Report of the SESYNC-Sponsored Workshop of the Future Earth Knowledge Action Network on Systems of Sustainable

Consumption and Production National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center

Annapolis, Maryland, USA May 3–5, 2017

Prepared by Maurie J. Cohen with the assistance of Daniel Fischer, Melanie Jaeger-Erben, Charlotte Jensen, Manu Mathai, and Dimitris Stevis

Final Draft June 26, 2017

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Report of the SESYNC-Sponsored Workshop of the Future Earth Knowledge

Action Network on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center

Annapolis, Maryland, USA May 3–5, 2017

Table of Contents

1. Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………...….4 2. Background and Overview………………………………………………………………..…..5 3. Synopsis of Sessions…………………...…………………...……………………………....…5 4. Working Group Summaries………………………………………………………………….40 Annexes Annex 1 List of Participants……………………………………………………………………50 Annex 2 Workshop Program………………………………………………………………...…52 Annex 3 Text of Presentation by Halina Brown (Session 2)…………………………………...57 Annex 4 Initial Framing Document of the Working Group on Urban Provisioning Systems,

Equity, and Well-being……………………………………………………………….61 Annex 5 Initial Framing Document of the Working Group on Communications and

Outreach………………………………………………………………………………67 Annex 6 Collected Comments by the Working Group on Communication and Outreach……..77 Annex 7 Summary of “Pop Survey” Results………………………………………..………….78

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List of Figures

Figure 1 Schematic Diagram of Transdisciplinary Science Figure 2 The Processes of Co-design and Co-production Figure 3 Global Megatrends of the 21st Century Figure 4 Diagram of a Circular Economy Figure 5 Socio-technical Systems Perspective Figure 6 “Doughnut” of Social and Planetary Boundaries Figure 7 New Sustainability-oriented Business Models Figure 8 FoodChain-Lab Figure 9 A Strategy Framework for Just Transition Figure 10 Cities Most Threatened by Rising Sea Levels Figure 11 Diagram of the Methodological Steps for Backcasting Figure 12 The Who, What, and How of Communication for Sustainable Consumption Figure 13 Organizational Model for SWITCH-Asia Program Figure 14 SWITCH Asia Grant Project Location Figure 15 SCP Practices Supported by SWITCH-Asia Program Figure 16 Yardfarmers Pilot Reality Television Program Figure 17 Conference on Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene at Colorado State

University Figure 18 Schematic Diagram of a Production and Consumption Across Space Figure 19 World Total Primary Energy Supply from 1971–2013 by Fuel Figure 20 Total Primary Energy Supply 1972–2008 (United States, China, and India) Figure 21 Rio Bisected: Halves of Affluence and Poverty at Sunset Figure 22 Data⧿The New Raw Material in the Information Age Figure 23 Alternative Consumption Futures Figure 24 Alternative Consumption Futures Under Ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence Figure 25 Rostow’s Stages of Economic Development Model Figure 26 Objectives of Working Group on Communications and Outreach

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1. Acknowledgements

The workshop summarized in this report was enabled by funding from the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), a research institute based in Annapolis, Maryland and a constituent part of the University of Maryland. We are extremely grateful for this support and in particular appreciate the collegiality and guidance provided by Jonathan Kramer (Director of Interdisciplinary Science) and Jessica Marx (Research Program Manager). The Future Earth Knowledge-Action Network (KAN) on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SSCP) benefited significantly during its early stages from the active encouragement of former Future Earth Executive Director Paul Shrivastava as well as from the interest of members of the organization’s scientific and engagement committees. We moreover extend special thanks to Rebecca Oliver, Craig Starger, Alyson Surveyor from the Future Earth global hubs for valuable guidance throughout this journey. The KAN has received invaluable support from the Kyoto-based Research Institute for Humanity and Nature and the Future Earth Regional Centre for Asia. Extensive organizational input for the workshop was provided by Magnus Bengtsson, Hein Mallee, Steven McGreevy, Patrick Schöder, and Philip Vergragt and we are very appreciative of their indispensable assistance. We also express our appreciation to Owen Gaffney and his team at Future Earth’s global hub in Stockholm for having the confidence to designate this event as a Sustainable Development Goals Lab. Final thanks are extended to the researchers and practitioners who devoted their time and energy to participate in this workshop and to contribute to the further advancement of the KAN.

MJC, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

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2. Background and Overview

With financial support from the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), the developing Future Earth Knowledge-Action Network (KAN) on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SSCP) held a three-day workshop in Annapolis, Maryland, USA on May 3–5, 2017. This event was designed to advance the organizational objectives of the KAN and contribute to the preparation of a Research and Engagement Plan (REP) for submission to the Future Earth secretariat.

The workshop was additionally conceived and conducted as a social experiment in transdisciplinarity and accordingly the scope of participation was international and involved a diverse range of stakeholders including academics, policy makers, journalists, and representatives of non-governmental organizations (see Annex 1). The program for the event did not replicate the customary structure of an academic gathering but rather sought to create space for non-researcher participants to highlight their work and related perspectives by way of a series of sessions referred to as “Reflections from the Field” (see Annex 2). In addition, a considerable amount of time during the course of the workshop was devoted to discussions organized by the KAN’s four Working Groups (WGs). These groups have coalesced over the prior six months and have structured their activities through a series of regularly scheduled conference calls. The workshop in Annapolis though was the first time that members of the respective WGs were able to convene on a face-to-face basis.

The event also provided an opportunity for two of the WGs to present to the rest of the KAN proposals that they recently submitted in response to the call on Transformations to Sustainability issued by the Belmont Forum/NORFACE.1 The workshop was moreover an occasion for all of the WGs to engage several new participants in their activities.

3. Synopsis of Sessions Session 1: Opening Session

As lead organizer of the workshop, Maurie Cohen (New Jersey Institute of Technology) formally opened the proceedings on the first morning and outlined its main aims in terms of building up the KAN and launching it as a strong and effective institution to support research and practice in the field of sustainable consumption and production (SCP). He explained how the forthcoming Research and Engagement Plan (REP) would provide strategic guidance for further developments over the next 5–10 years and elevate the visibility and stature of constituent

1 The Belmont Forum is a global consortium of national science funding councils that focuses its resources to support research on global environmental change. For further details, see https://www.belmontforum.org/belmont-forum. NORFACE is a similar organization operating at the European level and is an assemblage of eighteen funding agencies in the area of social and behavioral sciences. Refer to https://www.norface.net/about-norface.

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activities as meaningful responses to ongoing patterns of global change.

Hein Mallee (Regional Center for Future Earth in Asia) explained the institutional arrangements of the KAN and its relationship to Future Earth. More specifically, he outlined how civilization is in the midst of a “great acceleration” and described our responsibilities for containing the impacts of humanity relative to planetary boundaries while maintaining a commitment to social justice. We are indeed living in the Anthropocene and are facing challenges of an unprecedented order of magnitude. Part of the task before us is to formulate new modes of science and policy practice that are transdisciplinary and problem-oriented.

Representing the Montreal-based global hub of Future Earth, Alyson Surveyor (Future Earth) described the core functions of the overall organization which are to enable research; to facilitate engagement with policy makers, civil society, and the private sector; to synthesize products and supporting science-policy collaborations; to build capacity for transdisciplinary activities, and to facilitate communication among diverse constituencies.

The session concluded with brief self-introductions of all thirty workshop participants (including several individuals who connected to the workshop on a virtual basis). Session 2: Workshop Overview

The second session began with a presentation on the aims and organizational achievements of the KAN by Magnus Bengtsson (Institute for Global Environmental Strategies). He highlighted the significant events in the timeline of the network and the roles played by the Core Coordination Group (comprising six individuals), the Development Team, and the four WGs assembled to date. Bengtsson also described the synergy and collaboration that exists between the KAN and the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI), a separate (and pre-existing) network comprising approximately 1000 scholars, policy makers, and others. He furthermore outlined the key objectives of the KAN in terms of encouraging and facilitating development of innovative SCP research projects with strong stakeholder involvement, inspiring real-world actions, developing more systemic ways of understanding and transforming the provisioning of goods and services (including production and consumption), promoting a “strong view” of SCP that goes beyond behavioral change by individual consumers, exploring how various forms of lock-in to current unsustainable modes of consumption and production could be addressed and overcome, and contributing to the development of new compelling narratives related with post-consumerist futures. Key activities for the next few months will center on finalizing the REP, preparing to pursue several fundraising initiatives, and encouraging recruitment into the KAN of a wider range of participants in different capacities. Bengtsson additionally summarized a slate of related events that are scheduled for the next several months including the conference of the Global Research Forum on Sustainable Consumption and Production (in the UK in June 2017), the International Sustainability Science Conference (in Sweden in August 2017), the European Roundtable on SCP (in Greece in October 2017), and the SCORAI conference (in Denmark in June 2018).

Maurie Cohen (New Jersey Institute of Technology) then reiterated that the intentions

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of the workshop were to expand the scope of engagement in the overall KAN while at the same time providing current participants with understanding of the work that has thus far been carried out, to provide WG members with an opportunity to participate in focused discussions on a face-to-face basis, to create an alternative forum for more intensive interaction and collaboration than generally possible at more customary events, to pursue a process of co-design and co-production with a broad group of stakeholders that catalyzes innovative forms of knowledge creation and dissemination, and to make headway toward drafting the REP. He also reviewed the key outputs of the event which were expected to be as follows: each of four WGs by the end of the workshop should have a clear sense of mission (and a plan) and an understanding of the work that needs to be undertaken during the months going forward, the overall KAN should have in place the outlines of a REP (that will be actively formulated into a draft document during the subsequent few months), demonstrated resolve (in the form of a collective decision) to develop (or not) a jointly drafted manuscript for submission to Science, Nature, or similar publication venue. The third talk in this session was by Hein Mallee (Regional Center for Future Earth in Asia) who provided a brief primer on co-design and co-production. Sitting at the heart of this endeavor is the notion of transdisciplinarity which he defined as research and action that “contributes to real-world problem-solving and bridges different kinds of knowledge.” Mallee indicated that the procedures for achieving this new mode of science had not yet been fully worked out and that the activities of this KAN were very much part of a process of seeking how to successfully satisfy these objectives. Figure 1 captures the essence of an idealized form of transdisciplinary interaction and the steps associated with this mode of knowledge generation and Figure 2 highlights the constituent roles of co-design and co-production in this process.

Figure 1: Schematic Diagram of Transdisciplinary Science

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Figure 2: The Processes of Co-design and Co-production

The final contribution to this session was a presentation by Halina Brown (Clark

University) who delivered a stage-setting talk entitled “Thinking About Social Change” (Annex 3). She began by noting that social and political stability in most countries (and by extension the global system) continues to be heavily reliant on expanding private consumption and economic growth. Proponents of sustainable consumption are deeply out of sync with these political circumstances and the challenge is how to foster conditions conducive to social change in the face of such contradictions. In the absence of overwhelming societal ruptures, she encouraged a focus on incremental progress and suggested that the design and implementation of various initiatives must always account for macroeconomic considerations, the often invisible power of dominant ideology (such as the veneration of free-market “solutions,” central to neoliberalism), recognize the interdependency and evolving relationship between economic structures and cultural change, and take advantage of the potential of technological innovation in affecting societal transitions. Against this background it is possible to nurture small-scale initiatives. At the same time, success of such efforts should be defined as promoting social and technical learning rather than creating a template for replication and upscaling. She also pointed toward the necessity for closer collaboration with the New Economics movement and communities of professionals working in the fields of, for example, public health and livable cities. During the ensuing discussion some of the more salient points raised included the notion of “mushrooming” (as a complement to upscaling and more conventional forms of diffusion and meant to evoke the notion of initiatives growing in fertile soil that fracture society at various points) and the need to avoid shortchanging initiatives generally constituted to embody “weak” sustainable consumption. Other questions centered on future prospects of the “sharing economy” (recast by one participant as the “public economy”), creation of windows of opportunity, drivers of production, and the need to acknowledge initiatives aligned with “weak” sustainability.

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Session 3: Reflections from the Field 1: Perspectives on Policy

The first session featuring presentations principally by practitioners began after lunch on Day 1 and included talks by four practitioners variously involved in working with policy makers. Eva Alfredsson (Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis) first reviewed the policy successes achieved in Sweden in recent years to develop a comprehensive framework for reducing the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions. She highlighted the need for artful compromise in pursuing such objectives and the importance of building relationships of trust among all stakeholders, as well as learning how to navigate in and mediate across controversies, because it is important to recognize that deeper challenges remain. Affluent nations like Sweden are beset by secular stagnation, resource constraints, widening inequality, overaccumulation, and problematic levels of debt. In the face of these circumstances, governmental capacity is constrained by a vast policy apparatus that is inextricably predicated on economic growth to meet a variety of needs that include offsetting a contracting tax base and fulfilling generous pension obligations. These contradictions will at some point need to be resolved if credible progress is to be made in averting dangerous climate change and in addressing other global scale environmental dilemmas. Lars Mortensen (European Environment Agency) began his presentation by drawing attention to nearly one dozen global megatrends causing ecological stress including changing disease burdens and the risk of pandemics, continual economic growth, and increasingly severe consequences of climate change (see Figure 3). These problems are captured by many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the issues at the heart of the SCP agenda have been taken up at the international level by resolutions passed by the United Nations Environment Assembly, the United Nations Resource Panel, and the United Nations Ten-Year Framework of Programs on Sustainable Consumption and Production. Within the European Union, there has been a strong and long-standing commitment to the notion of a circular economy (see Figure 4).

Figure 3: Global Megatrends of the 21st Century

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Figure 4: Diagram of a Circular Economy

In its own work, the European Environment Agency has sought to take an integrated and systemic approach premised on the notion of socio-technical systems (see Figure 5) and to rely on the idea of a “doughnut” of social and planetary boundaries (see Figure 6).

Figure 5: Socio-technical Systems Perspective

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Figure 6: “Doughnut” of Social and Planetary Boundaries (refer also to

https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut)

Mortensen also drew attention to the fact that throughout the recent recession, environmentally-oriented businesses throughout Europe have performed quite well with steady increases in eco-industry value added and employment. This success is prominently captured by the growth in patents issued for innovations pertaining to renewable energy and green innovation more generally. He also pointed to the fact that new business models are being spawned based on notions of prosumption, collaborative consumption, and the use of waste as a resource (see Figure 7). He concluded his presentation by noting that the United Nations 2030 Agenda has to date provided a powerful opportunity to systemic change.

Figure 7: New Sustainability-oriented Business Models

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Leonie Dendler (German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment) next drew on her prior experience carrying out sustainable consumption research in China and focusing in particular on the country’s serious soil-erosion problems, heavy use of chemical fertilizers, and extensive farmland pollution. In the face of its increasingly prominent position in global supply chains, an extremely difficult challenge is the traceability of raw materials in China. She contrasted this situation with techniques being developed in Europe that enable more effective integration, harmonization, and standardization (see Figure 8). Emergent problems nonetheless include digitalization, artificial intelligence, bio- and nanotechnology, and the rapid rate of new product and process development. At the same time, we are looking at a future characterized by new health risks, deepening social and cultural polarization, unemployment, migration, and changing consumption patterns (especially in emerging and developing countries). Current policy responses unfortunately remain centered on an increasingly outmoded understanding of risk analysis and response that presumes clear demarcations among assessment, management, and communication (all with their associated siloed organizational structures). Opportunities however exist for overhauling problematic arrangements if we recognize the role of crises as triggers for change, the capacity of key actors, the importance of institutional strategies, and landscape of resource access and power.

