Introduction

2. Engineering a Consumer Society: From the United States to the World

More than half a century before the 1992 Earth Summit, the British economist John Maynard Keynes published his well-known essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. After observing in his lifetime the huge increase in workers’ productivity in the manufacturing and energy sectors – owing to technological and process innovations, and the harnessing of fossil energy – Keynes predicted that a hundred years from then people will be able to drastically reduce their working hours to about 15 hours per week in order to satisfy their needs. The “economic prob-lem” would be solved. A new challenge would be “for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society”.

Keynes’ predictions have not come to pass. In Europe and North America, working hours have indeed decreased since then, though not nearly in step with continuing productivity growth, as Keynes anticipated. Where he was most mistaken, perhaps, was the assumption that the motivation for people to work is mostly to satisfy their basic needs. He did not consider that, once the “eco-nomic problem” of basic subsistence was solved, cultivated and seemingly insatiable wants would take their place as the motivator for work and the pursuit of well-being.

In Keynes’ days, it was impossible to foresee that a complex societal system would be devel-oped to perpetuate the human drive to satisfy wants through the acquisition and maintenance of goods and services. Nor could it be envisioned that this behavior would become the organizing principle of societal life, including culture, institutions, politics, and the economy. Today, we call this complex system the consumer society.

In her magisterial work A Consumer Republic (2003), historian Lisabeth Cohen describes how, during the three decades after the end of World War II (WWII), consumer society was constructed in the United States. It is instructive to retell this story because the US model soon became a prototype to be exported and replicated throughout the world, overriding alternative models of development (see Box 0.1).

By the 1970s, 20 years before at the Earth Summit consumerism was recognized as a global ecological problem, all key pillars of the growth-oriented consumer society were firmly in place: the debt-financed economy – both household and government – that demanded growth to survive; pension funds dependent on growth to deliver on their commitments; the financial system happy to fuel growth, both real and imagined; and the ever-rising aspirations of households. By the 1970s, consumers as a distinct class, transcending the traditional sociological groupings by age, race, wealth, education, or political leanings, became a political force to reckon with. Through boycotts, buycotts, and other public campaigns, consumer movements punished and rewarded companies for their social and ecological impacts. Consumer protection laws were adopted to protect that distinct class.

The neoliberal ideology – which proclaimed that greed and wealth accumulation are good, markets know best, and government is a drag on the economy – came to the fore in the late 1970s and extended its influence to the present day. Its policies emphasize free trade, deregulation, lower taxes, increasing consumption to grow the economy, and promoting the ideology of consumer sov-ereignty. It intentionally conflates a consumer with a citizen and creates a transactional relationship between citizens and the government: the purpose of public policy would increasingly not be to serve the public good but rather to satisfy the consumer-voter.

In the next logical stage of maturation, by the mid- to late 20th century, many elements of neo-liberalism and the US-style consumer society spread to other parts of the world, first in the indus-trial economies of North America and Western Europe, then in Asia and post-socialist Europe, and finally in capitals and major cities of the rest of the world.

3. Defining Sustainable Consumption, Sustainable Lifestyles – and Sustainable Living

Despite its growing use in research and policy circles, the operational meaning of the term sus-tainable consumption is quite fluid. Some may associate it with daily household decisions such as minimal shopping, leisure flying, and taking cruises, and with green and ethical shopping. For social activists, sustainable consumption may bring to mind changing personal and community value systems, norms, social practices, personal priorities, diet, or adopting a minimalist way of life. From a policy perspective, sustainable consumption may signify a personal carbon budget, shorter workweek, limits on advertising, and more efficient buildings and mobility infrastructure; while the political economy perspective points toward a diminished role of the financial sector, degrowth, a steady-state economy, taxation reform, and reigning in corporate power. Each per-spective has its own language and shared understandings among its adherents, but communication between them is inadequate.

