Definition
Choice editing is about redesigning the “choice architecture” around lifestyles, focusing on the factors that most influence how people live and seek to satisfy their needs. Through this approach, decision-makers such as businesses and policymakers actively shape the range of products and services available in the marketplace, influencing their competitiveness and attractiveness, and thereby guiding consumer choices. This definition is in line with UNEP’s use of the term.
Other uses of the term tend to focus more narrowly on influencing consumer choices, for example through the display and promotion of products in retail outlets. Such measures, which are similar to nudging (see Green Nudging), can be part of choice editing as described here, but often in combination with other interventions.
The choices available to consumers are always edited in some way. Choice editing is done by manufacturers, retailers, and service providers when deciding on product and service portfolios, designs, packaging, distribution channels, promotion, and pricing. The criteria businesses use for choice editing are typically based on profitability, available technology, brand image, or market appeal. They usually do not include – or give low priority to – environmental impacts and broader sustainability concerns.
Governments also practice choice editing. It is used, for example, to eliminate unsafe products or services or to incentivize the development of safer alternatives, which may otherwise not be made available. Traditionally, choice editing in public policy has primarily employed the filter of public safety, health, and security. However, considering the current environmental and social crises, governments are increasingly applying choice editing to promote and enable more sustainable ways of living and satisfying human needs.
Box 76.1 Elements of choice editing
Choice editing for sustainable lifestyles can be described as a three-pronged approach with the following elements:
- Editing out: discouraging high-impact non-essential lifestyle and consumption options or eliminating them from the market. This involves making such options more expensive, less appealing to consumers, and/or harder to access.
- Editing in: promoting low-impact alternatives to existing products and services, driving social innovation to ultimately make sustainable options the default. This involves (i) stimulating innovation, (ii) introducing new low-impact options, and (iii) increasing the attractiveness, affordability, and availability of already existing ones.
- Guaranteeing a social floor for consumption: ensuring everyone can consume what is necessary to maintain human health, dignity, and social functioning (see Fair Consumption Space, Consumption Corridors).
A key feature of choice editing policies is the coordinated use of combinations of policy tools in the three areas outlined in Box 76.1. Editing out lifestyle and consumption options can be controversial (see Freedom of Choice). Editing in feasible options and guaranteeing a social floor for consumption can thus be key to gaining public acceptance for editing out policies.
History
There is a long history of governments editing the field of choice for consumers in the public interest. Such policy efforts have ranged from non-intrusive measures, such as awareness-raising campaigns and consumer education, to outright product bans. The latter, which tend to be controversial if not carefully implemented, have been extensively used. For example, in the United States, where since the colonial era, laws prohibiting the sale of adulterated bread and other “unwholesome provisions” were enacted.
Over time, the criteria used for choice editing regulations have widened to include the protection of nature and the environment. For example, in the 1970s, governments worldwide established vehicle emission and fuel economy standards. More recent examples include (i) the phasing out of incandescent light bulbs from retail and wholesale markets, (ii) bans on plastic shopping bags and other single-use plastic packaging, and (iii) sale restrictions on cars with internal combustion engines.
Different Perspectives
Choice editing policies, especially those removing products from the market, can be viewed as paternalistic and heavy-handed. To gain acceptance, they need to be based on scientifically sound and transparent criteria and informed by deliberative processes. This can be seen as a form of collective self-governance – to restrict the availability of options that may be tempting to some consumers, and profitable for manufacturers and retailers, but deemed to have unacceptable impacts.
In democratic societies, government intervention in private consumption choices is often perceived as risky for politicians. Such interventions tend to be framed as restricting individual freedoms, go against neoliberal free-market thinking, and can be seen as a threat to economic growth (see Box 76.2). However, such concerns are based on a particular view of individual freedoms and the role of governments.
Box 76.2 Addressing objections regarding individual freedoms and government overreach
- Pursuing the common good is the responsibility of the political community – those mandated with governing. Governing includes the management of our commons, including the atmosphere and the Earth’s life-supporting systems. Thus, the design and implementation of choice editing policies is a way of guaranteeing the common good, especially when there is a scarcity of said resources or the risk that they may be severely damaged.
- Since the state is responsible for preventing discrimination and protecting individuals against infringements on their freedom by others, it has the right and the obligation to prevent individuals from consuming to such an extent that access to a sufficient quality and quantity of resources is denied to others. Given the significant asymmetries in power existing in the market and politics today, the need to exert this right and obligation to protect freedoms is, in fact, particularly important (see Political Economy of Consumerism). This is only reinforced by the growing urgency of the environmental crises. A clearer mandate for democratic choice editing could be part of renewed social contracts, or ecosocial contracts, which are increasingly called for by social and environmental advocates.
Choice editing is sometimes criticized for promoting a shift to more efficient and less-polluting products, while not addressing excessive volumes of consumption. However, this is mainly a matter of how the approach is used. Replacing one product with another might indeed fuel “green consumerism” and not achieve meaningful reductions in environmental impact. Hence, when considering alternatives to problematic consumption options, it is important to include not only greener products and other market-based options but also alternative need satisfiers. For example, promoting a shift away from fast fashion needs to look not only at how to make clothes less environmentally harmful but also at how the human needs that drive current consumption of fast fashion – for example, social recognition, self-identity, novelty – could be met differently, including through non-material and non-consumptive means (see Social Norms, Social Practice Theory, Circular Economy and Society).
