There has for decades been widespread agreement in policy, activist and scholarly circles that the consumption patterns of households play a central role in the world’s sustainability challenges. The way people lead their lives and the goods and services that are incorporated in mundane practices—and in particular related to housing, mobility and food (Tukker et al., 2010)—can have dramatic environmental consequences. Estimates show that household consumption contributes to as much as 72 per cent of global green greenhouse gas emissions (Dubois et al., 2019), and that consumption accounts for up to 80 per cent of total resource use in affluent societies (Ivanova et al., 2016). Yet, despite growing levels of awareness about the magnitude and urgency of the situation, unsustainable consumption patterns have rarely been the target of concentrated efforts towards progressive change. Rather, in order to keep citizens content and to ensure the ‘wellbeing’ of businesses and national economies, consumption has generally been allowed to grow almost unchecked (Wilhite, 2016). Tellingly, while consumption was central to the sustainable consumption agenda from the very beginning, it has time and again been reduced to questions of greening production. One of the clearest examples of this is found in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While there is a separate goal on ‘ensuring sustainable consumption and production’ (SDG12), almost all the targets of this goal deal with production only (see Gasper et al., 2019 for discussion). The focus on consumption is limited to building awareness, a paradoxical situation given that decades of consumption research have convincingly shown this will never be sufficient to create the changes needed for genuine sustainability transformations (e.g. Shove, 2010). Similar trends are arguably found in policymaking around the world, where efforts towards making consumption patterns more sustainable are either non-existing or restricted to efforts towards making the individual consumer substitute selected goods for more environmentally friendly ones (Welch & Southerton, 2019).

Understanding why we consume as we do, how consumption changes, and why we keep consuming more is the focus of this book. The different chapters cover both the stubbornness of unsustainable consumption patterns in affluent societies and the drivers of rapidly increasing consumption in emerging economies. They zoom in on some of the consumption patterns with the largest environmental footprints, including energy, housing and mobility. And they engage in different ways with the theoretical and empirical frontiers of the by now large field of consumption research, and particularly with the ‘practice turn’ that has come to dominate the field in recent decades. Consumption studies is a multi-disciplinary field, and the contributors in this book come from diverse backgrounds including Human Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Economy, Ecological Economics, Science and Technology Studies, Social and Policy Science, Urban Studies and Architecture. The chapters all deal with questions of sustainability, and many of them directly with how consumption patterns can be made more sustainable. Together, they bring the reader up to speed on what we know about consumption and point us in the direction of the next steps for better understanding—and changing—unsustainable consumption patterns.

This introductory chapter starts by briefly reviewing the history and development of consumption research, thereby situating the contributions in this book within the broader field. We start broadly, before gradually zooming in on the ‘practice turn’ and on research engaging with consumption and sustainability. Following this, we outline the chapters of the book and conclude with some reflections on the possible future of consumption research, calling for a broader agenda for research on consumption and sustainability.

Consumption Studies

Consumption of different kinds is necessary for our survival and an intrinsic part of cultural expressions, national economies and everyday lives. Studying consumption thus means engaging with fundamental questions of human action and societal organisation. It is therefore no surprise that consumption has long attracted academic attention, although a discernible field of ‘consumption research’ is a more recent phenomenon. Of the classic texts, few match the impact of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (2005 [1899]). In this book, Veblen famously introduced the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ to explain the purchase and display of luxury goods among the new rich in the United States after the second industrial revolution. He argued that as inherited social positions were losing the monopoly on hierarchically structuring society, expensive material goods gained a particular social value in displaying ‘pecuniary strength’. In other words, goods were strategically used as visible evidence of wealth and status. Furthermore, and this is one of the most used references to Veblen’s work, he argued that the lower classes ‘emulated’ the consumption patterns of the upper classes in a variety of ways.

