Social practices and sustainable consumption: Benefits and limitations of a new theoretical approach

Abstract

In environmental and consumer policy it has become common place to view the 'critical consumer' as the decisive agent for a change towards sustainable consumption. Private consumption, however, cannot be understood adequately as a matter of 'personal choice'. Individualistic approaches do not take into account the complex socio-technical nature of consumption, its dependency on 'systems of provison', its varying symbolic meanings across social milieus, and the systematic interlinkage of consumption practices and conventions of everyday life. The paper contends that practice-theoretical approaches provide a better understanding of these complex interdependencies. In a first section the basic assumptions of these approaches are summarized. Focused on routine practices these approaches, usually, do not deal with the question of how consumption patterns can be changed intentionally by political intervention, however. Based on an empirical case study on the German Agrarwende politics - an attempt to bring organic food from the niche to the center of German food markets in 2001-2005 - in a second section, the paper therefore explores the question in how far practice approaches can also be utilized for a better understanding of the problems of promoting sustainable lifestyles by political measures. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.