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SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1      Background of the Study

Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) has become an important topic of policy and research agendas over the last ten years. Although early policy ideas can be traced back to reports by the United Nations, OECD and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in the mid-1990s, policy attention accelerated after the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where delegates called upon the United Nations Environment Programme and the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs to develop a 10-year framework programme on Sustainable Consumption and Production, which was subsequently developed through the multistakeholder Marrakech Process (2003–2011), together with national SCP initiatives in Finland, Germany and the UK, before being adopted at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio + 20) in 2012. In parallel, SCP has been increasingly debated by academics, resulting in various special issues in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (2005, 2010), Journal of Cleaner Production (2008), Natural Resources Forum (2010), overviews (Lebel and Lorek, 2008; Tukker et al., 2007, 2008), and analyses of policy debates (Seyfang, 2004; Fuchs and Lorek, 2005; Clark, 2007; Berg and Hukkinen, 2011). The appeal and importance of the SCP agenda is that it moves beyond the dominant focus on pollution control and green products, widening attention to the patterns of consumption that underpin the resource-intensity of everyday lives. The strength of SCP-research is its proposal to jointly consider production and consumption activities. In the context of climate change, environmental degradation, resource problems and declining bio-diversity, research on these two fundamental areas of human activity has intensified because of the recognition that both domains need to change in tandem to achieve large gains in environmental sustainability. Yet, SCP research suffers from two related problems that stymie theoretical progress. First, the meaning of SCP is unclear, with the term acting as an umbrella concept for a heterogeneous set of concepts and approaches, e.g. sustainable product service systems, eco-labelling, new economics, community grassroots innovation. Second, SCP-debates are dominated by two intellectual positions, with one (which we label ‘reformist’) representing the orthodoxy in SCP policy documents and mainstream academic debates, and the other (which we label ‘revolutionary’) condemning orthodoxy, by offering a ‘‘critique of the consumer society model’’ (Webb, 2012: 210) and making pleas for ‘‘reducing consumption and adopting voluntary simplicity or downshifting’’ (Seyfang, 2004: 327). This study thus seeks to examine sustainable consumption in Finland.