Definition
According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP):
Education for Sustainable Consumption (ESC) aims to provide knowledge, values, and skills to enable individuals and social groups to become actors of change towards more sustainable consumption behaviors. The objective is to ensure that the basic needs of the global community are met, quality of life for all is improved and inefficient use of resources and environmental degradation are avoided. ESC is therefore about providing citizens with appropriate information and knowledge on the environmental and social impacts of their daily choices, as well as providing workable solutions and alternatives. ESC integrates fundamental rights and freedoms including consumers’ rights, and aims at protecting and empowering consumers in order to enable them to participate in the public debate and economy in an informed, confident and ethical way.
(UNEP 2010: ABC of SCP. UNEP-DTIE)
This definition makes clear that ESC goes beyond increasing knowledge, aiming to develop values and skills for action. It refrains from reducing sustainable consumption to green purchasing alone and instead associates it with the adequate use of resources to meet needs and improve the quality of life for all. The definition defines learners as both consumers and citizens, participating in processes that could potentially change the collective contexts in which their individual consumption is embedded (see Consumer-Citizen). However, when it comes to specific ESC activities, the UNEP definition still focuses on “information and knowledge”.
As a definition, which reflects more recent debates and perspectives (see below), we propose the following:
ESC represents a variety of teaching and learning approaches that support learners in developing their own ways to contribute to fair and just needs satisfaction by means of individual and collective, private and civic, economic, cultural and political activities.
Sustainable consumption and sustainable living cannot be achieved by education alone. However, especially in democracies, the activities necessary to transform consumption and production systems will hardly be possible and accepted without it.
History
ESC has two main origins: Consumer Education and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).
Consumer education, as a main instrument of consumer policy, has traditionally focused on increasing consumer power by providing knowledge and information to enable consumers to make better decisions for themselves. Over time, this individualistic approach has evolved into a more critical perspective on consumption and self-centered need satisfaction. This eventually led to empowerment to act for mutual and collective interest. While these types of consumer education still exist, the empowerment for mutual and collective interest approach aligns most closely with ESC.
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been strongly promoted by the United Nations (UN). Agenda 21, adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro brought, for the first time, a dual focus on both Sustainable Consumption and Production and education. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014), seeking to establish a sustainability focus in all areas of education. In this period, UNEP especially underlined the importance of consumption in ESD with the report “HERE and NOW! Education for Sustainable Consumption”, written by Victoria W. Thoresen in 2010. The Global Action Programme (2015–2019) continued the UN Decade, before the UN prominently positioned education within its Agenda 2030. Quality Education is thus recognized as a Sustainable Development Goal of its own (SDG 4) and referred to as a “key enabler” of all other SDGs. This is also reflected in the current UN Decade: Education for Sustainable Development: Towards achieving the SDGs (2020–2030).
From the 1990s to the mid-2010s, education was seen as a crucial but underrated approach to realizing sustainable development. In recent years, its role in the necessary transformation has been increasingly challenged by scientists and activists, as will be discussed in the following section.
Different Perspectives
Critics have argued that the main motivation for different political actors to eagerly embrace ESC was the prospect of passing responsibility to individuals and reducing pressure to make uncomfortable decisions that would have imposed duties and burdens on businesses and citizens (see Consumer Scapegoatism). Accordingly, some scholars doubt the relevance and effectiveness of ESC for sustainable development, suggesting that it concentrates too heavily on individual consumer behavior alone.
While some criticism may apply to earlier or very practical approaches, most ESC scholars and practitioners agree that teaching and learning sustainable consumption must go beyond individual behavior. ESC should involve critically questioning and potentially transgressively confronting consumption (and production) systems, legal frameworks, power structures, lock-in effects, path dependencies, and other drivers of the sustainability crisis. It views learners as consumer citizens and focuses on collective actions while acknowledging the role and limits of individuals’ responsibility. It also provides perspectives that allow for a critical engagement in improving quality of life through non-commercialized ways of needs satisfaction, reflecting on both individual and systemic sufficiency (see Foundational Economy).
To have a realistic understanding of and potential impact on sustainable consumption, ESC must acknowledge the complexity of consumer behavior, its embeddedness in social practices, and its dependency on other determining factors (see Social Practice Theory, Behavior Change). ESC has been criticized for referring to simplistic, individualistic models of traditional consumer education like the information-deficit model, which fails to capture this complexity. As shown in the definition section above, most ESC learning objectives today promote competencies, which include – in addition to knowledge – motivation and skills. Next to (more individual) problem-solving, prominent competencies in the international ESC discourse are systems thinking, collaboration, and interpersonal skills.
An additional point of contention against ESC is its alleged use of pedagogy to impose predefined “morally correct” behaviors. While this approach exists, most ESC scholars today agree that values, motivation, and skills for transformative sustainability action cannot be taught as such or directly imparted. Rather, ESC can merely offer a conducive environment and favorable conditions for personal development oriented toward sustainability – a process that may yield very diverse and uncertain outcomes. It empowers learners to challenge expert definitions of “sustainable consumption” and encourages reflection on and transformation of their relationship with consumption in the context of the societies and cultures they have been born and socialized into (emancipatory education). This is why transformative learning is widely endorsed in ESC.