Most definitions of sustainable consumption and lifestyles are modifications of the now-classic definition of sustainable development offered by the World Commission on Environment and Development (known as the Brundtland Report, titled Our Common Future): “sustainable devel-opment is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987). Although the root concepts “lifestyle” and “consumption” have been previously defined by academics, the modifier “sustainable” brings additional complexity to the definitions.

Sustainable consumption is both a concept and a practice, and research on it sets out to under-stand and promote the types of consumption behaviors that are conducive to a sustainable soci-ety. This is reflected in one of its earliest and most widely used definitions (known as the “Oslo Declaration”):

Sustainable consumption is “the use of goods and services that respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life, while minimizing the use of natural resources, toxic materials and emissions of waste and pollutants over the life cycle, so as not to jeopardize the needs of future generations”. (Ofstad et al., 1994)

The concept of sustainable lifestyles goes beyond consumption, however. It speaks to more com-plex and intangible aspects of human life, including habits, social practices, traditions, aspirations, and the search for meaning, all embedded in societal structures: physical, economic, cultural, and political. A 2016 definition captures this complexity:

A sustainable lifestyle minimizes ecological impacts while enabling a flourishing life for indi-viduals, households, communities, and beyond. (Vergragt et al., 2016)

In policy and academic discourse, the two terms – sustainable consumption and sustainable lifestyles – are often used interchangeably, and confusingly so (Gabriel & Lang, 2006; Miles, 1998). One helps to define the other and vice versa: sustainable consumption research empha-sizes the material aspect of sustainable lifestyles, and conversely, lifestyles determine one’s consumption patterns. While sustainable consumption tends to address decisions and actions linked to the purchase, use, and disposal of material products and services, the term sustain-able lifestyle incorporates other actions in the context of values, education, community, and infrastructure.

One term that easily connects sustainable consumption and sustainable lifestyles is “sustainable living”. While encompassing both terms, it does so without taking on the notion of “lifestyle” as advertised by corporate marketing.

Sustainable living is equitable consumption and lifestyles that contribute to wellbeing of indi-viduals and society within ecological limits. (Akenji, 2019)

This definition has at its core three key elements: ecological limits as a basis and boundary for pro-viding individual and societal needs; equity and justice in how we organize ourselves as a society and pursue our needs; and well-being as a shared objective. It also recognizes that consumption and lifestyles are embedded in a societal context, including institutions, norms, and infrastructures that frame and shape individual and collective choices. Implicit in the definition is the recognition that there is more than one way of living sustainably; there are different approaches by different individuals and societies that could be described as sustainable.

The concept of sustainable living also accommodates a broader set of relevant concepts, such as voluntary simplicity, minimalism, sufficiency, and healthy living – often combining physical, emotional, and spiritual health with a more limited role for materialism. In public health parlance, sustainable living promotes health and well-being for individuals, communities, and the planet by balancing ecological, economic, and social systems; in business, it would be reflected in work-life balance and employment conditions; and in marketing, promotion of “green” or healthy products and services.

Because of their overlaps and variations, the above three terms and definitions are used across different entries in this book. The emergence of these concepts can be seen in the evolving under-standing of consumer society elaborated in the following section.

4. Evolving Understanding of Consumer Society as a Complex System

Over the millennia, scholars, religious leaders, and social commentators have expressed criticism of unrestrained wealth accumulation, consumption, and their underpinnings – greed, gluttony, acquisitiveness, profit-seeking, excessive luxury, and positional consumption. In the 20th century, writers such as Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899), Galbraith (The Affluent Society, 1958), Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, 1964), Elgin (Voluntary Simplicity, 1981), and others focused largely on the moral, class, and existential dimensions of mass consumption and its impact on the quality of modern life.

