Policies to promote sustainable consumption: First results from an EU-wide impact evaluation project
Year: 2010
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The development of policies to promote sustainable consumption is a growing and demanding task of today. Many different actors have to cooperate, or even integrate their strategies and portfolios from the local to the international level, and across sectors. In order to achieve effective and coherent policies, many uncertainties have to be dealt with. These include uncertainties about how policy instruments influence consumption patterns with regard to cultural or lifestyle differences and about the impact of changes in consumption patterns on the supply side and, thus, on sustainability. The FP7-funded project Policies to Promote Sustainable Consumption Patterns (EUPOPP) is aiming to increase the knowledge about context and framework conditions as well as on the impact of policy instruments. Guided by a Conceptual Framework, research is focused on the need areas of food and housing reflecting present and future lifestyles as well as existing best-practice to promote more sustainable lifestyles. The assessment of such impacts must account for interlinkages of consumer action with activities of other market players and path-creating effects of systems of consumption and supply. The paper presents an interdisciplinary tool for the assessment of consumption policies, which combines policy and material flow analyses. First results on consumption trends and projections are discussed as well as on instrumentspecific effects on consumer behaviour. These form the baseline against which sustainability impacts can be quantified in order to identify the potential that, e.g. information, incentives or regulatory instruments, may offer to reduce adverse impacts, such as GHG emissions, costs, and employment. Effects and sustainability impacts of future instrument bundles will be explored in the next project steps.
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W399570479