Among Veblen’s many insights from his study of the leisure class was that the social value of objects was different from their ‘rational’ and intrinsic use value. A similar argument was made by Georg Simmel in his classic study, The Philosophy of Money (1990 [1900]). Simmel argued that things do not have absolute value, but are rather given value by subjects in historically and culturally conditioned ways. For both Veblen and Simmel, this value was used in social performance to achieve particular benefits. But both also recognised the importance of conformity in determining consumption patterns. Veblen wrote of a ‘conventional standard of decency’ as an important determinant of consumption. People do not only consume goods to distinguish themselves from others, but also to associate themselves with others in order to not stand out, to achieve group belonging or to keep up with societal expectations. This was a central point also in Fashion (Simmel, 1957[1904]), and remains a recurring theme in consumption research (e.g. van der Laan & Velthuis, 2016; Dwyer, 2009; Wilhite, 2008). Indeed, although a range of classic work has informed social-scientific understandings of consumption (see e.g. Campbell, 1995), Simmel and Veblen (particularly the latter) stand out almost as founding fathers (for discussion, see Sassatelli, 2007; Dwyer, 2009). This is arguably because of the ground-breaking way in which they approached consumption as a social phenomenon, and largely as an outcome of processes involving both competition and status-seeking, but also conformity and habituation. This fundamentally social nature of consumption has remained foundational also in later and highly influential studies (by the likes of Goffman, 1990 [1959]; Bourdieu, 1984; Appadurai, 1986) and remains perhaps the main insight and starting point that unites the broad field of social-scientific consumption research (see Slater, 1997), with the possible exclusion of economics.

With time, however, critical social and cultural theory would—unlike fields such as economics and marketing—come to pay less attention to consumption. In mainstream economics, in contrast, the idea of ‘the rational consumer’ would become fundamental to theory development and modelling. Instead of the fundamentally social consumer encountered in Veblen’s work, this is the asocial individualist (see Ackerman, 1997; McNeill, this volume). But although this rational consumer model remains intact, economic approaches to consumption have evolved, particularly due to behavioural economics and influential insights from psychology about the irrationality and habituation involved in much human behaviour (e.g. Kahneman, 2011). One of the strongest effects of the behavioural turn in economics is seen in the popularity of ‘nudging’ as a policy tool—based on the insight that humans often behave in certain ways that can be changed, or nudged, in alternative directions through alterations to the so-called choice architecture in which actions take place (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008, 2021; McNeill this volume; see also Schubert, 2017; Goodwin, 2012 for examples of critical takes on nudging).

Consumption received renewed attention only in the 1970s and the 1980s as new forms of cultural studies started going beyond lump assumptions about ‘mass culture’ to understand the role consumption played in the formation of subcultures, often in direct opposition to mainstream society (Campbell, 1995). The symbolic meaning of goods was in turn central to culturalist approaches to postmodernism, as consumer society was posited as central to the post-modern ‘condition’ as understood within this ‘cultural turn’ (e.g. Jamieson, 1998). Much attention was given to signs, with Jean Baudrillard (1998 [1970]) as a prime example. In a sense, consumption was released, almost disconnected from concerns about practical use value. To Zygmunt Bauman, for example, consumption had become ‘autotelic’, valuable in its own right (interviewed in Rojek, 2004). In culturalist analyses of consumer society, identity formation and ‘lifestyles’ were central to understandings of consumption—a view of things that was put to eminently practical use in the field of marketing (Campbell, 1995).

In crucial ways, the cultural turn worked wonders for the field of consumption research, placing consumption at the very core of academic interest in many disciplines. This period also saw anthropologists gradually including modern consumer societies as a legitimate arena for study, with Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood’s (1979) The World of Goods a pioneering work. By the 1990s, the study of consumption was central to the social sciences, and consumption studies was becoming a discernible field of its own, largely operating outside economics and marketing. Curiously, the year 1995 saw the publication of both Daniel Miller’s modern classic Acknowledging Consumption and a piece by Nick Gregson in the flagship Geography journal Progress in Human Geography titled ‘And now it’s all consumption?’. The two pieces are more in line than what the titles may at first glance suggest. Miller’s main rationale for the book was to acknowledge the ‘considerable and relatively sudden expansion of interest in the topic of consumption throughout the social sciences’, something he saw as a ‘delayed acknowledgment of social and economic transformations at a global level that had previously suffered from extraordinary academic neglect’ (Miller, 1995: 1). Through chapters focusing on a wide range of disciplines, the book showed how the topic of consumption had both gained prominence and—according to Miller—challenged basic disciplinary premises across the board of social scientific research. Gregson’s piece comparably starts out with an observation about how especially British geography had become dominated by a focus on consumption. Gregson was not opposed to this turn, rather in favour of it. He was, however, critical of how the new focus on consumption came with ‘an interpretation of consumption grounded in meaning, identity, representation and ideology’ (Gregson, 1995: 139), representing a turn away from social theory and towards cultural theory. This by then dominant cultural theorisation of consumption would soon spark a new ‘turn’ in the field, this time towards social practices and everyday life.

