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Determinants of sustainable consumption in France: the importance of social influence and environmental values

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Abstract

Our article provides empirical findings for France related to sustainable consumption and what triggers sustainable behavior. We investigate various potential key explanatory variables including social influence and environmental values, among others. Our main contribution is to survey and to analyze a set of consumption practices (rather than the examination of single practices as in most of the literature) for a large sample of more than 3000 households. The survey was conducted in France in 2012. We use cluster analysis to identify and describe the different consumer behavior profiles. This methodology identifies three clusters of consumers characterized by diverse concerns related to the environmental impact of their consumption. Based on these clusters, ordered Logit models are fitted on three levels of sustainable consumption behaviors. Our results emphasize the importance of age, gender, education, environmental concern and peer effects for spurring sustainable consumption. We discuss the role of peer pressure as a major determinant. Learning about sustainable behavior from peers seems to complement changing environmental values and stimulate pro-environmental behavior. Our findings show that local externalities clearly outweigh the global consequences related to the promotion of sustainable consumption behaviors that is, the ability to learn in small networks is critical for the promotion of trust and the exchange of ideas and practices.

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Notes

  1. 1The phone survey was conducted by professional interviewers from CREDOC (French Research Centre for the Study and Observation of Living Conditions). The household sample was derived using the quota method and phone numbers were chosen randomly in 40% of cases, and taken from the phone book in the other 60%; 15% of the interviews were conducted on cell phones and 85% on landline phones.

  2. 2Interviewees were asked to rank the degree of importance of each proposed purchase criterion on a 1 to 4 scale.

  3. 3The choice of dairy products and washing machines was motivated by the suggestion in the literature on consumption that choice practices differ between current consumption goods and durables, the former being based more on habit and the latter involving a bigger investment and more thorough information search.

  4. 4The survey was in the French language and is available upon request from the authors.

  5. 1The possible responses to the second part of the question were: none; a minority; approximately 50% of my social neighborhood; the majority of my neighbors.

  6. 1And the second highest scoring influential variable in Table 3, column 6.

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Funding

This study was funded by ADEME (Paris) grant ‘Déchets et Société, Département Economie et Prospective ‘.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS, GREDEG, University of Côte d’Azur, Nice, France

    Nathalie Lazaric & Ali Douai

  2. RITM, University of Paris Sud, EA 7360, Sceaux, France

    Fabrice Le Guel

  3. GREThA CNRS, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France

    Jean Belin, Vanessa Oltra & Sébastien Lavaud

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  1. Nathalie Lazaric
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  2. Fabrice Le Guel
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  3. Jean Belin
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Correspondence to Nathalie Lazaric.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 4 Quota sampling
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Table 5 Variables assessing sustainable consumption behaviours
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Table 6 Descriptive statistics for the independent variables
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Table 7 Tetrachoric correlations
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Lazaric, N., Le Guel, F., Belin, J. et al. Determinants of sustainable consumption in France: the importance of social influence and environmental values. J Evol Econ 30, 1337–1366 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-019-00654-7

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