Figure 8: FoodChain-Lab

Tom Dallessio (Next City) described his role as the Executive Director of Next City

which is a nonprofit organization that seeks to inspire social, economic, and environmental change in cities through journalism and events that it holds around the world. During his presentation he showed a short video that had been produced to document the organization’s activities at the Habitat III Conference in Quito in 2016 and in particular highlighted the so-called “new urban agenda” centered on enhancing the livability of cities and preparing them for the coming century of urban migration.

The concluding discussion for this session emphasized the importance of creating

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narratives about change and the role of “champions” and the role of their stories was stressed as critical to make change more perceptible. Leida Rijnhout provided a set of recommendations from a civil-society perspective, saying that science should focus more on increasing the knowledge of people, particularly about their rights (environmental justice) and to work more on the comprehensibility and practicability of scientific reports.

Co-design and co-creation between stakeholders from science and civil society was discussed as both a challenge and a means for sustainable transformation; but it was asserted that we should be careful to avoid overloading participatory processes with expectations, especially because such processes are not without controversies and are not inherently democratic—facilitation is therefore of key to ensure that different perspectives are welcomed and negotiated. It was agreed that for transdisciplinary exchange to be effective it is valuable to find common terms and shared definitions of technical terminology (e.g., de-growth). It was furthermore mentioned that a fundamental obstacle for science is to adapt to instabilities and changing trends in policy making while simultaneously remaining independent of them.

Session 5: Reflections from the Field II: Communications

The second day of the workshop began with another session devoted to reflections from the field with this series of presentations focused on communications strategies. The first talk by Daniel Fischer (Leuphana University) highlighted the work of his research group (called the WG on Sustainable Consumption and Sustainability Communication (short: SuCo2) which focuses on the role of consumption in satisfying human needs, investigates its social and ecological impacts, and explores new ways in which people can be encouraged and enabled to take up more sustainable alternatives. A special interest of SuCo2 is in the analysis of how different formats of communication can help to achieve this aim. Its research is driven by a broader motivation to advance more responsible ways of living in contemporary society. Fischer noted that education and communication are mandatory but not sufficient conditions for progressing toward SCP and that progress requires both soft and hard instruments. The intent is to deploy education and communication to stimulate social (emancipatory) learning rather than on behavioral (instrumental) change. Drawing on the work of Manfred Max-Neef, it was noted that “cultural change is, among other things, the consequence of dropping traditional satisfiers for the purpose of adopting new or different ones.” In other words, how can needs (e.g., for developing and expressing identity) be satisfied in new ways?

Fischer then turned his attention to three approaches that he has used in his work. First, mindfulness training seeks to create deliberate awareness and capacity for non-judgmental focus on the present moment and he described an eight-week program in which such practices were used to impart understanding for sustainable consumption. Second, he outlined the use of co-design in a citizen-science approach as a way to assess and reduce food waste. Third, Fischer presented a project commissioned by the Federal Environmental Agency in Germany that engaged first-year undergraduate students of environmental sciences at Leuphana University in a process of developing campaigns to communicate the oldest eco-label in Germany to children

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and young adults. Finally, he explained several techniques for creating engaged communication based on artwork, music, videos, and auditory and visual storytelling.

The second presentation in this session was by Deric Gruen (University of Washington) who started out by depicting the somewhat unique sociopolitical landscape in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and the kinds of organizations that have been able to thrive in this geographic context. One initiative is called Rethinking Prosperity which a project based at the University of Washington’s Center for Communication and Civic Engagement that seeks to stimulate public discourse about sustainability issues in democratic processes and to provide a space to take up issues pertaining to a sustainable economy while connecting with civic leaders, grassroots activists, academics, and others. Recent projects have focused on practical initiatives designed to foster neighborhood improvement as well as lofty topics oriented around post-capitalism and post-consumerism.

Another initiative is called Front and Centered which is a Washington State-based climate-justice coalition that formulates its mission around the question of whether a focus on equity can create opportunities for communication about SCP when the issue of climate is so heavily dominated by messages about energy production. Contributing to the work of the group is the systems diagram featured in Figure 9 which highlights how a commitment to social justice can help to bridge discussions regarding consumption and the economy.

Figure 9: A Strategy Framework for Just Transition

Gruen also highlighted the activities of a couple of other advocacy organizations operating in the Pacific Northwest region. One is called Stand Up to Oil and is part of the so-called “Keep it in the Ground” movement and could provide effective space for communicating about SCP. A second initiative is the People’s Economy Project launched by the Seattle Good Business Network.

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Efforts to engage with these prospective political allies raise a number of challenges. ● What is the problem definition? What is the challenge that advocates of sustainable

consumption are trying to solve? ● How can we overcome the barriers created by unfamiliar terminology? ● How can we overcome certain taboos that surround sustainable consumption? It is

first and foremost not a popular framing of the issues. It is not measurable and not regarded as science.

● There is a stark lack of influencers. ● What is the appropriate balance between polling and purpose? At the same time, opportunities abound. There is potential to align with elements of the

social justice movement and to tell compelling stories that give life to victims and villains. In addition, we face real biophysical limits and the need to meet greenhouse-gas commitments and to adapt to carbon budgets creates some useful leverage. It is not necessarily the case that there are obvious windows of opportunity, but there are small cracks and many entry points that could be pursued. Finally, Gruen asserted that there is an overt need to get political, especially at the local level.

Neal Gorenflo (Shareable) began his presentation with a discussion of the Sungmisan neighborhood in Seoul which comprises approximately 700 families. A campaign to save a nearby tract of forest in 1994 led to establishment of several commons-based services including a childcare cooperative, a consumer cooperative for eco-friendly goods, and a variety of special-interest clubs for parents, gardeners, hikers, and more. Ten years later, residents embarked on a project to establish a new village school as an alternative to traditional public school education, The school was conceived to emphasize peer learning and to apply this approach to lessons on organic farming, pottery-making, and other life skills. The example has been replicated in other urban villages throughout the city.

Gorenflo described how the sharing networks developed in Sungmisan demonstrate a larger pattern whereby small-scale collaborations scale up and lead to larger enterprises based on solidarity and mutuality. Bologna (Italy) is home to another prominent example (so is the less well-known case of West Norwood in London) where cooperativism has deep roots and it holds important lessons, especially given the role that urban migration will play in the 21st century and the impact that climate change will have on livelihoods (see Figure 10). How will an increasing number of people afford to live in cities? Gorenflo suggests that a movement is taking form in which the growing ranks of economically disenfranchised people are adopting strategies to challenge dominant modes of capitalism not through head-on confrontation but rather by adopting creative strategies intended to create alternative provisioning networks. Often these interventions are being pursued in smaller and medium-sized cities that have lower costs of living and offer more room for entrepreneurial maneuverability based on commons-based development approaches. The presentation elicited several questions:

● How are the pilot projects being implemented and becoming societally embedded?

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How do they endure?

● Within the planning literature there is the idea of “second cities” with examples in the United States being Chicago, Minneapolis, and Houston. There are a number of interesting social innovations taking place in these cities. A recent issue of The

Atlantic magazine documented the case of Youngstown (former steel-manufacturing center in the state of Ohio) where there has been a near total collapse of pre-existing institutions and the cash economy. Neighborhood bars in many parts of the city are the only institutions that survive. They are becoming venues for residents to share homemade goods and locally grown produce. It is a compelling case of what happens when people are pushed to the extremes and begin to demonstrate capacity for experimental change. Article is at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294.

Figure 10: Cities Most Threatened by Rising Sea Levels

The final talk in the session was by Andre da Paz (Federal University of Rio De Janeiro State) who began by describing his work producing interactive and immersive narratives with social purpose. In particular, he coordinates workshops based on co-creation of participatory media and related projects. The aim is to increase opportunities for dialogue among makers, artists, researchers, and the public. Da Paz showed an example of his work which was a documentary video about an island village in Brazil called Ilha Grande. The project was conceived out of an effort to support community-based tourism but to do so by developing an expansive communication strategy that involved working with children on a co-production basis (to produce a website and web-based documentary) and to bring visibility to existing initiatives. The project developed a strategy using Facebook and other forms of social media to communicate outward about the availability of new videos and other relevant materials. According to Da Paz, “the idea was to create a process of communication that told stories about

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what happens inside the community so that people could learn what kinds of experience they would have when they visited.” He also highlighted examples of similar projects focused on the lived experience of residing in an urban high-rise dwelling (http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/outmywindow), on the victims of mass sterilization in Peru (https://interactive.quipu-project.com), and on the use of technology to communicate about intangible heritage (http://somdossinos.com.br). A question was posed inquiring how the website generated 10 million views. The response was that it went viral, perhaps because the video was about an animal (a penguin). The truth of the matter is that it was outside of anyone’s control. The other videos that were created generated on the order of 30,000 or 40,000 views and that is achieved by managing publicity through Facebook.

Questions posed about the session more generally centered on the following: ● With regard to the presentation by Daniel, one participant asked that if we want to

know whether the educational experience changes people’s view about future lifestyles, we would have to do a prospective study that involved following them. But is this possible? And what would we look for, as an endpoint. Response: This is a fundamental question for educational research. I will give a few examples to explain what it is that we are trying to do. At the midpoint of a project we track how users are using social media. We look for what they have used and what they have used it for. It is not a long-term thing, but it is as far as we can go (1 to 2, maybe 3 years—the period it takes for a student to complete an undergraduate degree. Regarding endpoints, we are discussing what legitimate endpoints would be beyond behavioral changes. We look for civic engagements and how people engage with others,

● The presentations show much more than communication; they also demonstrate action. How and what are the longer lasting impacts?

● Targeted education and students is fine, but what is often forgotten is the teachers and the parents. You can teach children not to use plastic, but parents are often the blockage.

● Interesting and important to study people in life transitions (moving house, getting married, retiring). What are the points of intervention? Melanie responded by saying that this is what her PhD dissertation was about. We can look for different aspects of socialization and to new ways that this can be achieved. It is useful to draw on insights from socialization theory and ways to apply and develop these theories. In transitional times, lots of things happen, though they may be ambiguous. With the first child, for instance, people become more focused on organic food, but they also get a car and use lots of diapers.

● How is socialization achieved through social media? Andre responded that it is rather a matter of spreadable media. The idea is not how we distribute our content, but how do we produce content that is spreadable. The diffusion has its own dynamic.

● With regard to Neal’s presentation, we should not get too fixated on urban renewal.

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The majority of millennials that we anticipate to be on the forefront of these processes, are not participating. It is people with high cultural capacity who are advancing such lifestyles most people in this age cohort do not fall into this category. (It was then noted that urban lifestyles are progressing differently in Europe.)

● With respect to this point that we are living in a bubble, there are large numbers of young people who get an education but then cannot get a job. Therefore, they live at home. Is that part of sharing cities? Is it beneficial?

● Can we study how to cultivate multigenerational living in terms of sustainability? How can we normalize the idea of multigenerational living (especially in the United States where we have large houses with few people living in them)?

Session 7: Presentations and Discussion of Working Group Belmont Forum/NORFACE

Proposals

Two of the KAN’s WGs submitted first-round proposals in early April in response to the Belmont Forum/NORFACE call on Transformations to Sustainability.2 This session of the workshop was devoted to providing other KAN members with an overview of each proposal and to widening the discussion on their key ideas and intentions. The first proposal (Inclusive Circular Economy Innovations in Cities: Prospects and Implications for Urban Transformations in Asia and Europe) was prepared by the WG on Urban Provisioning Systems, Equity, and Well-being and was led by co-chair Patrick Schröder (Institute for Development Studies) [in collaboration with Anthony Chiu (De la Salle University, Philippines), Ma Hwong-wen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan), Jaco Quist (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands), and Tim Foxon (University of Sussex, UK)] (see also Annex 4). The main research question put forth in the proposal was: What types of societal transformations are required to make an inclusive circular economy work in cities, and vice versa, how could circular economy innovation strategies contribute to societal transformations to sustainability? The proposal further seeks to investigate the types of institutional changes and social transformations that have already occurred in cities with advanced circular economy practices and to focus on the role of civil society participation, municipal governments, the informal sector and business in these transformations. It further asks what types of changes in cities’ economic strategies, financing models, institutions, and fiscal policies will be required to achieve these transformations.

The proposal outlines a scope of work to additionally consider the following: ● What are the social, livelihood and well-being effects of CE innovations and whose

“versions” of sustainability do they accord with? Who are the proponents and opponents of CE innovations? Who may be winners and losers of a transformation to a CE city in both developing and developed countries?

2 See https://www.belmontforum.org/transformations-sustainability-t2s.

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● What can we learn from the conditions under which CE innovations achieve absolute

reductions of material throughput in urban production and consumption systems? ● What do future scenarios toward “zero waste” circular cities look like and what

pathways are possible toward scaling up circular “zero waste” cities? What wider changes in macroeconomic policy frameworks would be needed for CE practices to be replicated and scaled up in a socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable way?

The project aims to focus on seven cities: Amsterdam (Netherlands), Chittagong (Bangladesh), Pune (India), Quezon (Philippines), Chongqing (China), and Brighton (UK) and to include eight work packages.

● Mapping of city specific circular economy innovations. ● Participatory visioning workshops with local stakeholders. ● Urban political economy, financial institutional, and livelihoods analysis. ● Agent-based modeling (ABM). ● Sector-specific material flow analysis (MFA) of circular economy innovations. ● Scenarios and pathways development for inclusive circular economy models. ● Feedback workshops and recommendations on social institutional measures for

scaling up. ● Dissemination of results and recommendations to scientific community, global policy

forums, and media. Highlighted in the proposal are several conceptual and theoretical innovations. First, the

research will outline the building blocks of a human-centered “inclusive circular economy” in which no one is left behind, thereby improving understanding about well-being and values associated with a circular economy—in terms of whose versions of sustainability they contribute to and who gains and who loses. Second, it will generate new insights into innovative financing mechanisms that can transform the linear economic system into a circular one. Third, the research will provide empirical evidence of the actual reductions in resource use achieved through urban circular innovations and generate models that show the potentials for reduction in resource consumption through scaling-up and replication of existing best practices. Finally, it will contribute to the knowledge base and conceptualization on tipping points of institutions and social norms, in particular by identifying if there are tipping points when cities and communities change from linear to circular socio-economic models, and the conditions and factors that influence such outcomes.

Jaco Quist (Delft University of Technology) then delivered a presentation on backcasting and visioning as these methodologies relate to the proposal. Backcasting is a way to create a desirable sustainable future first before looking back from that future to determine how it could have been achieved. It also entails planning the initial steps regarding how to move toward that future (see Figure 11). Backcasting can be useful when

● The planning process is highly complex and there are persistent problems. ● When there are present dominant trends. ● When market-based solutions do not work sufficiently well.

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● If there is a need for a major change. ● If the time horizon is long and allows for the consideration of strong alternatives.

Figure 11: Diagram of the Methodological Steps for Backcasting

In recent years, a number of European projects have employed a combination of

visioning and backcasting including Consensus, Glamurs, SPREAD, InContext, and Crisp. The subsequent discussion raised a number of questions. ● What is the role of sufficiency? Does the proposal make any attempt to challenge

consumer lifestyles? Another related question asked about where waste reduction fits into the scope of work? And where are the connections with civil society? Response: The proposal seeks to challenge some of the assumptions of contemporary circular economy thinking, for example, by focusing on different sectors of workers and new businesses. We have not yet given a great deal of thought to the consumer dimensions in terms of lifestyle sufficiency. With respect to the involvement of NGOs as cooperation partners, we have incorporated Buddhist perspectives on encouraging waste reduction. Furthermore, the project plans to have many stakeholders in the cities mentioned. Consumers are also addressed in the circular economy, for example in repair cafes. The project might provide better insight about the problems associated with circular economy.

