, policies that promote long-term saving over immediate expenditure could be an attractive strategy.

65 Table 1A Household Net Savings Rate for Selected OECD Countries (Percentage of Disposable Household Income) Australia * Canada Denmark * Finland Japan Korea Netherlands United Kingdom United States Declining Countries Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (available at * Data is for 2004; **Data is for 2003.

66 Table 1B Household Net Savings Rate for Selected OECD Countries (Percentage of Disposable Household Income) Stable Countries Austria * Belgium ** France Germany Switzerland Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (available at * Data is for 2004; **Data is for 2003.

67 Table 1C Household Net Savings Rate for Selected OECD Countries (Percentage of Disposable Household Income) Increasing Countries Norway ** Sweden * Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (available at * Data is for 2004; **Data is for 2003.

68 -10.0 Norway Iceland Denmark New Zealand Sweden Finland Korea Australia Canada Ireland Spain Netherlands Switzerland Luxembourg Austria Poland France Slovak Republic Germany United Kingdom Czech Republic United States Italy Greece Japan Portugal Hungary Percentage of GDP Net Government Surplus/Deficit OECD Countries, Surplus Deficit

69 -15.0 Norway Switzerland Luxembourg Netherlands Sweden Finland Germany Japan Denmark Canada Korea Austria France Italy Poland Czech Republic United Kingdom Ireland Australia Greece United States Hungary Spain Slovak Republic New Zealand Portugal Iceland Percentage of GDP Current Account Balances OECD Countries, Surplus Deficit -20.0