That changed in 1992 when at the Earth Summit, consumerism was officially declared a global ecological problem. Since then, sustainable consumption and consumerism have attracted increas-ing attention from scientists, community activists, and policymakers. Much of the early research on the topic of consumption focused on consumer behavior. After all, the consumer is the most visible end-user of market products and is often assumed to have free will and rational expres-sion of choice. Economic, social, and psychological theories have been used to explain the role of consumers as economic actors and to theorize about their motivations and drivers (Ajzen, 1991; Bourdieu, 1984; Thaler, 1980, 2016).

But people do not go about as rational, fully informed, and fully autonomous actors in the for-mal economy, as often attributed to them in economic theories. And while their pursuit of meaning and well-being must include the acquisition of goods and services, people do not solely seek these things through material means. “People also love, generate ideas, express their value systems, take care of family, create art, cherish silence, pray, fast, in ways that material flows and market economics cannot account for” (Akenji, 2019). They are also influenced by traditions and social norms, constrained by physical and regulatory infrastructure, and manipulated by sophisticated advertising. Part of the challenge of research for sustainable consumption and lifestyles is that these mixtures of material and psychological, rational and emotional, biological and cultural, all come together in vastly differing configurations across billions of people. Steven Miles (1998) has noted that “How we consume, why we consume, and the param-eters laid down for us within which we consume have become increasingly significant influ-ences on how we construct our everyday lives”. The statement recognizes that lifestyles occur within, or are railroaded by, broader social and physical contexts; in approaching sustainable living, it is important to differentiate between factors at the individual or the household level, and those that are beyond (direct) individual control (Wallnoefer et al., 2024). Scholars thus began to argue that focusing on the individual consumer is problematic because it fails to recognize the historical, political, and social conditions that shape everyday life, including our consumption patterns. The frame thus expanded from consuming individuals to a system of consumption. Books such as Schor’s The Overworked American (1993) and The Overspent American (1998), De Graaf’s Affluenza (2001), Maniates’s and Princen’s Confronting Consumption (2002), and works of several other authors featured in Jackson’s Earthscan Reader on Sustainable Consump-tion (2006) recognized that consumption is a manifestation of both basic human psychology and intentionally designed societal systems, including the ways employment and economy are organ-ized. Their work was further extended by Shove et al. (2012) who used social practice theory to emphasize that consumption is a collective act transmitted through widely accepted social norms and practices.

The psychological perspective on consumption – widely used until then and accused by many of “blaming the victim” or consumer scapegoatism – gave way to institutional theories, cultural analyses, macroeconomics, and theories of social change and collective action.

Scholars have emphasized the deliberate construction of the system of consumption in the United States and linked it specifically to the economic growth paradigm and, importantly, to its ideological underpinnings created during the Cold War period (see Section 2). While the idea of a deliberate construction implies that, at least in principle, the system of consumption could be dis-mantled, the ideological dimension also highlights the difficulty of doing so. This was illustrated by US President Bush’s famous declaration in 1992 that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation. Period”.

Research on consumption also began to increasingly draw on more quantitative method-ologies like natural resource accounting. Using methods such as Environmentally-Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output analysis enabled researchers to estimate the material and carbon “footprint” of a given consumption pattern and to show a clear correlation between the level of income, resource consumption, and environmental impacts. This focus on materials and energy, economic behaviors, and the desire for modeling and quantification partly explains why process and product optimization and technological innovations have become prevalent policy recommen-dations for climate mitigation (Akenji, 2019). The landmark report by Jackson (2009) Prosperity Without Growth delved deeper into the sys-temic nature of mass consumption. It specifically highlighted the links between mass consump-tion and economic growth, the associated role of the financial sector, and the impact of economic globalization, which made mass production cheaper and the useful life of products shorter. The report challenged the notion that absolute decoupling of economic growth from the use of energy is achievable through technological solutions. Jackson followed in the footsteps of Herman Daly’s (1993) theory of the steady-state economy and Peter Victor’s (2008) macroeconomic models of such an economy in Canada.