● Have you thought much in terms of the circular society where not just physical materials but ideas and talent can be placed in closed loops as a broad way to address societal challenges? Related to this is another question about concentrations of power—political and ideological.

● From the standpoint of terminology, a spiral economy might be a better metaphor as degrowth is not very acceptable in the United States.

Melanie Jaeger-Erben (Technische Universität Berlin), in her role as member of the WG on Social Change Beyond Consumerism and a Co-applicant on the KAN’s second Belmont

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Forum/NORFACE submission, presented an overview of this proposal. Entitled Metropolization and Digitalization as Accelerators of Sustainable Societal Transformations (MEDIATE) includes one Main Applicant, eight Co-applicants, and fourteen Cooperation Partners.3 The key objectives of the proposed project are to develop novel theoretical concepts to observe, understand, and influence transformations to sustainability, to facilitate (second-order) learning among actors in social experiments/social innovation, and to generate practical knowledge useful for socio-ecological pioneers, entrepreneurs, innovators, policymakers, and others.

The point of departure for the proposal is recognition that the near- and medium-term future in many countries is likely to be characterized by ongoing secular stagnation, expanding labor-market informalization, increasing social vulnerability and inequalities, and further societal disembedding. We are likely to see during this timeframe the deepening of tendencies toward centralization and power asymmetries, the intensifying of complexity and speed, the accelerating accumulation of risks, and the expanding scope of ecological and social threats. At the same time, we can anticipate the emergence of certain opportunities brought about by more efficient provisioning and better access to goods and services, “smarter” consumption, increasing opportunities for community building and organization, emergence of strategically placed metropolises as innovation hubs. The proposal points to the important role that certain established and newly emergent institutions and organizations could play in several of the constituent countries including worker-consumer cooperatives established by trade unions (United States), purchasing clubs (Japan), farmer and consumer cooperatives (Indonesia), makerspaces fostering do-it-yourself provisioning and open innovation (Germany), and cooperative building and eco-neighborhoods (Switzerland).

The core questions advanced by the proposal are as follows: ● How are metropolization and digitalization contributing to the evolution of innovative

social practices in different domains of everyday life (working, eating/cooking, shopping, traveling, recreating)?

3 Main applicant on the proposal is Maurie Cohen (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA). Co-applicants are Anna Davies (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), Juniati Gunawan (Trisakti University, Indonesia), Melanie Jaeger-Erben (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany), Jaco Quist (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands), Thomas Reuter (University of Bonn, Germany), Marlyne Sahakian (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Tatsuyoshi Saijo (Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Japan), and Martina Schäfer (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany). Cooperation partners are Robert Aitken (University of Otago, New Zealand), Kartika Anggraeni (Collaborating Centre for Sustainable Consumption and Production, Germany), Halina Brown (Clark University, USA), Sonali Diddi (Colorado State University, USA), Noemi Giszpenc (Cooperative Development Institute, USA), Timotheus Lesmana (Indonesia National Center for Cleaner Production, Indonesia), Hein Mallee (Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Japan), Steven McGreevey (Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Japan), Lucie Middlemiss (University of Leeds, UK), Semerdanta Pusaka (Sandikta School of Administrative Sciences, Indonesia), Ulf Schrader (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany), Jimmy Tanaya (Indonesia Sustainability Center, Indonesia), Philip Vergragt (Tellus Institute, USA), and Leah Watkins (University of Otago, New Zealand).

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● How do oppositional social “reactions” evolve and how are they embedded in and

deal with changes, ruptures, risks, and opportunities presented by digitalization and metropolization.

● Where are opportunities for policy makers and others to intervene to facilitate emergent social practices that are consistent with societal transformations to sustainability and to unlock sustainability potentials in digitalization and metropolization?

The constituent goals outlined by the proposal entail establishing an inventory of innovative social practices attributable to metropolization and digitalization and to explore their potential to contribute to societal transformations to sustainability, to build a critical understanding of the dynamics responsible for renewal of interest in institutional forms premised on solidarity, responsibility, emancipation, participation, and community-building, to expand linkages of transition dynamics from the past to the future and to explicate how they have facilitated processes of social change in terms of everyday routines, and to collaborate with stakeholders to co-design future visions of new social practices engendered by ongoing processes of social change.

The proposal outlines the following five work packages: ● Project management and interdisciplinary collaboration. ● Collaborative development of an innovative framework for the overall project. ● Typology of social innovation and select “deep dive” case studies. ● Historical perspectives and future visioning toward societal transformation. ● Communicating results and knowledge transfer.

The discussion raised a number of questions: ● Higher order learning was not mentioned in the latter part of the presentation. How

will you measure higher order learning? ● Digitalization also leads to decentralization and provides challenges to the system and

can change power structures. Response: Along with social media, e-commerce is becoming more mainstream. Current developments are not being driven by policy decisions or political priorities.

● This proposal has relevance to the Urban WG. Social change is not only about the meso-level. It would be useful to also discuss the individual level. Different levels (individual, community, national, international) of social change should also be discussed to get a better picture.

● How do you see the work embodied in this proposal as reaching policy makers and NGOs?

● What is the role of participatory processes, visions, and futures of sustainability? Who is invited to design sustainable futures? Who is meant to be part of this discussion?

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Session 8: Presentations and Discussion of Activities of the Working Group on Ecological

Macroeconomics and Political Economy of a Transition to Sustainable Lifestyles and the

Working Group on Communication and Outreach

The first half of this session was devoted to a report from Magnus Bengtsson (Institute for Global Environmental Strategies) concerning the current status of the WG on Ecological Macroeconomics and Political Economy of a Transition to Sustainable Lifestyles. The challenge that this group has selected to take up is how to facilitate system change from the current political economic system characterized by ecological overshoot and the transgression of planetary boundaries to a new system of social organization predicated on absolute reductions in energy and materials utilization and functioning within safe ecological space. Expressed slightly differently, how do we move from a set of arrangements whereby there are rampant unmet needs, massive inequality, overwork, precarious livelihoods, and so forth to a new system that produces more positive social outcomes including equitable well-being, secure livelihoods, and bonds of beneficial solidarity?

In more practical terms, what might this WG do? Several initial ideas come to mind: ● Identify alternative ways of provisioning based on sharing, increasing the circularity

of goods, and expanding the consumption of dematerialized services. ● Further development and better application of financial instruments and price

incentives. ● Reflect upon and approach well-being from an economic angle (the marginal utility

of consumption) but also a sociological angle (how much and in which ways well-being can be achieved without market activities and commodities). This could be revealed in the promotion of better ways of how to measure it, or by exploring how well-being can be defined differently (“new normals”)?

● Explore the practical potential of concepts already in circulation. ● Engage with relevant stakeholders. ● Develop (innovative) policies. ● Formulate alternative narratives. The WG will also need to pursue a number of questions that require further thought and

discussion. ● What needs to be changed? What do we need to know about it and how? In particular,

what are the social relations of power and practice behind what needs to be changed? This will give us a measure of the challenge.

● Who has agency to influence the structures/systems on which we are focusing? ● Who could be potential champions for the envisaged reforms? ● How can/should the various “tools” for change—tools not ever being just “tools”—be

arrayed and articulated to achieve what it is we want to achieve? On this basis, it is possible at the moment to advance several overarching, but

preliminary, research questions. ● What are the systems we want to change? How should we intervene in specific

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provisioning systems?

● What are the interests in relation to a transformation to SCP? Who are the champions? Who are the resisters? And why are they “champions” or “resisters”?

● How could the concept of consumption corridors be made operational? What are the implications of this idea for natural resource management?

● How might we use the 2030 Agenda as an opportunity? What changes in consumption and production systems are needed for achieving the SDGs? What could be the supporting narrative of those changes? How are the SDGs really different from the recommendations put forth by the Brundtland Commission and Agenda 21? What has been learned in the ensuing interval? Has the underlying narrative changed?

The subsequent discussion raised the following questions and comments: ● The notion of “financial incentives” seems problematic. What is needed is a

transformation of the financial system. How do we use underlying anger about globalization and the current consumption system to effect such change?

● It would be useful to build on previous academic work that has been done and start from there. It would be a good idea to ask more direct research questions rather than fundamental questions.

● May be some value in exploring social marketing to undermine public acceptance of smoking. Price was the driving factor in behavior change rather than changing attitudes.

● It would be a good idea to frame issues in terms of well-being rather than simply economic issues.

● With respect to the conceptual understanding presented by this WG it would be useful to consider political as well as social outcomes and their interlinkages.

● What are the social forces that allow financialization to take place? How do we address equity?

● This WG tries to combine ecological, economic, and political domains. The term “ecological economics” is inadequate as it does not capture the political aspect. That is the area of innovation that this WG seeks to exploit. A suggested modification to the name of this group that came up during the meeting was “WG on Macro-Political Economy for SCP.” Relatedly, a couple of questions that were voiced to offer an orientation for this group were along the lines of contributing to “mapping the world” as it relates to SCP by advancing a research agenda to “understand existing power structures.” For example, this could take the form of studying/scrutinizing banking and finance, another angle could be a study of the emergence of green capital.

In the second presentation in this session Daniel Fischer (Leuphana University) outlined the current status of the WG on Communications and Outreach (see also Annex 5). The WG has to date developed an initial framing document that distinguishes between communications about sustainable consumption (CaS) and communications of sustainable consumption (CoS). On one hand, the former is defined as being deliberative and focused on the

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production of intersubjective or shared concepts and frames. Its effectiveness is measured by the quality of the discourse to which it contributes. On the other hand, the latter is transmissive, based on the communication of one sender to many receivers, and intended to convey information in the service of a particular objective. And yet another mode is communication for sustainable consumption which focuses on the process of individual and social sense-making and seeks to empower people to take an active role in transformation processes to systems of SCP. Such understanding of communication reflects the normative assumptions underpinning the idea of sustainability (i.e., centered on capacity building for reflexive, adaptive, and participatory decision-making) meaning that it is insufficient to merely encourage people to act on what experts/political leaders have set out to be a “sustainable” way. In other words, the intent is to facilitate communication as social learning whereby learning collectively fosters systemic change. The framing document identifies several “hotspots” that are relevant with respect to communication for sustainable consumption.

● The role of power, politics, and networks. ● The role and range of individual agency. ● The role of media, advertising, and marketing organizations. These priority areas could be pursued by formulating visions and conducting visioning

exercises as well as identifying new ways with which to communicate sustainable lifestyles. Figure 12 then identifies the relevant audience, the objectives, and the approaches.

Figure 12: The Who, What, and How of Communication for Sustainable Consumption

As part of an effort to embrace its service function and provide utility to the rest of the

KAN the WG on Communications and Outreach also posed the following questions to other KAN members.

● What do you consider to be the vital and strategic audiences to communicate with?

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Educators Journalists Politicians

Change Agents in Civil Society

Communicators Millennials

…

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CTV

ES

Strengthen SCO in cllimate change

debate Inspire /

showcase social experiments

Offer stories and highlight news

value Promote

pressure groups …

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Interactive Narratives

SCP-Story Platform

Local journalism on SCP

Documentary Educational Material

…

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● What are your most relevant objectives in terms of communication? ● What are the key research questions that are on your mind when you think about

communication for sustainable consumption? ● How could a communication perspective contribute to your work/project ideas?

The resulting questions and comments for the Communications WG raised by this presentation were the following:

● It would be useful to focus research on new media rather than traditional media. ● What is the difference between communication and public relations? Response:

Communication is about the promotion of social learning rather than strategic public relations.

● How does communication about sustainable consumption overcome popular cultural mythology? It is useful to reframe individual agency but how do we more effectively interrogate the implicit cultural assumptions? How do we challenges dominant social practices?

● While the change from naming and blaming is important is there not some risk that the political message will get lost. It seems that both dimensions are necessary.

● How do we overcome the problem that we do not really know what sustainable consumption is. We need a clearer definition.

● Is there not as well a need to consider messages that highlight unsustainable consumption?

● Implementation of a communication strategy needs to consider who the audience is and who updates the content.

Session 9: Reflections from the Field III: Perspectives from Business and Social Change The fourth session on reflections from the field centered on perspectives from business and social change. The first talk was by Leida Rijnhout (Friends of the Earth Europe) who centered her remarks on social change and role of science. Greater collaboration between civil society organizations (CSOs) and researchers holds the prospect for win-win outcomes on both sides: CSOs are more effectively enabled to make policy recommendations on the basis of scientific evidence and researchers are able to put their work to use for societal change. One case where this interaction was effective involved the issue of ecological debt which started among CSOs in Latin America and was only reluctantly taken up in countries of the global North. In the Netherlands, this poor uptake was due to the fact that the term translated into Dutch as “ecological guilt.” However, in due course researchers developed a more active interest in the issue because of questions on how to calculate levels of ecological debt. A second example is the European Commission-funded project called SPREAD: Sustainable Lifestyles 2050 (http://sustainablelifesyle.eu) which involved the use of both forecasting and backcasting methodologies, scenario-building, narratives, and formulation of a roadmap for sustainable lifestyles by 2050. The project involved businesses, researchers, and NGOs and each constituency in its own way brought pressure for thoroughly innovative

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recommendations. Rijnhout profiled a third instance of another European project operating under the title of Civil Society Engagement with Ecological Economics (CEECEC). This initiative entailed a process of co-design with ordinary people who defined particular problems and the associated concepts. It was then the task of the researchers to render these ideas into more explicitly scientific form and to further flesh out the specific issues. The project led to publication of a book entitled Ecological Economics from the Ground Up. A yet further example of useful collaboration between civil society and researchers is the project Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities, and Trade (EJOLT) which produced an atlas with more than 2000 cases involving environmental injustice. Inclusion of specific instances in the book had the effect of providing activists with certain protection because of the notoriety generated by inclusion in the atlas. A final case involved a collaboration between researchers at the Institute of Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Friends of the Earth Europe (FoEE). This initiative generated a topical report entitled Land Under Pressure: Global Impacts

of the EU Bioeconomy. Rijnout concluded her presentation by noting that FoEE is open to similar partnerships in the future. The second presentation in this session by Ambreen Waheed (Responsible Business Initiative) centered on integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into company culture. This involves communicating with managers in the language of profitability. The intention though is not to regard CSR as an afterthought but rather to embed environmental and social considerations into operating systems. The framework developed by the Responsible Business Initiative has six parts: governance and management, principles and values, disclosure and compliance, stakeholder involvement, consumer and product focus, and financial viability and capitalization. From this standpoint, CSR should be part of the strategic orientation at the basis of the enterprise and therefore interact with all spheres of company management with financial aspects, production, marketing, human resources, and more generally with corporate strategies and policies. Kartika Anggraeni (Collaborating Center for Sustainable Consumption and Production) then summarized the activities of the European Commission’s SWITCH Asia program. Launched in 2007, the initiative is presently set to embark on its third phase (2017–2021) with €300 million available to fund SCP initiatives pursued by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) throughout the region (see Figure 13). During its prior two phases, SWITCH Asia has provided financial support to 95 projects in eighteen developing countries in Asia and established five national policy-support components (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand) (see Figure 14). Target groups for these initiatives have been SMEs and their workers, policy makers, representatives of NGOs and CSOs, consumer organizations, and universities and research institutions with particular emphasis devoted to designing for sustainability, greening supply chains, product eco-labeling, and so forth (see Figure 15).

