Boulanger, Paul-Marie

Institut pour un Développement Durable

Three strategies for sustainable consumption

Ottignies

2008

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.

1. Introduction
2. Sustainable development: a decomposition analysis
3. The eco-efficiency strategy
4. The sufficiency strategy
5. The de-commoditization (or de-commodification) strategy
6. Conclusions
Acknowledgements

↑ http://www.belspo.be/belspo/SSD/science/FinalReports/Reports/A2_Boulanger_Three%20strategies%20for%20sust%20consumption_WP1_IDD.pdf

↑ Boulanger2008Threestrategieforsustainableconsumption.pdf