From then on, questioning the powerful dominance of technological solutions to ecological cri-sis (also referred to as “techno-optimism”, “weak sustainability approach”, and “green technology approach”) and of absolute decoupling of economic growth from energy and material use – once the position of a tiny minority – would gain more currency among academics (Alfredsson et al., 2018; Parrique et al., 2019). We clearly need both green technology and demand reduction through life-style changes (see Box 0.2). Nonetheless, in the very real world of politics and policymaking, the dominance of technology-based over lifestyle-based approaches to climate mitigation continues.

The understanding of the attraction of consumer society and a potential transition beyond it has been greatly enriched by so-called happiness and subjective well-being research (Smith & Reid, 2018). Numerous scholars, among them Layard (2006), Kahneman and Deaton (2010), Tsurumi et al. (2021), Graham (2011), and Skidelsky and Skidelsky (2012), to name a few, interrogated such questions as: Does wealth accumulation and consumption make people happy? Is there a saturation point? How much is enough?

The answers are not straightforward. On the one hand, deprivation is a source of unhappiness in life; and friends, family, and a sense of belonging are the true long-lasting sources of life satisfac-tion. Research findings also suggested a point of saturation; beyond a moderate per capita income, additional income does not lead to greater happiness or satisfaction with life. On the other hand, satisfaction with material life is a relative concept. It is deeply grounded in social comparisons and how much one has relative to others (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010; Killingsworth et al., 2023). That leads to a kind of arms race: while the top earners strive to distance themselves from the rest (including their peers) by accumulating and spending more, those in the lower economic classes strive to emulate them and distance themselves from those below them. The phenomenon applies to all economic strata and brings a lot of stress to people’s lives and little happiness to most. At the time of this writing, complexities in the system of mass consumption – its components and mutual interdependencies in the context of a global economy – are generally recognized, but points of intervention are less clear. While the case for transitioning toward a different organiz-ing principle of societal life is strong, conversations about the point of departure and destination lack common ground. There are other major challenges to contend with. Three among those – the socio-economic impact of reducing consumption, the inequality between the Global North and Global South, and wealth inequality within countries – especially stand out.

5. Challenges to System Transition

Economic and Political Implications of Diminished Consumption

In recent years, various branches of the United Nations, as well as European governments and the EU, have adopted official proclamations about the need to reduce consumption.

For example, the European Commission’s New Energy Efficiency Directive (EU/2023/1791) established a weak, politically tainted but legally binding target to reduce the EU’s final energy con-sumption by 11.7% by 2030, based on 2020 scenarios. In the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework, Goal 12 is on Responsible Consumption, Goal 10 is on Reducing Inequalities, and Goal 3 is on Wellbeing. The adoption of the UN 10-Year Framework of Programmes for Sustainable Consumption and Production (10YFP) in 2012 at the Rio+20 Summit so far stands out as the most ambitious approach to the issue by the UN system, but the mandate is poorly under-resourced and has no functional implementation mechanism. In 2024, the UN Environment Assembly adopted a resolution (6/8) titled “Promoting Sustainable Lifestyles”. The same year, at the UN’s 75th General Assembly, the 193-member organization adopted “The Pact for the Future”, in which it commits (Action 10c) to “Promote sustainable consumption and production patterns, including sustainable lifestyles”.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which since its inception in 1988 has primarily focused on technical assessments and mitigation, devoted an entire chapter of its Sixth Report (2022) to sustainable consumption and sufficiency. It estimates that changes in systems of consumption and lifestyles by 2050 can potentially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 70% (IPCC, 2023). A study published in Nature went beyond carbon emissions, finding that reducing con-sumption among just the top 10% or 20% of the world’s consumers would go a long way to reducing overshoot of most planetary boundaries, decreasing environmental pressure by 25 to 53% (Tian et al., 2024). The media are also writing about consumption with growing frequency. The detailed and accessible analysis in the 1.5-degree lifestyles reports by Hot or Cool Institute (Akenji et al., 2021) has been repeatedly featured in mainstream media such as the BBC, Financial Times, The New York Times, Bloomberg News, Forbes, and multiple international and local mainstream media outlets.