Choice editing is related to approaches based on behavioral economics, such as nudging. However, while nudging aims to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions within a given field of choice, choice editing represents a more radical redesign of the marketplace and the choice architecture facing consumers. In this sense, choice editing targets both the demand side (behavior change) and the supply of goods and services (provisioning systems, see Foundational Economy, Product-Service-Systems, Universal Basic Services).
Application
Implementing choice editing spans from a narrow focus on removing the worst products to more broadly redesigning choice architectures.
Removing the worst products is best seen with programs like Japan’s “Top Runner” energy-efficient appliance program. Each year, the government rates major appliances for energy efficiency, and the top-rated appliances set the mandatory standard for future years, thus forcing the worst-performing models out of the market. This essentially creates a race to the top as there is a clear incentive for companies to make new models more efficient. As a result, in the early 2000s, TVs, air conditioners, and refrigerators became increasingly more efficient.
As a much broader approach, governments and institutions can shift the choice architecture – for example, building sidewalks and bike lanes, and implementing traffic-calming infrastructure (like speed bumps). To reduce car traffic and encourage walking, biking, or public transport use, London introduced the Congestion Charge, which drivers must pay to enter the charge zone in central London. In addition, vehicles that do not meet Ultra Low Emission Zone standards must pay an additional charge to drive in further restricted zones (see Sustainable Mobility, Urban Planning and Spatial Allocation).
One of the subtlest forms of choice editing is to alter the default options. Limiting the use of public spaces for highways and car parking promotes innovation for more sustainable transport; revising local government zoning laws, and size limits for housing construction, and raising the bar for minimum housing insulation standards defaults toward sustainable housing; raising ethical standards for animal farms and mandating reforestation and regeneration of lands previously allocated for cattle and pigs would encourage low-carbon and healthier diets.
Tiered pricing is also an example of shifting choice architecture. By increasing prices according to usage, tiered pricing expands a basic level of access for all but ratchets down consumption as prices increase along with total usage. In Durban, South Africa, for example, the first 750 liters of water per month is free (recognizing that access to water is a basic human right). But as consumption increases, so does the price. The cost of the next 20,000 liters jumps dramatically, and beyond that, the cost doubles again. Tiered pricing could easily be expanded to electricity and heating fuels, which in turn could further incentivize efficiency upgrades and solar panel installations on homes.
Still, on pricing, another approach is to make the least sustainable choices more expensive. Plastic bag charges are a good example. Rather than banning, which draws consumer ire as well as industry lawsuits and workarounds, mandatory charges for plastic bags can also reduce consumption significantly. Gentler changes can also help people get used to a shifting choice architecture. As more people shift to reusable bags to avoid the additional cost, when taking the next step of banning plastic bags, citizens are more comfortable with this further edit, having already gotten used to cultural shifts, such as bringing their own reusable bags.
It is not only governments that can implement significant choice edits. While businesses have mostly used choice editing to sell more products (such as cultivating planned obsolescence; see Extended Producer Responsibility), companies can also design products to be longer-lasting, and repairable (see Ecodesign), and, through everything from marketing and store design to shelf placement, can encourage more sustainable choices (see Advertising, The Role of Business). Stores can even take a further step of only stocking sustainable goods, whether removing virgin paper products, selling only sustainably harvested forest products, or selling only sustainably sourced seafood, as many companies have now committed to do. Companies can also shift default options. For example, utilities can make renewable energy the default source of electricity for new customers, or investment companies can make a green portfolio the default, which leads customers to automatically opt for the more sustainable option.
This article draws heavily from two publications:
- Akenji, L., & Bengtsson, M. (2022). Enabling sustainable lifestyles in a climate emergency. United Nations Environment Programme. Available at: https://hotorcool.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Enabling-Sustainable-Lifestyles_UNEP.pdf (accessed: 8 January 2025).
- Akenji, L., Bengtsson, M., Toivio, V., Lettenmeier, M., Fawcett, T., Parag, Y., Saheb, Y., Coote, A., Spangenberg, J.H., Capstick, S., Gore, T., Coscieme, L., Wackernagel, M., & Kenner, D. (2021). 1.5-degree lifestyles: Towards a fair consumption space for all. Hot or Cool. Available at: https://hotorcool.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Hot_or_Cool_1_5_lifestyles_FULL_REPORT_AND_ANNEX_B.pdf (accessed: 8 January 2025).
Further Reading
Gumbert, T. (2019). Freedom, autonomy, and sustainable behaviors: The politics of designing consumer choice. In Power and politics in sustainable consumption research and practice, pp. 107–123. Routledge.
Maniates, M. (2010). Editing out unsustainable behavior. State of the world 2010: Transforming cultures, from consumerism to sustainability. Routledge.
Sustainable Consumption Roundtable. (2006). Looking back, looking forward: Lessons in choice editing for sustainability: 19 case studies into drivers and barriers to mainstreaming more sustainable products. Sustainable Development Commission (UK).