Policy and Governance for Sustainable Consumption at the Crossroads of Theories and Concepts

2016

This introductory article of the special issue compares different conceptual underpinnings of efforts to make the everyday activities of consumers more sustainable. As social practice theory (SPT) is the main theoretical foundation of the articles collected here, we outline its strengths and limitations, when compared with the dominant individual-oriented behaviour change approach, and we focus on theories of planned behaviour, social marketing as well as ‘choice architecture’, based on behavioural economics. This article analyses SPT's usefulness, particularly from the applied point of view for policy-makers and social change programme designers. In the final section we provide some recomm…