Application
Although most ESC studies are situated in schools and universities, ESC can take place in all sectors of lifelong education: formal (pre-school, primary school, secondary school, high school, vocational school, college, university), non-formal (e.g., training on the job, in a youth club, or private language classes), and informal, everyday contexts (at work or in private life).
In formal educational institutions, ESC is not only a “topic” to be taught in the curriculum: it requires the transformation of educational settings so that sustainable ways of living can be experienced and experimented with (Whole Institution Approach). For example, teaching and learning about the importance of regional, seasonal, and low-processed foods in sustainable diets will be contradicted if the school kiosk only sells products of multinational sweets and soft drink companies. Implementing a workgroup or student firm to install and operate a photovoltaic system on the rooftop of the school will probably allow more effective (informal) learning than (formal) teaching in a classroom about challenges and developments in energy supply. Similar effects can be expected by implementing repair cafes or clothes libraries. All of these activities need to include reflections on opportunities and challenges on a system level, to avoid being stuck in individual solutions. For example, teachers might invite reflections on why commercial renting of a dress for one weekend is usually more expensive than new dresses sold in textile discounters or why repairing products is – if possible at all – often more expensive than buying new ones (see Repair, Alternative Consumer Cooperatives, Fast Fashion, Sharing Economy).
The guidebook Teaching and Learning Sustainable Consumption includes 57 practical ESC examples, many going beyond individual consumption issues and stimulating reflections on public policies, business opportunities, and collective activities. The book also includes more detailed descriptions of the examples in the text boxes, which go beyond the dominant cognitive approach (see Boxes 56.1 and 56.2).
Box 56.1 Education for sustainable consumption through mindfulness meditation
The brochure Education for Sustainable Consumption through Mindfulness has been published by PERL (Partnership for Education and Research about Responsible Living) in their Active Methodology Toolkit series (#9). It consists of three modules (personal, social, and ecological dimensions) with 19 consumption-related mindfulness practices and tasks, mainly guided meditations (see Mindfulness). They are ready-to-use even for teachers with little meditation experience. The approach follows the assumption that the necessary changes in values, attitudes, and behaviors for a societal transformation require personal transformation beyond increasing knowledge. The brochure was developed within a broader research, practice, and evaluation project which empirically confirmed that mindfulness practices can strengthen non-material values. However, it also made clear that such practices are neither a one-size-fits-all solution nor a silver bullet to instigate transformations in consumption behaviors.
A free download of the brochure is available here:
https://www.oneplanetnetwork.org/sites/default/files/from-crm/toolkit_9_mindfulness.pdf
Box 56.2 Real-world experiments for sustainable fashion consumption
In the project “ESC Textile Laboratory”, real-world experiments (RWEs) were developed and used as a teaching and learning method with the following stages of intensive learner involvement: (1) co-design to determine the specific questions and tasks the students would like to work on; (2) implementation and active participation; (3) co-evaluation; and possibly (4) re-iteration. Examples of specific textile-related RWEs selected by students in different parts of Germany include repair cafes, upcycling workshops, clothes libraries, or creating a capsule wardrobe (i.e., a collection of a few, essential, versatile clothing items that can be mixed and matched to create a variety of outfits). To open the perspective beyond local activities, the students were also given the opportunity to write a letter to a fictitious but very specific textile worker (“Aadya”) to empathize with a person from the Global South, where most textiles are produced. Additional reflections on systemic boundaries of sustainable fashion consumption at schools could be part of the evaluation, even if it bears the risk of reducing the students’ self-efficacy due to actions being outside their immediate sphere of influence. The RWEs reflect Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s triad of learning with head, heart, and hand – which also provides the foundation for other examples of transformative learning (see Living Labs).
Further Reading
Fischer, D., Sahakian, M., King, J., Dyer, J., & Seyfang, G. (Eds.). (2023). Teaching and learning sustainable consumption: A guidebook. Taylor & Francis.
Gossen, M., & Schrader, U. (2025). Education for sustainable development and sustainable consumption: The role of sufficiency. In L.A. Reisch & C.R. Sunstein (Eds.), Elgar companion to consumer behaviour and the sustainable development goals, pp. 56–72. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Grauer, C., Solbakken, I., Fischer, D., & Didham, R. (2025). Education for Sustainable Lifestyles: A powerful tool for what and for whom? In M.J. Cohen, M. Bengtsson, R. Lambino, S. Lorek, & S. McGreevy (Eds.), Handbook of research on sustainable lifestyles. Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming.
Lotz-Sisitka, H., Wals, A.E.J., Kronlid, D., & McGarry, D. (2015). Transformative, transgressive social learning: Rethinking higher education pedagogy in times of systemic global dysfunction. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 16, 73–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2015.07.018.
McGregor, S.L.T. (2005). Sustainable consumer empowerment through critical consumer education: A typology of consumer education approaches. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 29(5), 437–447. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1470-6431.2005.00467.x.