Significant parts of the new field of consumption research have been driven by an interest in questions of environmental (un)sustainability and, in many cases, coupled with action-oriented ambitions of not only understanding, but changing, consumption (e.g. Princen et al., 2002; Jackson, 2005). The practice turn in many ways developed alongside, and strengthened, the focus on sustainability, and ‘sustainable consumption studies’ is by some now seen as a distinct subfield (see discussion in Evans, 2019). But just like the focus on consumption in general, social practice theory has deep roots that predate concerns for the environmental impacts of human behavioural patterns.

Consumed in Practice

In 2002, an article by Richard Wilk titled ‘Consumption, human needs, and environmental change’ was published in Global Environmental Change. Here, Wilk first summarised dominant understandings of consumption, grouped into three paradigms: individual choice theories, cultural theories and social theories. He proceeded to argue for theoretical pragmatism and pluralism, since the world’s environmental problems were too profound and urgent to wait for a grand unified theory to emerge. What was needed, Wilk argued, was a heterodox ‘multigenic’ theory, ‘which accepts that there are multiple determinants of consumption, operating at different conceptual and analytical levels, from the individual, through the household, community, and ultimately to nations and larger groups’ (Wilk, 2002: 9). And, rather prophetically, he argued that Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ would be a proper place to start. Few have matched the influence of Pierre Bourdieu on the study of consumption, with Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste being probably the most influential book ever published in the field. But while his analysis of capital, class and distinction have long inspired consumption research, recent decades have seen a deeper engagement with the overall practice theory that Bourdieu, as well as Giddens, Wittgenstein and others, developed. Inspired by theorists like Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2002) and Andreas Reckwitz (2002), a ‘second generation’ of practice approaches has come to completely dominate consumption research, especially in Europe (see Welch et al., 2020; Evans, 2019; Warde, 2017).

Through practice approaches, scholars have recently turned the consumption gaze away from expressive behaviour and towards more mundane forms of consumption and the socio-material organisation of everyday life. Often, this involves privileging analysis of ‘inconspicuous’ forms of consumption of for example energy (e.g. Winther & Wilhite, 2015; Sahakian, 2014; Shove & Walker, 2014), mobility (Guillen-Royo, 2022; Greene & Rau, 2018; Hansen, 2017), and food (Hoolohan et al., 2022; Neuman, 2019; Hansen, 2018; Warde, 2016). Practice approaches tend to take interest in how consumption is shaped in and by society-level processes and arrangements, for example, the temporal organisation of everyday life (e.g. Shove et al., 2009; Southerton, 2020; Greene et al., 2022), or the norms and expectations concerning comfort and cleanliness (Shove, 2003; Wilhite, 2008; Jack, 2017; Hansen et al., 2016). Practice theorists have also had a particular focus on the relationship between practices and the visible and invisible material arrangements that shape and are shaped by practices, such as infrastructure (Shove et al., 2019; Cass et al., 2018; Southerton et al., 2004). Consumption is not seen as a distinct practice in itself, but almost all practices involve some sort of consumption, and consumption always happens as part of, or as ‘moments’ in, practices (Warde, 2005). To take an example, buying or wearing new clothes are not in themselves considered practices, but the purchase and wearing of particular items of clothing happens due to, and as part of, different and interlinked social practices and the expectations built into these, whether at home, with friends or at work. From a practice perspective, this means that rather than focusing on individual consumers and individual instances of consumption, we need to understand the broader patterns of human action and socio-material arrangements within which consumption patterns play out. As argued by Warde (2005: 146), practice approaches offer a perspective where ‘the collective development of modes of appropriate conduct in everyday life’ are more important than individual choice.