Governments are nonetheless averse to abandoning the economic growth paradigm. And for good reason. What remains unresolved is the potential socio-economic impact of rapid reductions in consumption: recession, unemployment, and massive economic dislocations, both among the consumers in the Global North and among producers in the Global South. Some scholars have attempted to develop scenarios and macroeconomic models for such a transition (Victor, 2008), but many questions remain open. For instance, all private and public pension plans depend on future growth to deliver on their commitments; in the United States, meanwhile, much of the public ser-vice sector, such as public radio and television, depends on advertising revenues for their operat-ing budgets. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

After decades of following the neoliberal economic model, national governments are also deeply constrained by the enormous power of multinational corporations, which demand growth and mass consumption (Slobodian, 2018). Governments thus cling to the idea that economic growth can continue as long as it is decoupled from resources. Green consumerism and green growth are the operative words. This framing has allowed governments to pay lip service to sustainable consump-tion while still tacitly or explicitly encouraging mass consumption. They look to technological and market solutions for what is essentially a social and political problem.

Inequality

As noted earlier, inequality within countries drives consumption because people strive to raise their social status by emulating those “above them”. The groundbreaking 2009 and 2019 studies by British epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett illuminate other corrosive effects of inequality by showing that it is a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunc-tional. For example, bigger gaps between the rich and the poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment, more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse, and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being and social mobility. These findings imply an alternative to economic growth as a way to solve many social ills: reducing inequality. But approaching sustainability from this inequality perspective conjures the specter of wealth redistribution: a political third rail. This is another great challenge of our times.

Inequality within societies has another corrosive effect on the politics of system transition. Reaching broad societal support for action on that scale requires social cohesion and a feeling that everybody contributes their share. But in highly unequal societies, social trust, cohesion, and solidarity are greatly eroded. It is hard to build support for collective action if people feel that the burden is not being shared fairly (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2024).

Inequality between countries is another unresolved issue. The tension between the rich and poor countries of the Global North and Global South was already evident at the 1992 Earth Summit and continues to clog up global negotiations on who should pay for loss and damage due to impacts of climate change, and the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation. Although climate change is a consequence of environmental destruction, overconsumption, and historical emissions by the rich countries of the Global North, countries of the Global South are facing its worst impacts.

On top of that, poorer countries are trapped in a neo-colonial and extractive global economic system that is forcing them to use their limited financial and natural resources to continue to sup-ply the rich countries of the Global North, instead of developing their own economies or building their own resilience. Analysis by the International Resources Panel (IRP, 2024) shows that, through global trade, rich countries displace environmental impacts onto others, and that rich countries use six times more materials per capita and are responsible for ten times more climate impacts per capita than low-income countries.

In addition to the issue of historical responsibility, the shrinking size of the global carbon budget and the power disparities in international negotiations make changes in energy consumption a zero-sum game: an increase in the Global South requires a decrease in the Global North. In 2017, Hubacek et al. estimated that bringing the 837 million people living in extreme poverty to the level of consumption that is referred to as poor would have a minimal impact on the global car-bon budget; but bringing the poor of the world (half of its population) to a more dignified state of existence might raise the global temperature by 0.6 degrees by the end of the century. More recent estimates put the impact of eradicating poverty somewhat lower, but not negligible (Oswald et al., 2021; Baltruszewicz et al., 2021, 2023).

Even as climate change forces the need to reduce emissions and as resource stocks dwindle, the International Resources Panel warns that

without urgent and concerted action to change the way resources are used, material resource extraction could increase by almost 60 per cent from 2020 levels by 2060. . . far exceeding what is required to meet essential human needs for all in line with the SDGs.

Without addressing these tensions between resource needs and availability, and the asymmetries in political and economic power, countries of the Global South are unlikely to meet their material needs, and the Global North would pull the rest of the world into a deeper climate overshoot.