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Figure 13: Organizational Model for European Commission’s SWITCH-Asia Program

Figure 14: SWITCH Asia Grant Project Location

Figure 15: SCP Practices Supported by SWITCH-Asia Program

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A total of 38 grant-funded projects have been completed to date and they have engaged

29,000 SMEs through seminars workshops, technical and business development trainings. In terms of social impact, the program has generated new income streams and skill sets for approximately 220,000 farmers and artisans and offset an estimated five million tons of carbon dioxide. In addition, several projects have resulted in reduced energy and water consumption and solid-waste production and eighteen initiatives have managed to generate supplementary sources of finance.

The final presentation in the session was delivered by Robert Aitken and Leah Watkins (University of Otago) who discussed the role of consumers and business in a more sustainable consumption future. They began by suggesting that while were aware of the urgent need for macro-level change there also needed to be a complementary focus on encouraging behavior change at the level of individual consumption. Business schools had a role to play in contributing to both facets of activity. In relation to the former, this could be achieved by providing strong research-informed policy and regulatory advice and to the latter by encouraging more critical business education and more environmentally sensitive business practice. Aitken and Watkins then pointed out some of the critical barriers to an emphasis on sustainable consumption in contemporary university-level business education: particularly that the supportive context in business schools needs to be strengthened as the present emphasis is on a weak sustainability orientation. There is little regard for strong notions of sustainability or consideration of serious system change. Developing integrated and holistic approaches to sustainability are also difficult in business schools where departments are siloed and resources allocated according to traditional subject boundaries. Perhaps the most important barrier, however, is the uncritical reliance on continuous economic growth as the way to increase prosperity and ensure well-being. That prosperity and well-being are not directly related to economic growth is well understood and business schools should take a lead in emphasizing that quality of life is a more important imperative than the quantity of economic success.

Aitken and Watkins then moved on to highlight a number of consumption-based marketing projects that they have been sprearheading in New Zealand. The first, Kids’Cam, provided students with small body cameras which were worn for a multi-week period and which took automatic photographs at regular fixed intervals. The aim was to demonstrate the extent and nature of the commercial exposure and saturation that children routinely encounter during the course of everyday life. That increased exposure to advertising leads to elevated levels of materialism is well understood, however, objective evidence of the extent of children’s exposure to marketing is absent. It is intended that evidence provided by the study will inform public- policy decisions relating to advertising to children. A second study considered the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate giving as an example of how business and society could work together to build mutually-beneficial relationships. Using the Free Milk in Schools initiative sponsored by New Zealand’s largest dairy exporter, Fonterra, as an example, results from this research suggested that CSR can be used as much to build a company’s social and public capital as it can be to achieve genuine social benefits. The conclusions of this work

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caution companies to recognize that public responses to such initiatives can lead to considerable support where motives and intentions are perceived as genuine. Where intentions are regarded as impelled by self-interest, the potential for damage to the brand is considerable. Aitken and Watkins highlighted the value of these findings to the debate on “greenwashing” and stressed the need for businesses to make a genuine commitment to CSR a central and defining characteristic of their practice.

A third and continuing project that they outlined is the Lifestyles Survey. This research explores the values, attitudes, lifestyles and behaviors of contemporary New Zealand society. Essentially a lifestyle segmentation survey, this six yearly iteration examines the changing nature of consumer society and identifies trends and shifts in its population. More recently, they have provided stronger emphasis on identifying attitudes and behaviors related to sustainable consumption. The latest report (2015) suggests that a number of lifestyle segments have expanded their awareness of and commitment to consuming more sustainably. Interestingly, there are also increased calls for business and government to take a stronger lead in moving toward a more sustainable society. The results from the Lifestyles Survey have been widely disseminated in the media and to both private and public organizations and Aitken and Watkins described the contribution that this work is making to draw attention to issues that currently occupy the attention of a large proportion of the population. They further noted that despite calls by some business academics and progressive organizations to make sustainability the defining challenge of our times, progress remains slow. The main obstacle is not that consumers are unaware of macro-level issues, but translating this understanding into consumption behavior at the point of purchase is difficult given the absence of appropriate and credible information to guide decisions. Providing evidence that consumers would like more information related to sustainability on packaging, for example, will be the focus for the next stage of their research. A final area of work is an investigation into the characteristics of alternative business models such as those represented by organizations such as “Thankyou” which provides 100% of its profits to nominated social initiatives and which has successfully challenged traditional producers in Australia and is poised to launch in New Zealand.

Commentary on the presentation noted that we are not seeing businesses move toward or encourage a world that uses fewer resources. On the contrary, socialization into consumerism remains extremely powerful. It was furthermore observed that long-standing attention about moving from a society based on ownership to one privileging usership may be an idea that will have some enduring appeal.

Session 11: The Future of Sustainable Consumption Research and Practice

This session was devoted to four presentations that were meant to speculate on some future directions for future research and practice. The first talk by Erik Assadourian (Worldwatch Institute) began by highlighting the need to develop projects focused on action, had some capacity to be self-financing, and instilled resilience. He drew on examples from his own experience that were partly conceived out of a desire to tap this potential including a

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sustainability version of the popular boardgame, Catan and second-hand clothing brand called Fēnx. Also notable is a brand of bottled water sold under the name Ethos Water which contributes five cents per bottle sold to help support water projects in developing countries. (Assadourian wryly observed that perhaps a better idea would be to donate all profits to lobbying for rebuilding public water infrastructure—perhaps even in the same markets where this type of bottled water is selling—to make water access free, safe, and easy. The resultant beverage could be called Agua Publica. Another creative example of such a process could include a campaign to encourage people to give up their space in commercial storage facilities and to purge their excess possessions. Assadourian mused that such a scheme could even work with venture capitalists to short-sell leading self-storage companies and to commit a percentage of the profit to supporting the effort. He based a further imaginative idea on the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), calling the result the Framework Convention on Controlling Marketing (FCCM). This protocol would do the following:

● Impose a ban on most pernicious types of marketing (child-targeted marketing, fossil fuels and cars, junk food and tobacco, direct-to-consumer pharmaceuticals).

● Provide real-time disclosure of product placement in media. ● Disclosure by “buzz marketers” that they are actively marketing certain products or

brands—with legal liability for non-disclosure. ● Establish a significant tax on outdoor and public space advertising, with 50 percent of

all this space dedicated to social marketing (paid for by a dedicated tax). ● Introduce a surcharge on all television, radio, newspaper, and magazine advertising

with revenue dedicated to social marketing in same media. ● Ban or heavily tax direct mail marketing (plus establish easier opt-out vehicles). ● Eliminate all tax deductions by companies for marketing efforts—this should also be

pursued immediately outside of this FCCM The presentation concluded with a summary of Assadourian’s recent efforts to advance

the cause of “yardfarming,” a form of agricultural cultivation that aims to put suburban lawns to use as landscapes for growing crops (see Figure 16). A project along these lines involved development of a pilot reality television program featuring actual people pursuing yardfarming on a commercial basis.4

The second talk in this session was delivered by Dimitris Stevis, Sonali Diddi, and Craig Starger (Colorado State University) who are all affiliated with the CSU School of Global Environmental Sustainability. Stevis began by describing a recent multidisciplinary conference that they organized with the title “Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene” which comprised more than 100 presentations and participants from more than thirty countries. Central to the event were the notions of “just transitions” and “just futures” (see Figure 17). 4 See http://yardfarmers.us.

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Figure 16: Yardfarmers Pilot Reality Television Program

Figure 17: Conference on Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene at Colorado

State University Diddi then outlined how the topic area of sustainable consumption is operationalized at

CSU in terms of the drivers and solutions to socially and environmentally unsustainable consumption behavior (demographic shifts, migration, culture, values) as well as individual and

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collective behavior with respect to global environmental change. In terms of production, work at the university is focused on sustainable development in the textiles and clothing industry, new business models and alternative methods of production, and shared and circular economy.

Within this context, she raised the following questions: Who is responsible for the unsustainability of the fast fashion industry? Why do we discard clothes, shoes, and accessories that we do not need? As part of an effort to quantify the scale, they noted that in the city of Denver 90,000 pounds of denim and 350,000 pounds of cotton/acrylic sweaters are disposed of in the municipal landfill each year and nationally only one-fifth of the clothing donated to charitable organizations is directly used or sold in thrift shops or exported to other countries. This volume of waste clothing is due to lack of use or demand in local communities, no export value, changing consumer demands, need to follow current fashion trends, and abundance of cheap and affordable clothing.

Research on these and related themes has been a focus for the establishment at CSU of two Global Challenges Research Teams (GCRT) centered on (over)consumption: 1) The Culprit Causing an Environmental Crisis in Your Closet and 2) Clothing and Sustainability: Policy Implications through Structured Public Deliberation. In addition, several initiatives have been launched to raise awareness among members of the campus community including establishment of a tee-shirt exchange and upcycling lab, organization of a screening of the film The True Cost, and creation of a display visualizing the environmental impact of denim. Finally, Craig Starger explained his background as a marine biologist and some of his prior work advancing the science of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development in Southeast Asia. He had previously served as an AAAS Overseas Fellow at the Regional Development Mission for Asia (part of the United States Agency for International Development in Bangkok) and led the design and procurement of the Oceans and Fisheries Partnership which is currently the United States government’s largest investment in combatting illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing overseas. The partnership among these three members of the CSU community makes for an interesting collaboration and they have been working over the past several months to build a network of stakeholders at the local level to engage with the activities of the KAN. They have sought to diffuse information from the KAN to proximate constituencies and the wider region (and vice versa) and to build a local “chapter” to facilitate WGs based on common interests. They have additionally strived to identify local, national, and international funding opportunities to enable research, education, and outreach of SSCP knowledge. There are also plans to create strategic roundtables involving academics, practitioners, and policy makers and to pursue internal funding opportunities that could provide resources to build a team across the Front Range of the Rocky Mountain region over the course of a one to two year period of time. At present, the initiative has recruited approximately 25 participants from several disciplinary departments including geosciences, civil engineering, environmental sciences, geography, political science, history, sociology, and economics as well as researchers from the Public Lands History Center and representatives of the City of Fort Collins (where CSU is located).

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Initial thinking to date seeks to broaden the understanding of consumption and production beyond merely physical products and to conceive of each act of production as also an act of consumption (and vice versa). They have also worked to frame consumption and production as taking place across space and time and to conceptualize certain “policy chains or circuits” and to look to the past (as well as project into the future) examples of “green transitions” or “just transitions” (see Figure 18).

Figure 18: Schematic Diagram of a Production and Consumption Across Space

Against this background the CSU group poses the following questions: ● From the standpoint of the political economy of a sustainable transition, what are the

forces which promote/enable alternative methods of production and consumption in

Colorado? ● Is it possible to identify examples of alternative methods of consumption and

production at the local level? For what reasons are people defecting from certain practices that generate high resource throughputs and being recruited to alternative practices involving less energy and materials utilization?

● What is the future that we want and how can it be enabled? How might we compare and contrast cities/counties involved in different initiatives?

● What is the role being played by companies and industries that are successfully adapting to a new shared economy?

● What lessons can be gleaned from historical trends in local consumption and production to predict future directions?

Manu V. Mathai (Azim Premji University) started his presentation by observing (drawing on the work of J. R. McNeill in his book entitled Something New Under the Sun) that the twentieth century was characterized by a 40-fold expansion in industrial output, a 14-fold

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expansion in economic output, a 13-fold increase in energy use, a 13-fold expansion in carbon dioxide emissions, a 9-fold increase in water use, and a 4-fold increase in human population (see Figure 19).

Figure 19: World Total Primary Energy Supply from 1971–2013 by Fuel

Against this historical background, it is useful to compare the growth trajectories of energy use in the United States with even more dramatic increases realized in more recent years in India and China (see Figure 20). However, because of extremely large disparities in income and resources the language of sustainable consumption does not resonate widely in developing countries. We need to find a form of communication that is more effective. The challenge is how to enhance the consumptive capacity of households at the lower levels and suppress it at the higher levels. Improving quality of life for people at the bottom of the income distribution is actually not that significant of a problem in terms of its ecological footprint; but realizing this outcome is a matter of correcting the extremely skewed allocation of the proceeds of growth within present political-economic arrangements (see Figure 21). In other words, it is a matter of increasing consumption for some groups, while controlling it for others and avoiding the lock-in effects of current development trajectories (e.g., construction of new highways financed by debt). Another dimension, often overlooked in the sustainability discourse, is the thrust for economic growth to build and bolster national power and prestige. This observation problematizes the distribution of, and competition for, geopolitical power and status that preoccupies many nation-states around the world. Some of the loose strings that need to be brought together include the different vocabularies that resonate in the global North and South, the dynamics of rural destitution and distress that drive urbanization, the friction between conceptualizations of system change (technical) and the transformation of structures (political), and the design of new institutional forms to enable more effective advocacy and partnering with frontline civil society in the less industrialized world.

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Figure 20: Total Primary Energy Supply 1972–2008 (United States, China, and India)

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Figure 21: Rio Bisected: Halves of Affluence and Poverty at Sunset (Source: http://www.disposablewords.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/bisected.jpg)

The final presentation in this session was by Patrick Schröder (Institute for Development Studies) who discussed the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in altering future systems of consumption and production. He noted that people are losing economic importance as non-conscious algorithms outperform humans in a growing number tasks. For instance, an Oxford University study recently estimated that 67 percent of jobs in the United States, 35 percent in the UK, and 49 percent in Japan could be automated in the near future.5 A report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) forecasts that the equivalent figure for developing countries could be as high as two-thirds of these amounts.6 Impacts on the consumption side could be just as disruptive. Fundamental technologies such as behavioral algorithms operating smart buildings and autonomously-powered self-driving vehicles will have powerful predictive capabilities. These systems will understand people better than they apprehend themselves and will make most decisions for them. It seems likely that people will begin to trust algorithms more and more and hand over decisions about, for example, online dating, body and health, food choices, travel routes, and so forth. It is not difficult to envision a future where a growing number of people increasingly become non-autonomous beings, losing the ability to make independent free (consumption) choices. Under such circumstances, the belief in an individualistic, autonomous self with free choice finally turns out to be an illusion (see Figure 22).

5 C. Frey and M. Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation? Oxford: Oxford Martin School, 2013 (available at http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf). 6 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Robots and Industrialization in Developing Countries. Geneva: UNCTAD, 2016 (http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pdf).

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Figure 22: Data—The New Raw Material in the Information Age

Such patterns of technological innovation hold the prospect of optimizing consumption

with a low environmental footprint. This is accomplished because reasoning is shifted from people to AIs that are designed to learn our preferences, overcome our decision biases, and make complex cost-benefit trade-offs. It becomes possible to build a rational economic agent (a synthetic homo economicus) that is possibly capable of making fully rational (non-conscious) choices on our behalf. Learning algorithms could become the new matchmakers or middlemen between production and consumption. Does this lead to rational green consumption choices and sustainable lifestyle practices? Will algorithms make green choices that lead to low-impact consumption practices and lifestyles which people previously have not been able to do for themselves (e.g., overcoming information overload, bridging the awareness-action gap)? Figure 23 and Figure 24 highlights some possible consumption futures.

Figure 23: Alternative Consumption Futures

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Figure 24: Alternative Consumption Futures Under Ubiquitous Artificial

Intelligence

Session 12: Wrap-up and Next Steps

Philip Vergragt (Tellus Institute) chaired a final discussion session that began with brief reflections from several participants. The wrap-up comments comprised the following:

● Workshop was a real immersion experience. Need though to be clearer about the question regarding what is to be sustained and who sets the parameters for doing so? There was no consensus about these are important matters. We perhaps need to devise a better definition of SCP.