In many ways, the practice turn developed in opposition to both ‘the rational consumer’ posited by mainstream economics, and culturalist readings of consumption focused mainly on symbols, meanings and signs (Warde, 2014). Despite often quite different takes on the degree of agency attributed to individuals (see Welch & Warde, 2015), all practice approaches take the fundamental social nature of consumption as a starting point. Practice theories in general transcend the classic structure-agency dichotomy in the social sciences. A major source of inspiration is, again, Bourdieu and his concept of habitus, which in his words is both a ‘structured structure’ and a ‘structuring structure’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 166). This acknowledges that while people do have agency, this agency is immensely complex and more bounded than what rational choice theory would suggest. Later Sherry Ortner (2006) has built on this to argue that although individuals and their ‘projects’ do matter, agency is not the property of individuals. Drawing on influences such as Bruno Latour and actor-network theory, contemporary practice theorists also tend to insist, although again in different ways, that the material world takes on agency. Telling examples are how take-away coffee cups ‘ask’ (or are ‘scripted’) to be thrown away (Verbeek, 2006), or how (the lack of) bicycle lanes affect the recruitment to velomobile practices (Cass et al., 2018). From these perspectives, both the habitus and the material world have lasting effects on action which thereby acquire a history where the past acts in the present (Sahakian & Wilhite, 2014). As put by Wilhite (2013: 62), inspired by Bourdieu, ‘[m]oving and acting in sociomaterial space carves out predispositions for subsequent actions that are embedded in bodies, practices, and material settings’. This idea of ‘distributed’ agency is aligned with an understanding of practices as consisting of bodily, social and material elements that act in tandem to shape everyday consumption patterns (Shove et al., 2012; Sahakian & Wilhite, 2014; see Gram-Hanssen, 2011 and the chapters by Standal et al., Wethal, and Volden and Hansen for discussion).

Practice theories have become dominant in consumption research, but they have also started to receive significant criticism. Parts of the criticism revolve around the extent to which practice approaches overshadow other and more systemic approaches to consumption and consumer society (Evans, 2019), while another criticism concerns how practice theorists engage with, or fail to engage with, the agency of individuals, expressive culture and economic structures (Welch et al., 2020). The latter point has in fact been raised to the entire field of consumption research, not only within the practice turn (e.g. Fine, 2002), and is the topic of the following chapter. This brings us up to speed in this short history of consumption research. In different ways, the chapters in this book engage with practice theories in order to analyse pertinent issues related to consumption and sustainability in everyday life.

Consumption and the Transformation of Everyday Life: Outline of the Book

Richard Wilk’s opening chapter introduced the main source of inspiration for this book, Hal Wilhite. Wilhite’s work on consumption has influenced not just this book and its individual contributors, but the field of consumption research as such. The chapters that follow are inspired by and indebted to Hal Wilhite, and some are even co-authored by him. In different ways, they discuss the frontiers of work on consumption, dealing with social practice theories in particular.

Chapter 2 by Arve Hansen completes the book’s introductory Part I. Hansen locates the challenge of simultaneously tackling underconsumption and overconsumption of resources at the core of global sustainability challenges: while a large proportion of the world’s population does not have the capacity to meet its basic consumption needs, a small proportion consumes far too much. However, while the number of people belonging to the former category has remained fairly constant for some time, the latter category is expanding rapidly, not least in the so-called ‘emerging economies’. Hansen argues that the field of consumption research needs to put a deeper engagement with the world’s ‘new middle classes’ high on the agenda. Such an agenda would, in turn, benefit from approaching changing consumption patterns as the outcome of both large-scale societal transformations and local-scale changes in how people carry out mundane activities. The chapter is influenced by social practice theories but argues for combining these with a direct study of economic systems and the political economy of consumption, in order to illuminate the fundamentally structuring role that capitalism has on consumption patterns. This is illustrated through an analysis of the radical changes in consumption patterns in China and Vietnam over the past decades, after both countries embarked on market reforms. The dramatic consumption booms these countries have seen under communist regimes—traditionally highly sceptical of ‘consumerism’—represent an excellent case for discussing the conditioning effects of political-economic contexts on consumption patterns.

