Promoting a University Culture of Sustainability: The Role of Conscious Consumption

This chapter will focus on the economic elements that both promote and enable a university culture of sustainability. The assessment provided differs from other research and evaluation in this area, as it does not view stakeholder motivations as differentiable from the standard consumer model. Instead, the establishment of a university cultural shift is assumed to be consistent with an economy-wide shift in paradigm from consumerism to sustainability. As a result institutional growth is not a focus, stakeholder understanding and capacity for sustainability are. Following a discussion of how the deployment of classical economic theory has contributed to the distancing of consumption from sustainability, this chapter will address how education programs targeted to defining responsible demand, along with an infrastructure inclusive of facilities, curriculum and business as usual operations, are a requisite foundation for the promotion of a university culture of sustainability