● This was a very enjoyable event with good diversity. Would have been useful to have more explicit discussion of fundamental concepts like “system,” “structure.” and “sustainability.”

● Very instructive learning experience. Great diversity and the level of engagement was encouraging.

● Extremely enjoyable but could have had more emphasis on concrete actions. ● Enjoyed very much the pictures, cases, and so forth. In the future we could seek to

crowdsource some of the materials and develop mechanisms for sharing data. ● Workshop was very academic and could have been more activating. We could have

employed use of facilitation tools to enable better report-backs from the WGs. ● Could have used facilitation techniques to achieve better alignment and to encourage

more thinking across the WGs. ● Need to make sure that social justice is core to the discussion. Focus here needs to be

on just transitions. Response: It is possible to use the pollution topic of the United Nations Environment Assembly and combine with justice and consumption agendas.

● Opportunities exist to build up the section of the SCORAI website devoted to the

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dissemination of teaching materials.

● Discussion point raised about the relationship between the Future Earth KAN and SCORAI. Response: Insufficient case for building direct linkage between SCORAI and the KAN though need to acknowledge that the success of the KAN is to a large degree due to connections with SCORAI. No need for the KAN to replicate the SCORAI experience.

● Prepare a paper with an overview of the field. Response: Make a Google Drive document and start a group writing process with spontaneous co-authorship. Charlotte will start a Google Drive writing process on terminology.

Next Steps ● Maurie will draft a report so send him your slides under the assumption that they will

also be uploaded to the website for public access. He will also create a small WG to process the results of the workshop and assist in producing the workshop report for SESYNC and as input to preparation of the REP.

● WGs will contribute to the REP in accordance with a timeline still to be developed. Each WG for the meantime should produce a 2–3 page summary that includes a list of several research questions.

● The results of this workshop will be presented by Magnus, Patrick, and Maurie at the International Conference on Sustainability Science being held in Stockholm at the end of August.

● Workshop outcomes will be presented at the conference of the Global Research Forum on Sustainable Consumption and Production in Brighton (UK) at the end of June.

● Jaco is co-organizing the conference of the European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production being held in Greece in the beginning of October.

● The Asia-Pacific Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production will be held in Melaka (Malaysia) at the end of October and we will seek out opportunities to participate in this forum.

4. Working Group Summaries WG 1: Ecological Macroeconomics and Political Economy of a Transition to Sustainable Lifestyles (Participants: Eva Alferdssson, Magnus Bengtsson, Sylvia Lorek (remote), Hein Mallee, Manu Mathai, Lars Mortensen, Leida Rijnhout, Dimitiri Stevis, Alyson Surveyor, Philip Vergragt, and Ambreen Waheed)

In the discussion the question arose about if and how to transform the entire economic system and the rules of the game and how to study power relationships; in short, a political- economic approach to capitalism, its flaws, and how to transform or go beyond it. The problem with the system is that it is stuck in a growth paradigm and growth is necessary because of debt. Beyond the economic system looms large the financial system. What are its drivers? Unfortunately, most actors are enmeshed in entrenched business models. In Sweden, financial

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markets are mapping sustainability companies using risk perspectives and the SDGs to identify winners. Leida mentions Bernard Lietaer as a possible ally; also the Next System project. We should connect with the financial KAN. Absolute decoupling is not happening; is “green capital” part of the solution? We should be able to list arguments pro and con. There will be winners and losers. The solution has been called “just transition,” which also addresses equity issues. Insurance companies could be allies too as they have issues with climate change and other looming calamities. There is an entire literature on the “commons” (and the notion of “communing”) that we should take into account here.

In an initial document we should take the strong SCP perspective: absolute reductions, equity, and well-being. One suggestion is a research proposal studying the link in Bangalore between the transport system and financialization. There are opportunities in upcoming conferences, especially Stockholm+60. Research Questions ● How to transform capitalism; or how to address and change the drivers of the present

system? o How are consumption and production tied to the present growth model? o What would alternative rules of the game be? o What is the role of debt in the present system, and how to address its significance? o What is the importance of the abyss between the financial system and the real

economy, and how to bridge it? o Is public control of the creation of money part of a solution? o Which alliances would be necessary to transform the economic-financial system? o Does the present crisis of the political system and its commitment in open markets

offer an opportunity for transformations; for instance in Europe? ● The logic, rules, obstacles that govern how the private sector behaves.

o Who are the actors who would have an interest in reduced overall resource use? o Can companies make profits out of reduced consumption? o Let’s name the system: “capitalism.” It is about power. o What would we say if we were invited to the WEF? o Map the obstacles that prevent businesses from following through on their good

intentions. ● What are the drivers of the financial system?

o Financial sector is now into sustainability because they can make money. Risk perspective. They map companies against the SDGs.

o Alliances, more than reformist and incumbent. o The connection that allows non-existing money to flow from the financial system into

the production system. o Bernard Lietaer to join us? o We need expertise on this so do not go into this too deeply. o Apply a specific consumption perspective.

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● The emergence of green capital.

o What is it? o What does its success imply for the need to change the economic system (they thrive

under that same system)? o Is green capital contributing to strong sustainability? o Include finance.

● The need to manage transitions. o Just transitions o There is a long history of transitions. Map some of these. o Need for strong public sector in these transitions.

WG 2: Urban Provisioning Systems, Equity, and Well-being (Participants: Tom Dallessio, Halina Brown, Leonie Dendler, Jaco Quist, Patrick Schröder, and Philip Vergragt) Main Discussion Points

1. Boundaries and scope of WG The Future Earth Cities KAN has a focus on sustainable infrastructure and related

technical topics, but this WG will focus its research and engagement on the human aspects of sustainable cities, in particular bringing sustainable lifestyles and sustainable consumption perspectives to sustainable urbanizations. Regarding the issue of provisioning systems, it was decided not to include the global supply chains of cities into the scope of this WG. For the analysis of supply chains, we suggested establishment of an additional WG to look into this and related issues (e.g., sustainable business practices). The creation of this new WG is being coordinated by Ambreen Waheed and Leonie Dendler. 2. Keeping “inequality/equity” as part of the WG title and research focus

This discussion centered around issues of equity, inclusion, unequal levels of consumption within cities, and inequitable access to social services such as education, healthcare, protection from crime, adequate housing, and transportation to areas rich in employment and civic engagement opportunities. It was agreed that these are important issues that need to be addressed for future cities and sustainable urbanization and we should continue to focus on such topics in addition to the research on environmental issues of unsustainable consumption and production patterns. 3. The issue of employment and the future of work in cities

This was a new issue for the group, but it was discussed quite extensively. Everyone agreed that it will be an increasingly important challenge in the rapidly changing economic landscape where a growing number of people depend on an irregular income stream in the “gig” economy. Under such circumstances many individuals might seek ways to spread financial risks by, for example, sharing homeownership among family or community members, avoiding mortgage debt, or looking for alternative models of homeownership, such as cooperatives. These factors are central to the issues of social change, post-consumerism, bottom-up community initiatives, and investments.

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4. Principles of a sustainable city

The discussion explored a number of principles for sustainable cities. As a starting point, several issues were identified including equity, low environmental footprint, well-being, circularity, livability, responsiveness (to labor-market changes), embeddedness (in local environmental and cultural contexts), and connectivity. Further work and exploration of principles and how these link to sustainable city indicators is required. 5. Discussions about research questions

Possible research questions were discussed and proposed including the following: ● What are interesting practices/case studies of SCP in cities and what can be learned

from them? ● What are different narratives for SCP, circular economy, and sustainable cities? ● How does SCP in cities relate to other megatrends in the labor market, digitalization,

and climate change? ● What are the implications of current change processes (e.g., disappearing

of potentially sustainable practices such as traditional housing, and cooking)? ● How can emerging disruptive technologies such as autonomous vehicles and

platform-based economic exchanges be harnessed toward more SCP? ● What is the future of work and community in future cities, and how will it affect

material consumption levels and provisioning systems? ● What is the role of the circular economy for sustainable cities and lifestyles?

6. Engagement plan and co-creation processes Several avenues of engagement and co-creation processes were identified: ● Engagement with local city governments which are active in sustainable city forums

(e.g., Oakland mayor in the New Urban Agenda; Amsterdam and its circular economy city plans).

● Work of local bottom-up initiatives and communities is of particular interest as hooking on these initiatives can generate interesting case studies for researchers.

● Engagement with zero-waste city initiatives and narratives around circular economy and informal sector in developing country cities.

● Identifying and connecting to project-accelerator initiatives. 7. Outputs, products, and funding of the WG

● An immediate output of these WG discussions will be an op-ed based on the discussions in Annapolis (to be coordinated by Tom).

● The research and engagement plan of the WG is to be further developed based on the discussions held during the Annapolis workshop.

● For funding, it was decided to target foundations working on sustainable cities (these foundations still need to be identified).

● The main venue for engagement at this stage is the World Urban Forum.

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WG 3: Social Change Beyond Consumerism (Participants: Robert Aitkin, Katrika Anggraeni, Erik Assadourian, Maurie Cohen, Sonali Diddi, Melanie Jaeger-Erben, Charlotte Jensen, Leah Watkins)

1. Assessment of Key Terms ● “States”: Consumerism is a condition that characterizes the mode of social

organization in many contemporary societies ● “Social change”: novel practices, what seems to be enabling and what seems to be

disabling? How can we learn from what happens? How we unlock underlying potential?

● “Beyond”: idea that suggests both construction and destruction. ● “Well-being” (normative dimensions): What is well-being? Is it possible to get a

global agreement on certain aspects of well-being (e.g., happiness index)? Can we devise indices of solidarity-based quality of life that also include notions of sufficiency? How much can you take without compromising the quality of life for others?

● “Visions” can be developed based on what we can “observe”/explore through the above aspects (social change + beyond + consumerism)

2. Reactions ● The disembedding from existing practices and institutions? ● Business cultures are changing and consumer culture is changing. Businesses are

recognizing the need to re-orientate and to align toward the SDGs and social issues related to their “field.” SMEs more closely related to their communities. What is the participatory nature of these kinds of businesses that we can learn from?

● Consumers appear to be taking power back through social media. Is this true? ● The hourglass society—the upper part (luxury/aspirational products and services) and

the lower part (the supply of goods, you go and pick the basics). The middle ground appears to be withering away.

3. Research Questions ● What are the resisting/reproducing forces that are trying to maintain consumer

society? What are the dynamics influencing consumption? What are the soft spots/the Achilles heels in the consuming economy?

● What are the dynamics at the forefront of the “innovation paradigm”? How are companies dealing with “keeping up”? How do they experience it as a problem?

● What gives “aspirational” products/goods their role? Why are they aspirational? ● If, in fact, the “drivers” of the “virtuous cycle of economic activity/growth” are losing

steam, how do incumbent actors of that cycle justify their future? What are their scenarios and visions? (Companies like BMW envision a complete system of BMW living that extends beyond just cars.) What are the business models for secular stagnation? (Maybe look to Peter Wells’ work on alternative business models).

● How do we take into consideration the “only caring about your kin” aspects? Can we

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create a global direction in SCP?

● Democratization of consumption? What are the emancipating practices of companies? ● The Patagonia example: the “don’t by this jacket” campaign generated skyrocketing

sales. What are the contradictions between business strategies for sustainability and more customary company strategies (for surviving)?

● What is the relevance of social license to keep doing what you do? Consumers looking for “redemption” in driving an “eco-car” and wearing an “eco-jacket” (but they reproduce practices of driving and dressing/shopping).

● Strategies for living with dissonances and strategies for being relieved from dissonance. How many ambiguities can people handle, and when does a level of ambiguity prompt changes? When have people “had enough”? Matters of responsibility? Delegation of responsibilities vs. taking responsibility? (Aspects of guilt—makes people not react)

● What can we learn from counter-movements and why do they appear? What seems to fuel them? Examples are “rolling coal,” ordering an extra steak when your dining partner is a vegetarian for sustainability reasons, people buying products and breaking them “because they can.” Also interesting is the “prepper” movement in the United States and similar movements in Germany and elsewhere (right wing people expecting eco-apocalypse).

● How do “re-orientations” happen in different kinds of communities? ● Participatory planning—seeding disruption and purposefully creating liminal

moments where everything is “shaken up” and it becomes possible to glimpse into alternative futures. How might we initiate small-scale disruptions?

● Leonie makes a note to explore the relevance of literature on “new institutions” which connects with practice theory. It derives from crisis theory: It is not the crisis that creates change, it is what follows after the crisis (the new configurations of actors happening after the crisis).

● What happens with indigenous products in the changing phase of sustainable consumption and production? What will happen with artisanal crafts (and the rich cultural heritage)?

● The Ifixit movement: videos and manuals about how to fix all sorts of things. Learning from these kinds of movements? How do they start? How do they take hold?

● How can societies become laboratories of innovation (and what is innovation)? ● Charlotte mentions practice theory and how we might include it into our WG. How

can we encourage practices taking center stage in analysis? We can learn from what is meaningful to people and how consumption plays a part in “performing everyday life.” Practices only exist when they are performed. We can learn from the performance of unsustainable practices (why do we keep reproducing them?) and we can learn from the performance of sustainable practices (Who carries out these

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practices and why? What does it take? What does it imply?) We can think about lifestyles as being made up of practices. Practices compete for our attention. Why are certain practices successful in grabbing our attention and why are some practices not able to do so? How and why do people defect from some practices? And how are we recruited to (sustainable) practices?

4. Further Questions to Explore (from Day 3 Discussion) How can we bring into closer focus the different challenges across the global North

and the global South? If consumer societies in the North are breaking down, it will have a significant influence on the conditions in the global South.

How do we move from weak to strong SCP? 5. Discussion about the “North-South” Aspects Development policies implicitly assume that a mass consumption-based society is the

end goal? This mode of thinking dates back to W. W. Rostow and the stage model of economic development that he formulated (see Figure 23).

Figure 23: Rostow’s Stages of Economic Development Model

● Can we discuss the underlying paradigms among various kinds of consumer

societies? Do they embody different modes of economic thinking and assign different roles and values to human beings and all living beings?

● How do we break with the dominant correlation that consumption = happiness? ● Can we generate a graph showing countries that have experienced a decrease in

consumption, stagnation in consumption, and increase in consumption? Can we access the reasons why/dynamics as to why the countries are going in these different directions?

● We do not have an alternative that provides some other point of reorientation in terms of sustainable living; in other words, we do not have a paradigm to include in Figure 23 that would help policy makers envision the “next step” in the progression. Is this something we can explore?

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● Can we imagine “fantastical machines” of non-consumerism, like the fantastical

machines that were envisioned during the 1600s and 1700s, which actually anticipated the industrial age in some ways?

● Consumer society is politically fairly stable. Would alternative systems of social organization offer the same degree of stability? Would they be politically stable?

● A critical perspective would observe the lack of utility in distinguishing societies in terms of their development status (e.g., developed vs. developing) because all societies are developing. By contrast, some countries are “overdeveloped.” Perhaps we should discard efforts to compare countries and instead talk about locally good practices.

● What is the role of consumption/consumerism in development policy? Sustainable development (at least of the non-technological variety) often entails “reversing” development (e.g., replacing the “milkman” and farmers markets with industrialized production).

● What is the paradigm that informs the current state of consumerism and images of development? Though implicit, these paradigms experience successful transmission around the world and are, for example, materialized in the “mushrooming” of shopping malls around the world.

● Linear growth paradigms are not abstract but inscribed into “mental infrastructures” that are infectious. How might we propagate sustainability-oriented mental infrastructures? What strategies exist for reversing current images and opening up windows for reflection that show different kinds of opportunities?