Part II explores the role of energy and technology in everyday consumption. Energy is connected to and a defining part of sustainability in a wide variety of ways. Some of the most influential work in consumption research emerged from social scientists such as Harold Wilhite, Elisabeth Shove and Loren Lutzenhiser, who brought arguments about the need for taking the complexity of human behaviour seriously in the domain of energy research (e.g. Wilhite et al., 2000). Standal, Wilhite and Wågø’s chapter continues in this tradition by examining household energy practices in the ecological housing cooperative Klosterenga in Oslo, Norway. Klosterenga, built in the year 2000, was one of the early implementers of smart building principles in the city. Although the ecological profile of Klosterenga inspired some of the residents to change behavioural habits such as limiting their car use or consumption patterns, the findings in this chapter show that expectations of smart technology as a primary solution towards energy efficiency, wielded by ‘residents as rational consumers’ looking to cut costs, are not easily realised. The residents of Klosterenga rarely emphasised the building’s ecological profile and smart energy systems when purchasing their home. And in fact, the energy-efficient systems and integration of heating costs in the rent had adverse rather than positive effects on residents’ energy consumption. Rather than taking the visions of ecology to heart, many residents legitimised their everyday habits of having a high indoor temperature by reference to the system being efficient. These findings contribute to the growing body of research that critically examines how smart technology visions for reducing energy use in buildings are actually implemented and used by the residents living in them.

Moezzi, Wilhite, Lutzenhiser and Bartiaux’s chapter studies solar water heating in California. Solar water heating, when working correctly, can slash fossil fuel use in households, and these systems have been popular in some countries for decades. But even in places environmentally well-suited to solar water heating, the technology is not necessarily widely used. Despite favourable weather, an early embrace of rooftop photovoltaics, and a generous decade-long incentive programme, solar water heating remains uncommon in California households. While there are many possible explanations for this, there has been little fieldwork so far on who uses solar water heating, and with what expectations. This chapter presents findings based on conversations with California households who use solar water heating systems, and relates these findings to policies and strategies for achieving low-carbon futures. The authors also discuss the role of these interviews in their research project more broadly, and the challenges of producing an integrated socio-technical analysis that can satisfactorily inform technology-centred solutions to meet concrete policy targets.

Most people live in Asia, and the region’s energy consumption will in many ways define global sustainability. And no country holds a more central position than China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, representing almost a third of global emissions. China’s power sector has contributed to more than 45 per cent of China’s total historical carbon emissions. The economic turnaround experienced since 1978 has increased incomes and the national gross domestic product, in part through actively embracing consumerism. Expectedly, environmental exploitation and widespread pollution of air, soil and water have accompanied the development process. Korsnes’ chapter qualitatively explores China’s current development path by analysing electricity consumption and energy services, looking mainly at the services that electricity provides domestically in an urban Chinese context. Korsnes takes inspiration by a 2004 article by Wilhite and Nørgård, where they held that it is not ethical or practical to argue for a reduction in energy growth in countries such as China. Korsnes then engages with their position on changing from efficiency to sufficiency thinking in energy policy, in other words the idea of having enough of something. But while Wilhite and Nørgård pointed towards affluent societies, Korsnes uses the same starting point to engage with China’s energy sector. While he agrees that the onus should still be on the affluent population of the world, the chapter explores what such an idea could mean for a massive and rapidly growing economy such as China’s. In doing so, the chapter asks what drives energy growth in China, focusing particular attention on how this growth connects to the delivery of basic services and infrastructure. The chapter then proceeds to engage with the ethical and practical dimensions of reducing the growth in energy consumption in China.

