Strategies towards sustainable households using stakeholder workshops and scenarios

Meeting the needs of present generations while ensuring that future generations can fulfil their needs properly requires sustainable development. Assuming that in the next 50 years the global population will double and global wealth will increase fivefold, while it will be necessary to halve the environmental burden, social needs will have to be fulfilled twenty times more environmentally efficiently by 2050. It requires great changes in consumption and production in the "developed" part of the world. This is the starting point of the EU-funded research project "Strategies towards the Sustainable Household – SusHouse" focusing on what households can contribute to such Factor 20 strategies. This paper describes the participatory approach of the SusHouse project, focusing on the key elements of stakeholder workshops and scenario construction, and presents first results for the household functions (areas) (Clothing Care, and Shopping, Cooking and Eating) studied in the Netherlands and the UK. It is concluded that it is possible to construct scenarios for future sustainable fulfilment of household functions based on the creative ideas and visions of stakeholders from different societal groups attending workshops. The paper ends with a discussion of the relevance of the applied methodology in the field of sustainability research.