Sustainable consumption: from environmental concerns to including justice and quality of life

Sustainable consumption has become an important field of research by social sciences and humanities in recent years. Trying to report the broad body of (inter)disciplinary research would be presumptuous. Therefore, we limit ourselves to summarizing some points that are key to us. Consumption does not begin with people setting foot in a store (or accessing the online shop), and it does not end with people leaving the store (or the online shop). Reducing consumption to the act of buying would be reductionist. Acts of consumption are not ending in themselves but serve diverse functional and symbolic purposes. In order to find out how the concept of consumption corridors would be received in Switzerland, we conducted a representative survey in which we asked respondents to react to arguments in favour and against this concept. The results indicate that it is not out of question to discuss fundamental questions about sustainable consumption in Switzerland – this could be a promising focus for both policy design and future research.Cite as: Di Giulio, Antonietta & Rico Defila (2021): Sustainable consumption: from environmental concerns to including justice and quality of life, in: Konsum: Auf dem Weg zu einer nachhaltigen Transformation? (Bulletin of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences 27,2), pp. 42-46