Wethal’s chapter studies the impact of power outages in rural Norwegian households. While electricity plays a vital role in everyday life, electricity-dependent practices are often taken for granted, and the complex underlying infrastructure enabling these practices tends to be invisible—until power supply is disrupted. Drawing on qualitative interviews with rural Norwegian households, Wethal takes practices as the starting point for examining how daily life changes during power outages and how households experience the consequences of such outages. In this way, she uses households’ perspectives to understand the consequences of power outages and shows how disruption influences relations between infrastructures, practices, customers and providers. Using the three elements of practice—materials, competences, meanings—Wethal demonstrates how power failures temporarily break the linkages between elements in electricity-dependent practices, and how households forge linkages between other items and technologies, embodied knowledge and competences, and new meanings, in order to continue daily life. This re-assembling of elements in practices demonstrates the complexity of power-outage consequences and explains how and why rural Norwegian households can cope relatively well with lengthy power outages. The ability to adapt during outages demonstrates a relatively high level of flexibility, but this does not mean that households do not value having secure power supplies.

Part III of the book turns to the study of consumption and mobility. One of the most predictable consumption changes to follow capitalist development is increasing car ownership and the spread of what John Urry (2004) called ‘the system of automobility’ (see also Hansen & Nielsen, 2017). Drawing on earlier work (Nielsen & Wilhite, 2015; Hansen et al., 2016), Nielsen and Wilhite’s chapter analyses the trajectory of the Indian small car, the Tata Nano. When launched by the manufacturer Tata Motors as a new Indian ‘people’s car’ in 2008, the Nano was widely predicted to revolutionise automobility in India. Yet it barely made an impact on the Indian car market, and production was phased out just a decade after the first Nano had hit the Indian roads. By analysing the changing popular representations and symbolic imaginaries that attach to the car as a means to mobility and an object of identity and social status, Nielsen and Wilhite argue that the Nano failed neither because it was mediocre nor because it remained economically out of reach for most Indians. Rather, its insertion into the lower ranks of a powerful status hierarchy of identity-defining objects precluded it from adequately tapping into new and hegemonic forms of middle-class consumer aspiration in ‘New India’, thereby leaving the people’s car without ‘a people’.

While automobility is a defining part of unsustainable consumption patterns, aeromobility is in many ways worse and has come to define contemporary discussions about sustainable consumption and the responsibility and agency of individual travellers. Volden and Hansen study why ‘green’ consumers often continue to fly even though flying has become an increasingly contested form of consumption. The chapter provides novel insights into the stubbornness of air travel by specifically studying the obstacles that environmentally conscious consumers face when trying to limit or altogether eliminate aeromobility. Through in-depth interviews with Norwegian environmental organisation workers, Volden and Hansen analyse how environmentalists negotiate one of the most environmentally destructive aspects of their consumption patterns. The research participants considered flying to be problematic, but also often necessary. Various expectations related to convenience, time, and sociality led to a certain ‘lock-in’ of (aero)mobility. Zooming out to consider broader practice geographies, Volden and Hansen argue that aeromobility contributes to the tempo-spatial expansion of many practices, changing their contents and meanings, as well as the contexts in which they unfold. To achieve sustainable mobility, they suggest that attention must be shifted from the air travels of individual consumers to the broader practices in which aeromobility is embedded.

Part IV focuses on wellbeing, a central topic in research on sustainable consumption (e.g. Guillen-Royo & Wilhite, 2015; Moynat et al., 2022). Sahakian’s chapter studies sustainable wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated semi-confinement measures that led to severe disruptions of everyday life, not least when it came to habits and routines. Sahakian analyses weekly journal entries of 95 students in an undergraduate class at the University of Geneva, where students engaged in a reflexivity exercise to document how their consumption-related practices were changing during the pandemic and how these changes relate to the notion of ‘sustainable wellbeing’. The chapter shows how students describe thrift and frugality measures in relation to resource consumption, critically reconsider existing practices such as ‘being fashionable’, but also explore new practices such as preparing elaborate meals. Importantly, the study also shows that in terms of wellbeing, consuming resources was clearly less important to the students than social relations and experiencing some form of contact with nature. In other words, the weekly journal entries made it possible to engage students in reflecting on the normative goal of need satisfaction, and enabled students to distinguish between needs and desires, and between needs and their means of satisfaction. Crucially, the pandemic also led to reflections around how wellbeing must be understood at both an individual and societal level, and how ‘sustainable wellbeing’ as a normative aim might be planned for in the future.