Envisioning Sustainable Consumption and Lifestyles

Aiming for global carbon equality would mean a radical change in lifestyles in the Global North. What would such a low-impact life look like? In this volume, we include some metaphors that attempt to define it by adopting the idea of minima and maxima: earth systems boundaries (Röck-ström et al., 2023), doughnut economics, consumption corridors, and fair consumption space. These differ in respective emphases on physical and social factors, equity, justice, and the degree of quantification, but all aim to define boundaries: the lower boundary ensures dignified, equitable living below which no one should fall; and the upper one defines the biophysical limits that should not be exceeded.

We also include examples of visions – some descriptive, others using quantitative models – of an economy capable of delivering such a life within boundaries: steady-state economy, sharing economy, circular economy, and society and foundational economy. Some papers highlight principles and policies that could form the basis of a society with sustainable lifestyles: sufficiency (Princen, 2003), for instance, or changing provisioning systems by adopting universal basic ser-vices for fundamental needs (Gough, 2019).

Using theoretical models, some researchers have sharpened the picture of a life within bounda-ries and under the scenario of equality by producing specific numbers to describe it. In modeling so-called 1.5-degree lifestyles, they consider factors such as the size of living space, access to basic amenities, sufficient nutrition, basic mobility, and others (Akenji et al., 2021; Oswald et al., 2021; Baltruszewicz et al., 2021, 2023). The results all demonstrate a large gap between the current average lifestyles of citizens in affluent societies and lifestyles of sufficiency.

The irony of envisioning and calling for sufficiency lifestyles in wealthy societies is that low-income people in these countries already provide elements of a living model of it (see, for instance, examples from Norway, reported by Korsnes et al., 2024; see also Pungas et al., 2024). By necessity, they develop procedures and understandings that support lower consumption levels, like sharing, volunteering, repairing, negotiating needs, and calculating costs. Many more exam-ples of sustainable lifestyles, especially in the Global South, can be found in a compendium similar to this one, called Pluriverse: A post-development dictionary (Kothari et al., 2019).

Notably, the frugality, simplicity, and sharing that are practiced by low-income people are often the same ones that the abundant literature on sustainable lifestyles presents as a model for achiev-ing more life satisfaction through community participation and more leisure time. But this kind of life also often comes with stigmas, a sense of social exclusion, and low social standing – hardly a situation to emulate. This in turn undermines social cohesion and solidarity, which are necessary for social change.

Thus the challenge for policymakers and advocates is to create the conditions under which low consumption lifestyles are the norm, fair to everyone, and easiest to practice. Efficiency-oriented policies, such as subsidies for heat pumps and electric cars, which work best for economically strong groups, are not up to the task and still have their own environmental impacts. Social activ-ism to bring about value shifts plays a relevant role in sustainability transitions for mainstreaming sustainable lifestyles out of their current niche. Several concepts explored in this book are relevant for considering how to create such conditions, among them choice editing, carbon budgets, grass-roots innovation, buen vivir and buenos convivires, ubuntu, living labs, eco-communities, and community-supported agriculture.

6. The Need for a Common Language

A major barrier to making sustainable consumption and lifestyles a high-profile issue is that it does not have a political champion; it is a political orphan. At the time of this writing, the websites of leading global and national environmental organizations do not mention unsustainable consump-tion or unrestrained economic growth, although inequality is highlighted. This should not come as a surprise. The research roots of the modern environmental movement are in natural sciences and technology; technological and supply-side solutions to ecological overshoot are therefore their natural choices. Furthermore, it is much easier to mobilize their constituency by targeting the business world as villains and human health as under threat – as was the case with environ-mental pollution from the 1960s on – than by challenging dominant lifestyles (see Box 0.3). Neither is there much explicit discussion of sustainable lifestyles among advocates for social justice or public health.

The problem of overconsumption is of course more complex than that of toxic pollution. And consumers who are concerned about their future quality of life are slow to accept the idea of sus-tainable consumption and lifestyles.