Examples

● Film No Impact Man (http://noimpactman.typepad.com) ● Book Material World by Peter Menzel (http://menzelphoto.com/books/mw.php) ● Finland-produced documentary My Stuff (http://mystuffmovie.com) 6. Product/Concrete Activities All WG members present for the discussion agreed to carry out at least one visioning

workshop (e.g., with students) by the end the year and to share the output with others. The results of these exercises could serve as a baseline for further consideration.

Everyone was also encouraged to take a look at the resources available as part of the Everyday Futures project at Lancaster University (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/social-futures/research/everyday-futures).

We further agreed to collectively be on the lookout for relevant material on consumption-based futures, for example, science fiction and documentaries. An initial list of sci-fi resources includes the following:

● http://www.postconsumers.com/education/sci-fi-movies-consumerism/ ● https://www.wired.com/2016/09/geeks-guide-advertising/ ● http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/01/21/264346947/the-absurdity-of-

consumerism

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● https://comparativegeeks.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/geek-culture-and-consumerism/ ● http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/11/sci-fi-movies-predicted-the-

future/violent-reality-television A very preliminary starter list of documentaries is appended below: ● Century of the Self (https://freedocumentaries.org/documentary/bbc-the-century-of-

the-self-happiness-machines-season-1-episode-1#watch-film) ● Empathetic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g) ● History of Consumerism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Unq3R--

M0&list=PLobNs_4_Pw5P5uHbkdJvRkSbR-0EXYpia&index=29) ● Big Ideas that Changed the World

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ29DQvopZo) WG 4: Communications and Outreach (Participants: Daniel Fischer, Philip Vergragt (partially), Andre Paz, Deric Gruen, Neal Gorenflo)

The discussion within the WG built on the initial framing document that had been prepared in advance of the workshop. The WG revisited the agenda set within the document and developed specific ideas and additional strategic approaches. The main objective of the onsite consultations in Annapolis was to sketch a working plan to guide the activities of the WG for the next phase. It was unanimously agreed that the WG aims to contribute both to further substantiating communication for sustainable consumption (CfSC) as a field of research, and to increasing the impact of CfSC in different strategically targeted domains. While the discussion mainly focused on the consumption side, it was also noted that production was equally relevant for the work of the group in a systems perspective. A number of relevant fields that the WG should engage with were identified:

● There is a need to strengthen the role of consumption in climate-change debates. So far, systems of SCP are largely decoupled from public debate about global warming, although SSCP represent a key leverage point. Herein lays an important communication challenge.

● While there are numerous inspiring social innovations and experiments taking place already all over the world, they still find only low coverage in mainstream communication venues. A challenge here is not only to attract more attention, but also to showcase these examples as nothing exorbitant and disconnected, but to frame them in ways that make these experiments accessible and intriguing to mainstream audiences.

● There is a need for new communication channels and to employ innovative strategies that engage with target audiences in their everyday settings, using viral, social, and decentralized measures. However, a complementary approach is needed that enables communicators to implant CfSC into more traditional media outlets by providing new stories with news value. This requires competencies among social innovators,

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researchers, and activists working on SSCP as well as new allies and intermediary agents capable of translating between media makers and the SSCP community.

● A strategic emphasis of the WG could be put on identifying and collaborating with potentially effective pressure groups (Halina Brown referred to the “second movement”) to influence agenda setting and increase the relevance of SSCP issues.

● In terms of communication approaches, interactive narratives were discussed as a potentially influential that could be used more prominently and systematically in CfSC. Approaches capable of showcasing social experiments that the WG could focus on are participatory media making, local reporting, and community journalism. Overall, CfSC based on the conceptual tenets outlined in the initial framing document should focus on the procedural character of change by facilitating interaction and following up, and therewith support change towards SSCP itself.

The Annapolis workshop resulted in the following future work plan. ● Setting the Stage: Development of an academic review paper that provides a baseline

assessment of approaches to CfSC, the existing evidence available on effects and effectiveness of these approaches, and research gaps and ways forward for future research. This paper will be prepared by WG members and represent a collaborative effort.

● Drafting a Stand-Alone-Proposal: The WG will further develop a strategy to look for its own funding. Part of the strategy is also to address funders that may not necessarily be interested in sustainability science (could be journalism, media, capacity-building).

● Utilizing Communication as a Leverage Point: The WG aims to provide “service” to SCP research projects being prepared (the WG seeks to draft a modular working package on how communication can enhance research in the project and promote its outreach. This package may then be incorporated into project proposals).

● Practical Outreach Activities: The WG seeks to increase the impact on the ground for CfSC. For this purpose, it will provide guidance and support on how to translate the message, how to reach target audiences, and how to design communication measures.

● Education for Sustainable Consumption: Education is a key actor in CfSC. The WG aims to include this sector in mapping activities and in project proposals. Activities will be developed to promote networking between the education community and the SSCP community, with the WG acting as an intermediary agent.

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Annex 1

List of Participants SESYNC-sponsored Workshop of the Future Earth Knowledge-Action Network on Systems of Sustainable

Consumption and Production Annapolis, Maryland, USA

May 3-5, 2017 Working Group/Participant Institutional Affiliation Country

A. Ecological Macroeconomics 1. Eva Alfredsson Swedish Agency for Growth Policy

Analysis Sweden

2. Magnus Bengtsson* Institute for Global Environmental Strategies

Japan/Sweden

3. Sylvia Lorek*† Sustainable Europe Research Institute Germany 4. Manu V. Mathai Azim Premji University India 5. Hein Mallee Future Earth Regional Centre for Asia Japan/Netherlands 6. Lars Mortensen European Environment Agency Denmark 7. Leida Rijnhout Friends of the Earth Europe Belgium 8. Dimitris Stevis Colorado State University United States 9. Ambreen Waheed Responsible Business Initiative Pakistan

B. Urban Provisioning 10. Leonie Dendler German Federal Institute for Risk

Assessment Germany

11. Tom Dallessio Next City United States 12. Neal Gorenflo Shareable United States 13. Jaco Quist Delft University of Technology Netherlands 14. Patrick Schröder* Institute for Development Studies (Sussex) United Kingdom/Germany

C. Social Change 15. Robert Aitken University of Otago New Zealand 16. Kartika Anggraeni SWITCH Asia/CSCP Germany/Indonesia 17. Erik Assadourian Worldwatch Institute United States 18. Halina Brown Clark University United States 19. Maurie Cohen* New Jersey Institute of Technology United States 20. Anna Davies*† Trinity College Dublin Ireland 21. Sonali Diddi Colorado State University United States/India 22. Melanie Jaeger-Erben Technische Universität Berlin Germany 23. Charlotte Jensen Aalborg University Denmark 24. Marlyne Sahakian† University of Lausanne Switzerland 25. Leah Watkins University of Otago New Zealand

D. Communications and

Outreach

26. Andre da Paz Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State Brazil 27. Daniel Fischer* Leuphana University Germany 28. Deric Gruen University of Washington United States

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29. Philip Vergragt* Tellus Institute United States/Netherlands E. Future Earth 30. Craig Starger† Future Earth Global Hub (Colorado) United States 31. Alyson Surveyor Future Earth Global Secretariat (Montreal) Canada

* Working group co-chair † Remote access participant in the workshop

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Annex 2: Workshop Program

Workshop on Further Development of a Future Earth Knowledge-Action Network on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production

National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) Annapolis, Maryland, USA

May 3‒5, 2017 Final Program

Tuesday, May 2 6:30pm Self-organized Dinner (Meet in Hotel Lobby) Wednesday, May 3 7:30‒8:30 Breakfast at Hotel or Local Restaurant of Your Choice 9‒10:30am Session 1 | Opening Session

Chair: Maurie Cohen | New Jersey Institute of Technology and SSCP KAN Core Group

Member Future Earth Overview | Hein Mallee, Regional Centre for Future Earth in Asia and SSCP

KAN Core Group Member (15 minutes) Role of Knowledge-Action Networks | Alyson Surveyor, Future Earth (15 minutes) Workshop Participant Self-Introductions (45 minutes) Questions and Discussion (10 minutes) Note-taker: Philip Vergragt

10:30‒11am Coffee Break 11am‒12:30pm Session 2 | Workshop Overview

Session Chair: Philip Vergragt | Tellus Institute and SSCP KAN Core Group Member Aims of the Knowledge-Action Network on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production | Magnus Bengtsson, Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and SSCP

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KAN Core Group Member (10 minutes) Intentions and Outputs of the Workshop | Maurie Cohen, New Jersey Institute of Technology

and SSCP KAN Core Group Member (10 minutes) Co-design and Co-Production | Hein Mallee, Regional Centre for Future Earth in Asia and

SSCP KAN Core Group Member (10 minutes) Thinking About Social Change | Halina Brown, Clark University (30 minutes) Discussion (30 minutes) Note-taker: Leonie Dendler

12:30‒1:30pm Lunch 1:30‒3pm Session 3 | Reflections from the Field I: Perspectives on Policy

Facilitator: Patrick Schröder | Institute for Development Studies and SSCP KAN Core Group

Member Eva Alfredsson | Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis (15 minutes) Lars Mortensen | European Environment Agency (15 minutes) Leonie Dendler | German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (15 minutes) Tom Dallessio | Next City (15 minutes) Discussion (30 minutes) Note-taker: Melanie Jaeger-Erben

3‒3:30pm Session 4 (Part A) | Working Group Meetings: Assess and Revise Mission Statement

WG 1: Ecological Macroeconomics and Political Economy of a Transition to Sustainable Lifestyles [Co-chairs: Magnus Bengtsson and Sylvia Lorek (via remote access)] WG 2: Urban Provisioning and Well-being (Co-chairs: Patrick Schröder and Philip

Vergragt, Tellus Institute) WG 3: Social Change Beyond Consumerism [Co-chairs: Maurie Cohen and Anna Davies

(via remote access)] WG 4: Communications (Co-chairs: Philip Vergragt and Daniel Fischer)

3:30‒4pm Tea Break 4‒5:30pm Session 4 (Part B) | Working Group Meetings: Refinement of Scope and Objectives

WG 1: Ecological Macroeconomics and Political Economy of a Transition to Sustainable Lifestyles WG 2: Urban Provisioning and Well-being WG 3: Social Change Beyond Consumerism WG 4: Communications

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5:30‒6:30pm Break 6:30pm Self-organized Dinner (Meet in Hotel Lobby) Thursday, May 4 7:30‒8:30 Breakfast at Hotel or Local Restaurant of Your Choice 9‒10:30am Session 5 | Reflections from the Field II: Communication

Facilitator: Philip Vergragt | Tellus Institute and SSCP KAN Core Group Member

Daniel Fischer | Leuphana University (15 minutes) Deric Gruen | University of Washington (15 minutes) Neal Gorenflo | Shareable (15 minutes) Andre da Paz | Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (15 minutes) Discussion (30 minutes) Note-taker: Charlotte Jensen

10:30‒11:00am Coffee Break 11am‒12:30pm Session 6 | Working Group Meetings: Formulating Research Questions

WG 1: Ecological Macroeconomics and Political Economy of a Transition to Sustainable Lifestyles WG 2: Urban Provisioning and Well-being WG 3: Social Change Beyond Consumerism WG 4: Communications

12:30‒1:30pm Lunch 1:30‒3:30pm Session 7 | Presentations and Discussion of Working Group Belmont Forum/NORFACE Proposals

Session Chair: Charlotte Jensen, Aalborg University WG on Urban Provisioning and Well-being | Patrick Schröder (Proposal Lead Applicant)

(30 minutes) Questions and Discussion (30 minutes) WG on Social Change Beyond Consumerism | Melanie Jaeger-Erben and Anna Davies,

Proposal Co-applicants (via remote access) (30 minutes) Questions and Discussion (30 minutes) Note-taker: Sonali Diddi

3:30-4pm Tea Break

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4‒5:30pm Session 8 | Working Group Panel Presentations and Discussion

Session Chair: Jaco Quist, Delft University of Technology WG on Ecological Macroeconomics and Political Economy of a Transition to Sustainable Lifestyles | Magnus Bengtsson and Sylvia Lorek (via remote access), WG Co-chairs (20 minutes) Questions and Discussion (25 minutes) WG on Communications | Daniel Fischer and Philip Vergragt (20 minutes) Questions and Discussion (25 minutes) Note-taker: Leah Watkins

5:30‒6:30pm Break 6:30pm Self-organized Dinner (Meet in Hotel Lobby) Friday, May 5 7:30‒8:30 Breakfast at Hotel or Local Restaurant of Your Choice 9‒10:30am Session 9 | Reflections from the Field III: Perspectives from Business and Social Change

Facilitator: Magnus Bengtsson, Institute of Global Environmental Strategies and SSCO Core

Group Member Leida Rijnhout | Friends of the Earth Europe (15 minutes) Ambreen Waheed | Responsible Business Initiative (15 minutes) Kartika Anggraeni | Collaborating Center for Sustainable Consumption and Production |

SWITCH Asia (15 minutes) Robert Aitken and Leah Watkins | University of Otago (15 minutes) Discussion (30 minutes) Note-taker: Manu Mathai

10:30‒11:00am Coffee Break 11am‒12:30pm Session 10 | Working Group Meetings: Moving from “Weak” to “Strong” Sustainable Consumption and Addressing the North-South Divide

WG 1: Ecological Macroeconomics and Political Economy of a Transition to Sustainable Lifestyles WG 2: Urban Provisioning and Well-being WG 3: Social Change Beyond Consumerism WG 4: Communications

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12:30‒1:30pm Lunch 1:30‒3:30pm Session 11 | The Future of Sustainable Consumption Research and Practice

Facilitator | Hein Mallee, Regional Centre for Future Earth in Asia and SSCP KAN Core

Group Member

Erik Assadourian | Worldwatch Institute (15 minutes) Dimitris Stevis | Colorado State University (15 minutes) Manu Mathai | Azim Premji University (15 minutes) Patrick Schröder | Institute for Development Studies (15 minutes) Discussion (75 minutes) Note-taker: Deric Gruen

3:30‒4pm Tea Break 4‒5pm Session 12 | Wrap up and Next Steps: Drafting a Research and Engagement Plan, Developing Research-Action Alliances, Identifying Funding Opportunities, Creating Provocative Communications, and Other Initiatives

Facilitator: Philip Vergragt (Tellus Institute and SSCP KAN Core Group Member) Note-taker: Hein Mallee

5pm Workshop Concludes

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Annex 3: Text of Presentation by Halina Brown

Thinking about Social Change,

Halina Szejnwald Brown Presentation at FutureEarth KAN Workshop, Annapolis, May 3, 2017

National economies in a growing number of countries—and, by extension, social and

political peace—are profoundly dependent on private consumption and growth. Therefore, those of us who see reduced consumption as a necessary element of an ecologically sustainable future, are essentially asking for a major social change: a different economy, change in key institutions, a culture and social practices in which consumerism would play a significantly diminished role, the production sector would be focused more on delivering services and public goods and less on consumer goods, and technological innovations would be applied in the service of less, rather than more, consumption. That is a very big challenge.