Guillén-Royo, Temesgen and Vangelsten’s chapter turns to the challenges associated with sustainable mobility in the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway. Drawing on Max-Neef’s Human Scale Development participatory methodology, the authors conducted a one-day workshop with representatives from local society discussing satisfiers (such as values, social practices, institutions, personal and collective actions, and so on) that either hampered or contributed to need fulfilment in the municipality. Participants also identified the interventions, at the personal, community and governance levels, that would improve need fulfilment and environmental sustainability. Based on an analysis of workshop data, the authors show how sustainable transport practices, including ride and car-sharing, using collective transport and cycling, were considered synergetic as they helped fulfil several human needs whilst hampering none. Further, the study highlighted the interdependence of satisfiers associated with sustainable transport and other need-promoting satisfiers. For example, encouraging ridesharing appeared both linked to the development of a dedicated mobile phone application and to the creation of non-commercial meeting places. Based on this, the chapter also offers a series of reflections on the implications of a human needs perspective for the transition towards sustainable practices and consumption patterns.

Butters and Jakobsen examine how one can practically embrace wellbeing in sustainability work, arguing that so-called value mapping offers a fruitful way forward. If the goal of consumption—and hence of economics—is wellbeing, we are faced with a situation where orthodox tools such as GNP indices are of little help, as they tell us little meaningful about our personal wellbeing, much less about the wellbeing of our planet. Newer frameworks such as Ecological Economics or Quality of Life indices that incorporate qualitative criteria and embrace a broader view of costs and benefits are more meaningful, but arguably still leave consumers without the necessary tools to guide and frame practical decision-making. The aim of Butters and Jakobsen is to offer such tools to enable those who have the intent to move towards more sustainable consumption patterns, whether consumers or policy makers. To Butters and Jakobsen, ‘value mapping’ and its integral approach to wellbeing and consumption offer a framework that allows us to evaluate and compare different choices and courses of action, and to arrive at conclusions about what kinds of consumption that can lead to maximum wellbeing with minimum negative impacts.

The fifth and final part of the book looks at how consumption can become more sustainable. Desmond McNeill’s chapter stands out from the rest through directly engaging with mainstream economic theory. Through engaging with criticism both within and outside of orthodox economics, he asks whether and how the discipline of economics can help to change consumption in a more sustainable direction. Economic theory of consumer behaviour is sophisticated and rigorous, he argues, but nonetheless very limited insofar as it excludes from consideration many of the factors which are well recognised by other social sciences as being important for understanding human actions—limitations that stem largely from the discipline’s standard model of homo oeconomicus. But even simple economic theory, in which income and price are the main explanatory factors of consumer behaviour, in fact provides the basis for potentially very effective policy instruments—if incomes fall, for example, consumption is indeed reduced, and manipulating taxes and subsidies can indeed substantially alter consumer behaviour. While such policy instruments to shape consumption are readily available, the problem is that they tend to be politically very unpopular. McNeill argues that both orthodox and heterodox economics bring vital consumption insights to the table, but that these must be coupled with insights from multiple disciplines if we are to properly understand, and change, consumption patterns.

