Three strategies for sustainable consumption

Abstract

An environmental program of sustainable consumption is one that causes humans to flourish along with the ecosystems. It fosters humans’ well-being and quality of life, along with environmental quality. We argue that there are three different, but complementary, ways to achieve these objectives: eco-efficiency, de-commoditization (or de-commodification), and sufficiency. The paper shows how these three strategies arise from a decomposition analysis of sustainable development as a program of maximizing a well-being-environmental load ratio. After describing the main characteristics of the three strategies, the paper concludes with the necessity to build mixed sector policies that have varying eco-efficiency, de-commoditization and sufficiency components, according to the consumption domain and social, economic and social circumstances and, in particular, the probability and importance of efficiency and sufficiency rebound effects.