Short of some major societal ruptures, this process would most likely be, at least initially, incremental. That means a variety of small-scale initiatives in the policy, business, and non-profit and civil society realms. If such initiatives are to become real agents of change they all have to have a directionality, so that the social and technical learnings thus produced will converge in a consistent and powerful way. Thid necessitates that the proponents of such initiatives must intentionally and thoughtfully keep in mind the broader context in which their projects operate. Below I highlight four elements of this broader context that need to be kept in mind. 1. We need to think about macroeconomics. In the current economy, national wealth as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) is largely created through private consumption (70% in the United States, 60% in Germany). The price we pay for such circumstances is 1) ecologically unsustainable demand for energy and materials and 2) lack of attention to the equity dimensions of this economic activity vis-a-vis actual social needs and well-being. In politics it matters less how the GDP is created and who benefits from it than the fact that it is created at all. But our current and future societal needs demand an economy that puts a priority on public investment and social spending: on healthcare, childcare, education, less industrialized food production system, renewable technologies, and others. Therefore, when considering specific policies and campaigns toward reducing consumption we need to ask the following questions: Does it contribute to the necessary shift toward an economy less dependent on consumption? Does it contribute to the necessary shift toward an economy that reflects current social needs: more public investment and social spending? 2. We need to account for the power of ideology which is, of course, connected with the preceding point. It is neoliberal ideology that has been delegated the job of improving the well-being of people in the context of the “free” market. In Karl Polanyi’s words, it facilitated the disembedding of the economy from society. The price we pay for it includes growing

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inequalities in income, wealth, access to services, and opportunities.

A case in point is the current interest in livable “smart” cities: walkable, dense, rich in amenities, with public transportation, low levels of sprawl, economically thriving, and attractive to the so-called “creative classes.” In principle, this is ecologically and economically desirable. But leaving the development of cities entirely to the market creates huge inequities. The very people who kept these cities going during the years of neglect are being priced out of them.

We need to support these low and moderate income city inhabitants not only because it is fair and just to do so but also because it is they, owing to their modest incomes, who have low ecological footprints. (Here, I draw on the very well established absolute correlation between income and ecological footprint). The solution is not, of course, to abandon the idea of livable cities but to balance market forces with investments in public amenities and alternative forms of housing ownership, such as cooperatives and others. An example I like to give is the Penn South development in the midtown-Manhattan area of New York City. This is high-rise community of 8,000 low and moderate income residents who live in the midst of great wealth and high housing prices. It was developed during the Kennedy presidency by labor unions for its members. The labor unions are gone but Penn South continues to thrive partly owing to the continuing ideological commitment to social good, tax subsidies from the City, the fiscal model of a limited equity non-profit cooperative, and its democratic participatory governance structure. Penn South is a truly sustainable community with a small footprint and low consumption, serving the people who would otherwise be pushed out of the City. Activating such developments requires challenging neoliberal ideology. Beyond that, it is entirely within the realm of possibilities. 3. We need to look at post-consumerism through the cultural lens. Cultural anthropologist Cindy Isenhour, one of the contributors to our recent book entitled Social Change and Coming of

Post-consumer Society, has taught me that culture evolves together with underlying economic structures and institutions in a particular historical and geographic context. Take for example the cultural change that accompanied the rapid shift in the United States during the years following World War II, from cities to suburbs. This shift to a significant degree took place in no more than a single generation, and had profound impacts on household consumption of goods and services and the ecological footprint of an American family. More to the point, it created a host of new social practices and new values and beliefs: the understandings of what a good life is in a free, democratic, and prosperous society.

What drove this cultural change? Largely, it was the need to find new civilian markets for the enormously productive war-time industrial complex and to find employment for the returning military veterans, in combination with the availability of cheap land and the particularly American emphasis on autonomy and individualism. Through the cooperation of the government (infrastructure, guaranteed interest-free loans, free education) and labor unions preoccupied with increasing wages, and through the genius of the production and marketing industries, a whole new cultural understanding of a good life emerged, grounded in consumerism and anchored in sprawling and ecologically problematic suburbs and exurbs. And with it, a physical

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infrastructure, a whole industry of housing construction and home decoration, and institutions—the mortgage market, investment banking, financial speculations—that perpetuate this cultural understanding and which create huge barriers to change.

This example shows that it is fruitless to call for “change in values” as we often hear. Rather, we need to think about cultural change in tandem with a transformation in these fundamental societal structures. 4. We need to think about ways to unleash the potential of technologic innovations. When innovations in information technology gave rise to the so-called sharing economy, for a brief period there was an intense interest in these new economic forms as potential social change agents. The optimists hoped for a change in the culture of consumption and social relations, from an emphasis on individualism and private consumption to more solidaristic and communal forms. The hope was also for less material consumption. But, as Juliet Schor’s research has shown, the power of free-market ideology and incumbent institutions is such that these new business models have quickly become reoriented into “platform-capitalism” rather than part of a “sharing economy,” even among proponents of social change (Uber, AirB&B). But the more socially-oriented variants have not disappeared: Cooperatively owned car-sharing services, tool libraries, and makerspaces are established niche activities, and bike-sharing programs have been fabulously successful worldwide. The point here is that new technologies can be channeled into the service of social change but this needs to be a deliberate effort. It requires simultaneous harnessing of market forces and public policies and resources. Essentially, it requires a recognition of the potential of emerging technological innovations to facilitate societal objectives. The socio-technical transition framework is useful for conceptualizing these processes. I will not delve any deeper into these topics today but would like to invite you to think about the potential of self-driving cars to make suburban garages obsolete, to upend the insurance industry, to facilitate retrofitting suburbia, and to change the culture of cars and sprawl.

* * * Going back to Small Scale Initiatives. The world is abuzz with small-scale innovations in key provisioning systems (food, housing, mobility, leisure). These are oftentimes inspiring efforts, some even leading to lower ecological impacts or less consumerism. But to a sober observer it is clear that these initiatives, by themselves, do not have the power to affect major social change. The question is often asked: “How can we scale up or replicate” these experiments. But I think that it would be more appropriate to ask: “How can we take advantage of the larger scale social, political, or technological processes to enable them to grow and challenge the incumbent systems? How can we create the conditions under which the social and technical learning that emerges from these small-scale experiments alter the mainstream?”

I argued in my opening remarks that modest initiatives need to be given a direction by

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designing them in the context of the four frames that I described. But that is not enough. We also need to recognize and take advantage of windows of opportunity. Here, I draw on the work of prominent sociologist Erik Olin Wright who argues in favor of nurturing novel modes of social organization in the fractures of the dominant system. While not threatening the incumbent institutions and power relations, these may provide the ground work for more radical social transformations in the future by providing the vision, social and technical learning, and social capital. Emily Huddart-Kennedy, another of the contributors to our recent book, provides an instructive example in the “eat-local” movement in Canada. The movement has traditionally sought to be determinedly non-political. But the leadership increasingly recognizes that it creates great inequities (the $4 tomato) and is limited in its growth capacity. To overcome these impediments the “eat-local” movement must confront the powerful incumbent system of food production, including the design of government subsidies and the economics of food production, distribution, and retail marketing. These leaders are ready to reframe the eat-local movement as a political agent and, given an opportunity, to link it with other challengers of the dominant food system, such as the public health, social justice, and environmental communities.

In short, I am talking about deliberate harmonized and consistent framing of small-scale initiatives as potential change agents, given a window of opportunity. What can provide such windows of opportunity? The list can be long. Below I identify some possibilities.

It could be social movements against, for example, growing unemployment and underemployment and the need it creates to turn toward the caring and educational sector for economic opportunities. To draw again on Karl Polanyi, this would be a second movement emerging in response to the excesses of the first movement, namely, the free market.

Or it could come from a challenge to the industrial food-production system by the public health sector fighting against obesity and diabetes, or from an acute public health disaster, such as another outbreak of mad-cow disease, or from the environmental advocates concerned about the dangers of pesticides and other food-production externalities.

Or it may come from protests from professionally-minded millennials who are interested in urban life but are priced out of the gentrifying cities.

Or it could come from the economic interests which see financial opportunities in retrofitting the failing suburbs in the United States or in bringing economic life back into declining post-industrial cities.

Or it could come from technological innovations, such as self-driving cars, which might make suburban garages obsolete, facilitate the re-examination of land-use policies, and address the frustrations arising from choking traffic. Final observation. The opportunities on which the small-scale initiatives might thrive and grow are in the domain of social policies, not generally understood as directly relevant to reducing consumption. That means that sustainable consumption researchers and activists must form alliances with social change advocates in other domains such as, for example, new economics, solidarity economy, and public health, livable cities, and public health.

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Annex 4: Initial Framing Document of the Working Group on Urban

Provisioning Systems, Equity, and Well-being

Scope of Research and Activities (Draft 25 April, 2017)

The WG will focus on three interlinked issues relating to systems of sustainable

consumption and production (SSCP) in the context of urbanization and cities—urban provisioning systems, social inequality, and well-being. The WG will aim to build on existing research on urban sustainability, for instance recent reports such as the German WBGU report7 and the UNEP report on city-level decoupling,8 as well as on the United Nations Habitat 3 resolution9 and provide new perspectives and possible solutions.

The main research question this WG aims to address is: How can a transformation of SCP systems contribute to improving urban provisioning systems, reduce inequalities and enhance well-being in urban areas? The WG will take a case-study approach to develop city case studies highlighting variety and commonalities among cities, but will also engage in overarching and systemic studies. In particular, the WG aims to address the following aspects of unsustainable urbanization:

1. Consumer culture and lifestyles: In cities, higher income levels and a culture of consumerism lead to more material consumption and more waste. This includes the “nutrition transition” toward higher caloric and more processed food. These lifestyles are spreading worldwide, especially in urban centers, and are a major driver for increasing material consumption levels and urban footprints.

2. Increasing waste generation and emissions to air and water are pressing concerns of many cities, especially in developing countries; deteriorating quality of urban environments has negative effects on health and well-being. Waste and pollution are often the result of inefficient management systems, uncoordinated industrial activity, and automobile-based mobility systems. These situations call for alternative models of provisioning with lower environmental impacts while enhancing local economic development, innovation and job creation. The overall challenge is to lower aggregate resource-consumption levels and waste generation of urban environments.

3. Growing inequality within cities, especially in relation to consumption and production patterns and unequal distribution of benefits and burdens through urban provisioning systems (including unequal access to services like healthcare and education) is a growing concern. This includes quantitative relationships between income level, education level,

7 See http://www.wbgu.de/en/flagship-reports/fr-2016-urbanization/. 8 http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/city-level-decoupling 9 http://habitat3.org/wp-content/uploads/N1639668-English.pdf

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and age distribution and the ecological footprints in cities; as well as qualitative relationships and case studies. We have identified the following possible solution directions to address these issues: Strengthening the relationships among well-being, bottom-up citizen-led

community initiatives, sustainable lifestyles, and social innovations to establish localized SSCP in urban contexts with the goal to decouple urban footprints from urban quality of life and to promote sufficiency. In this context social innovations like sharing and exchange question the role and narratives of middle-class lifestyles. Sharing connects and cuts across consumption, waste management, cultures of ownership and property, and importantly production. Sharing is a socially constructive production-enabling practice as in the examples of tool libraries, makerspaces, co-working spaces, co-housing, shared equipment, pooled buying of supplies by farmers and other enterprises, and all types of knowledge sharing that always go along with these phenomena as well is as manifesting independently. Other approaches and potential solutions include sustainable urban consumption practices, urban living labs, urban transition experiments, urban visions and how they relate to developments in urban provisioning and more sustainable consumption, social innovation in cities for sustainable lifestyles. Numerous examples are provided in the European Union-funded Glamurs project.10

Circular economy (CE) innovations in urban contexts: Pollution from industry and manufacturing can be addressed through CE innovation in urban areas. CE innovations have the potential to create sustainable supply networks and provisioning systems and generate new employment opportunities. Repair businesses (or “repair cafes”) are an important element of the CE in cities, which are linked to social innovation and community initiatives. In cities of the global South the role of the informal sector in urban provisioning systems, in particular regarding waste management and recycling, is significant. Acknowledging the role of the informal sector and livelihoods of marginalized groups such as waste pickers is important to develop alternative narratives regarding the circular economy, with the goal of creating inclusive circular economy practices in cities.

Urban policies, governance mechanisms, and multi-stakeholder collaborations that can address the tensions among conflicting issues and create synergies across solutions to address multiple problems are needed. This includes coordinating top-down policy and urban planning processes while enabling innovative citizen-led initiatives that steer sustainability transformations.11 How do bottom-up and top-down

10 http://www.glamurs.eu.

11 M. Bonneau and François Jégou, Local authorities and their adaptation to new governance models: distilling lessons from a social innovation project in J. Backhaus, A. Genus, S. Lorek, E. Vadovics, and J.

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approaches for SCP interact in urban contexts? What are their underlying and potentially conflicting normativities? The systemic approach to SSCP is an important framework that needs to be adapted to various contexts and made applicable to different cities and urban lifestyles.

Increasing the role and contribution of big data, social media, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in facilitating change towards SSCP. While big data and IoT can provide accurate data about resource flows to make provisioning systems more efficient or measure environmental data to provide users with information about potential health impacts, it is important to ensure that smart cities are not only smart, but also inclusive. Big data can enable fact-based decision making, but equally privacy concerns need to be considered. The role of social media in enabling collaboration for community-based action and social innovation has been emphasized, and can also play an important role communicating successful transition experiments.

Specific research questions and projects will be developed based on these cross-cutting topics linked to one or more of the three provisioning systems (or demand areas) of food, mobility, and housing. (For instance, a systemic approach to sustainable consumption was developed in the SCORE! project, and the WG could extend that to lifestyles and urban settings as an overarching framework. This would include urban provisioning systems such as housing, mobility and food.)

1. Housing: Housing accounts for a major share of urban energy consumption—up to 30-40 percent in many countries.12 Urban energy transitions will be to a large degree determined by their success in dramatically improving the energy efficiency of the building stock. High-performance buildings (PassivHaus for instance) are a socio-technical solution to this problem. What are the possibilities of applying PassivHaus design for cities where new construction is happening (e.g., enabling leapfrogging in building stock)? In terms of materials, housing is a growing factor in the accumulation of building material stock which need to be taken into account in the design of urban CE systems.13 This issue is not only linked to reducing the energy demand of cities, but is closely linked to strategies aimed at making sustainable lifestyles easier through appropriate infrastructure and urban forms that enable well-

Wittmayer, eds., Social Innovation and Sustainable Consumption: Research and Action for Societal

Transformation. London: Routledge, forthcoming. 12 P. Huovila, M. Ala-Juusela, L. Melchert, and S. Pouffary, Buildings and Climate Change Status:

Challenges and Opportunities. Paris: United Nations Environment Programme, 2017. 13 A. Miatto, H. Schandl, and H. Tanikawa, How importatant are realistic building lifespan assumptions for material stock and demolition waste accounts. Resources, Conservation, and Recycling 122:143–154 (2017).

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being (e.g., community and family friendly urban forms). Another important issue is the size and occupancy of individual housing units. Sizes of houses and apartments have been increasing enormously in the last half-century, which offsets increases in efficiency. Communication and cultural change are key here. Thus changes in behavioral aspects, occupant behavior and per capita floor space are important non-technical elements which determine the energy consumption of buildings.

2. Alternative models of food-provisioning systems are proliferating around the world and some of them provide innovative approaches to provisioning urban areas. Food systems expose key conflicts between bottom-up and large, integrated solutions. In particular, there are fundamental conflicts between dominant regimes of food production that have been historically focused on food security and food safety and small-scale efforts to produce, distribute, and share food resources while addressing issues of inequality and other alternative sustainability goals. There are also tensions emerging as alternative approaches and resources are being co-opted and commodified in the effort to “scale up” alternative models. Research in this area will investigate cases of both large-scale and alternative food provisioning to see how these tensions are playing out in practice. We will investigate different (and potentially conflicting?) sustainability implications, the utilization of new technologies (in particular nano-, bio-, and AI technology) within different movements, the question what “alternative” food practices mean in different contexts, and how dominant food regimes are accommodating (or not) alternative food provisioning and management practices. We will also look at which aspects of food provisioning and food waste seem to be the most promising from a sustainability perspective and most “ripe” for alternative approaches. Relatedly, what policies and other triggers are required to promote urban (food) solutions? Moreover, urban agriculture could contribute to food security by addressing health problems, counter trends to processed foods, reduce transportation of food by emphasizing conservation, biodiversity, recreation, local identification, and social cohesion. There is also likely a role for urban gardening and other forms of intercultural and collective gardens. In addition, certain specific food-consumption practices such as meat consumption could be addressed. It is surprising that the consumption of (red) meat, which is one of the most environmentally damaging foodstuffs, has not become the focus of a worldwide campaign. Why is this so; and under what condition could that change?