Conceptual barriers to collective action accompany the political ones. The transdisciplinary nature of sustainable consumption and lifestyles research hampers the emergence of a coherent community of scholar-advocates who share a language and worldviews. Suggested points of inter-vention are often based on fragmented findings and siloed perspectives rather than a unified per-spective (Wallnoefer, 2022). The result is that people and institutions who should communicate with each other do so poorly or not at all and graduates from sustainability programs who are eager to engage in social activism are often only familiar with a sliver of the big picture but without a good understanding of how all the pieces fit together.

These obstacles do not, however, justify inaction. Indeed, they are a clarion call for action. It is necessary to build a coalition of multidisciplinary academics, activists, policymakers, and business leaders who understand the urgency of shifting to a different organizing principle of societal life, and who can see opportunities in doing so. Creating a broad-based discourse that draws on the many concepts included in this book is the first step.

We are encouraged by the signs of a growing interest in consumption reduction policies among citizens in high-consuming countries. A recent study in ten European countries, for instance, showed that citizens are more committed to sufficiency policies than the authors of the National Energy and Climate Plans (Lage et al., 2023). In France, several recent reports on sufficiency have received considerable public attention (Bourliaguet, 2025). Cities like The Hague are ban-ning fossil fuel-related advertisements, which are a relevant driver of unsustainable consumption. Conversations around degrowth and post-growth approaches have also blossomed, fundamentally questioning what has been called the “imperial mode of living” (Brand & Wissen, 2021). This has brought such debates into prominent conferences in the European Union and national parliaments. There is also a long tradition and a more recent surge of civil experimentation and activism, quite often not under the banner of sustainable consumption, but very relevant for its development. Many of these are in the lower-consuming countries of the Global South (Kothari et al., 2019). Var-ious promising civil society developments are tackled in the book under topics such as subvertis-ing, grassroots innovation, alternative hedonism, green parenting, and community-supported agriculture.

7. Structure of the Book

This book seeks to curate and organize a shared vocabulary for the broad, transdisciplinary com-munities working on a transition toward sustainable consumption and lifestyles, especially in the high-consuming countries. It is also aimed at people who want to better understand those ideas and how they relate to each other. It strives to assess how far the discipline has matured and to highlight some of the emerging concepts that could become relevant for sustainable futures. Together, the entries in this book attempt to reclaim some of the language from appropriation and greenwashing, and to challenge some myths and misconceptions about sustainable consumption and lifestyles. Ultimately, we hope that it provides inspiration for researchers, practitioners, activists, innovators, and observers on how to collectively move toward a more sustainable society. The 87 essays are organized into five clusters with overlapping boundaries (see Box 0.4). Clus-ter I includes entries focusing mainly on actions by individuals, households, and social groups; Cluster II is more theoretical, including abstract concepts, frameworks, and applied theories. Clus-ter III takes a political economy perspective; Cluster IV focuses on social activism and value shifts; and Cluster V addresses governance, policy, and choice architecture.

Each entry provides a definition, a brief history of the concept, and a reflection on the various perspectives on the topic, as well as its applications and implications for a transition to a sustain-able consumption system. To facilitate cross-referencing between entries, we have marked the connections with other entries in bold. The result is a mosaic of concepts, most of them intercon-nected, which together form the “Vocabulary” that can be used to have a dialogue on sustainable living, consumption and lifestyles. This mosaic is important not only for a collective conversation but also for identifying leverage points for systemic change. Without a shared understanding of the issues at stake and of the various concepts that matter, it is hard to imagine purposeful social action.

In the entries, we avoided large bibliographies, as would be the case in a review article. This is because we seek to offer the reader a generally understood and self-contained description of each concept in the context of a transition to a system of sustainable consumption and lifestyles. Read-ers who want to know more about a topic can follow up with further research of their own, starting with the list of five additional readings.

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