Communicating Sustainable Consumption

The increasing growth of consumption indicates that communicating the need to transition towards more sustainable lifestyles has so far been ineffective. Therefore, it is necessary to reorient communication efforts in ways that allow to more effectively create, identify, validate, and share conditions to enable all societal actors to shift towards sustainable consumption patterns. The conditions to do so pertain to power relationships, ethics, culture, infrastructure and economics; all connected by the inherent notion of wellbeing, fulfillment of human needs, and sufficiency. This chapter discusses the particular challenges and potentials of communicating sustainable consumption. It is based on an extensive scoping process by an international working group (part of the Future Earth Knowledge Action Network – Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production) that aimed at summarizing the current state of research on communicating sustainable consumption and the development of an agenda for future research and practice in this field. This chapter presents some of the key insights from this work.