If global society is to address the many environmental and other sustainability challenges that confront us in the twenty-first century, such as climate change and water resources, it will be necessary to make significant changes in our patterns of consumption, production, and distribution. There is a growing realization that while changes in production and distribution are formidable, the proposed solutions may not succeed unless it is possible to persuade individuals and households to change their patterns of consumption to make them more sustainable. However there are significant differences in how key disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, and history conceptualise consumption, empirically test their theoretical predictions, and use these to inform policy-makers across the private, public and third sectors on how to make consumption more sustainable.
Sustainable Consumption contains chapters from world-leading experts in these different disciplines that seek to explain the perspectives on sustainable consumption of their disciplines, suggest how these might be further enriched by taking on board some of the findings from other disciplines, and consider what this implies for new policies to address the key sustainability challenges outlined above. Sustainable Consumption is dedicated to Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, one of the world's leading economists who has worked across a range of topics, including environmental and resource economics and development economics, and throughout his career has sought to incorporate into his economic thinking ideas from a range of other disciplines.
1: Dale Southerton and Alistair Ulph: Introduction
Part One: Extensions of the Simple Economists' Model of Consumption
2: Partha Dasgupta: Sustainability and the Determinants of Personal Consumption
3: Andrew Oswald: The Value to the Environmental Movement of the New Literature on the Economics of Happiness
4: Ann Kinzig and Charles Perrings: Consumption, Stability, and Sustainability in Socio-Economic Systems
5: Maureen Cropper: How Should Benefits and Costs Be Discounted in an Intergenerational Context
Part Two: Challenging the Assumption that Individual Consumers Always Act Rationally
6: Paul Fletcher: The Hungry Brain
7: Drazen Prelec: Consuming at the Wrong Rate: Lessons from the Harvard Game
8: Geoff Beattie and Laura McGuire: The Psychology of Sustainable Consumption
9: Richard Correia and Catarina Roseta-Palma: Behavioural Economics in Water Management: An Overview of Behavioural Economics Applications to Residential Water Demand
10: Gerry Stoker: The Politics of Nudge: Dilemmas in Implementing Policies for Sustainable Consumption
Part Three: Looking Beyond the Individual Consumer: Socio-Cultural Explanations of Consumption
11: Frank Trentmann: Past and Present: Historical Perspectives on Inequality and Collective Provision in Modern Consumption
12: Alan Warde: Sociology, Consumption, and Habit
13: Harold Wilhite: The Body in Consumption: Perspectives from India
14: Richard R. Wilk: Consumer Cultures: Past, Present, and Future