Sustainable Consumption, a Tricky Topic to Teach

Sustainable consumption is a challenging concept: ‘sustainability’ and ‘consumption’ are terms that merit unpacking. Building on the momentum of a steady increase in courses addressing sustainable consumption over the past decade, this chapter aims to support innovative approaches to teaching and learning, while also bringing to the fore conceptual debates around higher education and sustainability. The different ways of representing sustainable development – and thus, sustainable consumption, as a subset of that broader theme – have some pretty concrete consequences: for some, sustainability is a business-as-usual approach, where economic growth is never compromised. Sustainable consumption and social change also relate to other terms, such as ethical consumption, voluntary simplicity, conscious consumption, political consumerism, or sufficiency, to name but a few. Different approaches to consumption lead to different ways of imagining what changes might be possible.