Southerton and Warde also start from the position that present strategies for achieving reductions in material consumption in affluent societies are insufficient and proceed to consider alternative approaches. In an early critique of inadequate conceptions of consumer demand, Wilhite and Lutzenhiser (1999) examined the difference between base and peak loading as a mechanism responsible for immediate inefficiencies and escalating levels of production in energy systems. Their article introduced the term ‘just-in-case’ to identify a common rationalisation for the persistent tendency of individuals and organisations to hold or increase excess capacity. As a source of and justification for excess capacity, the proviso ‘just-in-case’ has wider relevance in debates about unsustainable levels of everyday consumption, regarding the determination of what might be too much, what too little, and what just enough (see also Korsnes, this volume). Defining ‘enough’ is an intellectual and political minefield, but at least it is possible to identify mechanisms which tend to generate unfruitful excess. Just-in-case reasoning is itself one such mechanism, Southerton and Warde argue. It is one surreptitious way to increase environmental load through the justification for ownership of un(der)utilised material resources. This chapter reveals circumstances in which just-in-case provides a rationalisation for escalating production and overstocking, and points to four ways of reducing the environmental impacts of particular goods, while also discussing the merits of alternatives to the private and exclusive ownership of underutilised resources-intensive products, including sharing ownership and renting services.

Lastly, Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s afterword concludes the book. Eriksen notes that while Hal Wilhite did not live to see the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, he would undoubtedly have framed it as a window of opportunity for the global community to rethink its priorities and move in a sustainable direction. In his last book, Wilhite (2016) unequivocally rejected capitalism and its promises of ‘green growth’ as a solution to the climate crisis. However, unlike many climate scientists and activists, he also insisted that climate policy had to be integrated with an analysis of global inequality. The pandemic has tragically exacerbated global inequalities and led to the further impoverishment of already very poor people, whose overriding concerns are how to make ends meet, not how to save the Greenland ice cap. By way of a comparative analysis of the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic on communities which face the situation under very different circumstances, Eriksen’s chapter asks whether a global policy on climate and the environment is at all conceivable in the aftermath of the pandemic. And if so, how? By way of dialogue with Wilhite’s research on capitalism, consumption and the environment, this concluding chapter aims to provide a credible answer to these questions.

Towards a Broadened Agenda for Research on Consumption and Sustainability

As we were writing this, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the third working group’s contribution to the sixth assessment report on tackling climate change. The key messages are dire—emissions continue to rise and too little is being done to mitigate climate disaster. Of particular interest to the readers of this book, this was the first time that the IPCC devoted attention to ‘demand-side’ measures, locating consumption measures such as shifting to healthy and sustainable diets, reducing food waste and changing transport patterns as crucial for cutting emissions (IPCC, 2022, Chap. 5). This is the latest example of a general tendency towards a broader acknowledgment of the role of consumption in global sustainability and the great potential that lies in changing consumption patterns rather than focusing merely on production and efficiency (see for example Wiedmann et al., 2020; Poore & Nemecek, 2018; Dubois et al., 2019). At the same time, to avoid a one-sided and reductionist focus on individuals and their idiosyncratic attitude and values, it underscores the importance of researchers within the field of consumption studies actively communicating the need for holistic approaches to change consumption.

Unsurprisingly, the contributions in this book do not bring simple solutions to the table. Nor should they, given the complex ways in which consumption patterns are embedded in societies and everyday lives. The chapters do however point in the direction of knowledge needs and possible steps that could take us towards more sustainable societies through addressing ‘demand-side’ changes. Much more research is needed on the stubbornness of consumption patterns and avenues for change in both affluent societies and emerging economies. The practice turn has taken the field of consumption studies further towards holistic understandings of consumption. A promising next step is to build on these insights to develop a broader research agenda on sustainable consumption that can balance the need to contribute to knowledge-based consumption policy with independent and critical social-scientific research. While consumption research needs to continue with empirically grounded and contextually sensitive explorations of everyday life, such an agenda should to a larger extent than what is the case today be global in orientation, and deal with difficult questions of inequality and power (see Anantharaman, 2018). Finally, a broadened agenda for research on consumption and sustainability needs to balance the deep engagement with everyday practices with better accounting for the political economy of everyday life in order to ‘engage with, break and reform’ the deep unsustainabilities embedded in contemporary capitalist consumer societies (Wilhite, 2016: 126). We hope that this book can help spark new conversations and debates that take the field in such a direction.