3. Transportation/urban mobility involving walkable cities, inclusive transport infrastructure, car-sharing systems, and autonomous (electric) vehicles. In recent years, a lot of progress has been made to address mobility in urban areas. The main issue is to reduce the use of private automobiles in cities and beyond, without compromising access to mobility. Urban planning, transit-oriented development, increasing density, access to public transit, and bike infrastructure are getting more attention from many city planners and municipalities. Still, car mobility is hardly

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decreasing mainly due to low fuel prices and entrenched habits and the “automobile culture.” There is scope for an integrated approach which includes car companies (who should become sustainable mobility providers), fuel prices which should include a carbon tax to offset greenhouse-gas emissions, but also communications and advertisements that aim at a cultural change toward shaming unnecessary automobile use and excessive size of vehicles.

Domain

Sustainable lifestyles and social innovation

Inclusive circular

economy innovations

Urban governance and

stakeholder collaboration

Big data, social media, artificial intelligence

Housing Food Mobility

The research will be centered on case studies as well as more holistic and conceptual

methodologies that apply a systems thinking approach and be inter-disciplinary, combining qualitative social science approaches with quantitative methods such as material flows and urban metabolism.14 In addition, existing case studies in the literature cited here will be evaluated and possibly enhanced from a SSCP perspective by focusing on:

What constitutes sustainable lifestyles in cities (dematerialized, density, communality, efficiency and sufficiency)?

What are promising social innovations? What are structural and cultural impediments (e.g., dominant culture and advertising,

infrastructure, economic incentives, competitiveness, wider economy and governance, globalization)?

What are conditions for success (strong sustainability vision from the top, supportive policies, conditions for bottom-up experiments, integration with other policies like local economic development)? The social aspects of how material consumption and production is shared and distributed

among different social groups will provide insights into the issue of inequality. Expected outputs of this WG are case studies of specific cities in which the various issues and the interactions among them are analyzed, as well as overarching studies which address systemic transformations in cities including conditions for success, how to integrate bottom-up and top-down, how to integrate sectoral approaches (housing, transportation, food) with overarching issues like stimulation of the local economy, jobs creation, strengthening of neighborhoods and communities, stimulation of producer and consumer cooperatives and B-corporations, and 14 X. Bai, A. Surveyer, T. Elmqvist, F. Gatzweiler, B. Güneralp, S. Parnell, A.-H. Prieur-Richard, P. Shrivastava, J. Siri, M. Stafford-Smith, J.-P. Toussaint, and R. Webb, Defining and advancing a systems approach for sustainable cities. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 23:69–78 (2016).

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strengthening of civil society organizations.

Examples of possible case studies include: ● Amsterdam Metropolitan Institute for Sustainable Solutions (AMS) which is in the

Netherlands a collaboration between Delft University of Technology, Wageningen Univerity, MIT, and the city of Amsterdam (Jaco).

● City of Somerville, Massachusetts (Lily). ● Freiburg, Germany (Leonie). ● Elaborating case studies in the German WBGU report: Mumbai, Cairo, Copenhagen,

Guangzhou, Ruhr, Kigali, Sao Paulo, Novi Beograd.15 ● Elaborating case studies in IRP/UNEP report on decoupling in cities (thirty case

studies).16 The WG will engage with stakeholders involved in local policy making including

business, civil society, academia, and local governments to bridge the gap between science and policy. Membership of this WG is open to persons active in public policy, progressive business and civil society initiatives, consultants, and researchers. The aim is to develop a research and action agenda as part the wider Research and Engagement Plan of the SSCP KAN.

Key Contacts: Patrick Schroeder, Institute of Development Studies (p.schroeder@ids.ac.uk) Philip Vergragt, Tellus Institute (pvergragt@tellus.org)

15 See http://www.wbgu.de/en/flagship-reports/fr-2016-urbanization. 16 See http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/city-level-decoupling.

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Annex 5: Initial Framing Document of the Working Group on

Communications and Outreach

Authors (alphabetical order): Valentina Aversano-Dearborn, Andre da Paz, Daniel Fischer, Deric Gruen, Georgina Guillen-Hanson, Robert Orzanna, and Philip Vergragt

Introduction

This WG on Communications and Outreach (WGCO) will orient its work around two objectives. First, we will develop a research and action agenda on communication as one of four issue-focused WGs contributing to the KAN objectives. Second, we will draft a plan for communication and outreach for the collective KAN. This latter communication plan will be developed in a separate document. Focus and Contributions of the WGCO

The WGCO will contribute to SSCP KAN objectives to address:17 ● How to forge a more integrated understanding of SCP. ● How to increase the societal/policy relevance of a “strong view” of SCP, enabling

engagement in actions toward more sustainable living.18 The WGCO will contribute to these objectives by focusing on the nexuses between

knowledge-empowerment and action-impact from a communication perspective. The WGCO will devote attention to the frames, topics, narratives, modes, formats, and instruments of communication and explore their impacts on engagement, empowerment, and action for more sustainable systems of consumption and production. It seeks to address both:

The knowledge side of the nexus by Identifying different frames and narratives featuring in discourses about SSCP in

different societal arenas. Collecting and systematizing existing examples of communication approaches and

campaigns (including the potential of social media). Using inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to synthesize existing scientific

evidence and practitioners’ experiences with regard to effects and effectiveness of different communication approaches and strategies.

And the action side of the nexus by

17 http://www.futureearth.org/future-earth-sscp. 18 The “strong view” of SSCP contends that sustainable production and consumption goes beyond “greening” through efficiency gains and a focus on individual behavior change and encompasses broader macro-structural and systemic changes of the economic system, institutions, culture, and power relationships. See, for example, S. Lorek and D. Fuchs, Strong sustainable consumption governance: precondition for a degrowth path? Journal of Cleaner Production 38:36–43 (2013).

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Providing typologies/heuristics that offer an overview and guidance on different

communication approaches and strategies to advance more integrated understandings, impacts, and a “strong view” of SCP.

Developing tools and giving recommendations for effective approaches and strategies to communicate SSCP and respective dissemination plans (communications, but also education/training/capacity building) to equip practitioners with these tools and the competencies needed to use them effectively.

Contributing to a strategic communications plan for the KAN SSCP (including strategies for overcoming obstacles to the uptake of strong SCP approaches and positioning to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances when they arise).

The objectives of the WGCO are displayed in Figure 26.

Figure 26: Objectives of Working Group on Communications and Outreach

An overall challenge for the promotion of SSCP as pursued by this KAN is to

acknowledge the embeddedness of individual consumer practices in broader contexts and structures. In recognition of such structural and cultural conditions, it seems critical to acknowledge the complexity inherent in consumption practices in communication research and practice. Hence, the WGCO considers tailoring communication efforts solely to end-consumers to be an overly narrow approach. Instead, a multi-stakeholder and multi-layered perspective is adopted that accounts for the richness of factors influencing consumer choices. The agenda of the WGCO thus considers communication to be a two-way effort; on the one hand, it appeals to the end user and unlocks the individual agency for change that will ultimately push for changes in legislations, production processes, and products on the shelves, this is, to enable a bottom-up approach. On the other hand, communication efforts should be focused on decision makers, policy makers, institution builders, and multi-stakeholder alliances to build partnerships that

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include these actors and institutions as well as end consumers. Consequently, audiences for this work may include:

People in power: targeting individuals and institutions at key leverage points in different societal subsystems (e.g. politics/government, business, education, the media).

Segments of the public: piloting communication projects to promote changes in public understandings and mindsets to trigger mobilization, political engagement, and positive lifestyle changes.

Understanding of Communication and Outreach 1. Communication of, about, and for SSCP

The work of this WGCO is underpinned by a broad perspective on communication that goes beyond the narrowly confined notion of communications as a strategic, instrumental, and marketing-oriented approach. Communication in its broadest sense refers to processes in which representations of the social and natural world are exchanged and shared (and therewith change).19 Communication is a contested concept, with understandings of sustainability-related communication differing significantly: from instrumental and transmissive (communication of a particular understanding of SSCP by means of one-way communication vs. modes focused strongly on fostering public deliberation, participation, and discourse, stimulating communication about what SSCP could mean by means of two-way communication); with these modes come different objectives (e.g., communication of: persuasion; communication about: social learning).20 The WGCO will review both communication of and communication about SSCP, but ultimately our emphasis is communication for SSCP and its potential impact for changing systems of production and consumption into more sustainable ones. This mode of sustainability communication focuses on process of individual and social sense-making that seek to empower people to take an active role in transformation processes to SSCP.21 Such understanding of communication reflects the normative assumptions underpinning the idea of sustainability (i.e., capacity building for reflexive, adaptive, and participatory decision-making), meaning that it is insufficient to merely encourage people to act in what experts/political leaders have set out to be a “sustainable” way. 19 D. Fischer, G. Lüdecke, J. Godemann, G. Michelsen, J. Newig, M. Rieckmann, and D. Schulz, Sustainability communication, pp. 139–148 in H. Heinrichs, P. Martens, G. Michelsen, and A. Wiek, Eds., Sustainability Science. An Introduction. Dordrecht: Springer. 20 J. Newig, D. Schulz, D. Fischer, K. Hetze, N. Laws, G. Lüdecke, and M. Rieckmann, Communication regarding sustainability: conceptual perspectives and exploration of societal Subsystems, Sustainability 5 (7):2976–2990 (2013) 21 M. Adomßent and J. Godemann, J. Sustainability communication: an integrative approach, pp. 27–38 in J. Godemann & G. Michelsen, Eds., Sustainability Communication: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and

Theoretical Foundation. Berlin: Springer, 2011.

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2. Communication as social learning

Given the magnitude of systemic changes needed to realize sustainable systems of consumption and production, it is crucial to not only seek to foster a better understanding of SSCP in societal groups or to promote public acceptance of respective interventions in people’s lives through communication. Moreover, what communication needs to contribute is to enhance

individual and collective capacities to learn “our way together to a more sustainable future in dynamic multi-stakeholder situations of uncertainty and complexity.”22 Such processes of “learning collectively to foster systemic change”23 have been vividly discussed in recent years as social learning. While social learning is itself a contested concept, it commonly entails three distinct processes: “one that looks into the practice of the individual, and relates it to what is happening to other members of the group, whilst collectively relating these reflections to what is happening in the broader system that frames their practice.”24 In such perspective, social learning emphasizes key features of communication for SSCP. In a social learning perspective, communication in the context of SSCP is challenged to overcome two often contested modes of traditional communication approaches: first, to extend traditional mono-directional forms of communication that focus on conveying issues around SSCP defined by experts, scientists, and elites to broader lay audiences. To stimulate social learning, communication is challenged to stimulate discourses about a range of issues that concern diverse social actors and to provide different perspectives on societal transitions.25 Second, social learning aims to take a broader perspective on the interrelatedness of individual behavioral change and societal transitions. From such a perspective, social experiments where various social actors with different worldviews collaborate on the local level in concrete projects and engage in processes of deep and mutual social learning could possibly provide powerful examples that may be diffused through peer-to-peer exchanges rather than traditional “communications.”26 22 S. Sterling, S. Learning for resilience, or the resilient learner? Towards a necessary reconciliation in a paradigm of sustainable education. Environmental Education Research 16(5):511–528 (2010). 23 Mutimkuru, Nyirenda, and Matose (2002) cited in Lotz-Sisitka. 24 H. Lotz-Sisitka, Ed., (Re)views on Social Learning Literature: A Monograph for Social Learning

Researchers in Natural Resources Management and Environmental Education. Grahamstown: Environmental Learning Research Centre, Rhodes University, 2012. 25 H. Brown and P. Vergragt, Bounded socio-technical experiments as agents of systemic change: the case of a zero-energy residential building. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 75:107–130 (2008). 26 P. Vergragt, H. Brown, V. Timmer, D. Timmer, D. Appleby, C. Pike, S. Eaves, R. McNeil, J. Stutz, and Z. Eaves. Fostering and Communicating Sustainable Lifestyles: Principles and Emerging Practices. Nairobi: UNEP (http://scorai.org/wp-content/uploads/wordpress/FULL-REPORT-UN-Fostering-Communicating-Sust-Lifestyles-Dec-2016.pdf).

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3. The research and action agenda

The work of the WGCO will focus on a number of specific themes and approaches in communication for SSCP and will utilize a variety of inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches.

Engagement with SSCP hotspots in communication: The question of what should be sustained or transformed, what actors bear which responsibility for such transformation, and what constitutes SSCP are principal organizing questions (POQ)27 that are negotiated and framed in communication processes. In light of this, the WGCO will focus on how such POQs are addressed and shaped in and through communication processes, including (but not limited to) the following issues.

The role of power, politics, and networks (Deric and Philip): Communication exists within, and maybe constrained by, social and economic power dynamics. How does communication for SSCP relate to current power structures? Can it be successful? How much must it conform vs. challenge the dominant paradigm? What forms of social organizing and network building have demonstrated sufficient capacity to overcome structural barriers in communication, politics, and economics? An obvious challenge is the power of dominant media and advertisement. The WGCO could review the literature and develop strategies of how to deal with media and advertisement dominance. Another issue is the dominance of the economic growth paradigm to solve societal problems like unemployment and economic stability. The WGCO could collaborate with parts of the degrowth movement to address this issue and to search for and promote economic models that are more compatible with SSCP. A third issue is the power of social media. There is a clear opportunity here to target audience groups and to bring people together on specific issues related to SSCP, and to form and endorse intentional communities. A fourth issue is the dominance of existing governance institutions such as governments, trade unions, business organizations, faith-based communities, and many others. There are opportunities to work with these institutions and also to work on their transformation into institutions that endorse SSCP. Finally, there are many opportunities to harness the power of private business: to work with big business to transform their strategies; to support alternative business models like cooperatives and B-corporations that have sustainability as their main business objective; and to support business strategies that aim to change from products to immaterial sustainable services.

The role of individual agency (Ginnie): Although theories of behavior change and approaches such as nudging and choice architecture tend to regard individual decision-making as the result of an environment that prompts people’s responses, recent experiments such as living labs and collaborative spaces have opened a door to

27 A. Dobson, Justice and the Environment. Conceptions of Environmental Sustainability and Dimensions

of Social Justice. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.

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a new type of solution development. As with visioning, the challenge remains in translating the outcomes from the plan, or findings, into the “real world” and with this challenge comes the task of communicating these activities in a way that helps bridge the “reality gap.” Communication plays a crucial role for changing attitudes, from passive, yet aware, individual/community into an active and informed agent of change, starting by taking actions to shift one’s lifestyles. The individual agency is often defined as a sense of agency or sense of ownership that relates to the “ability to imagine and effect desired change”28 and is intrinsically related to the ways individuals make their lifestyle choices. Empowerment is another outcome of a latent sense of agency, the belief “yes, we can!” represents the conviction of being capable to drive change, both individually as a consumer and systemically as a citizen, as well as awareness of the implications that one’s actions have and could have. Tapping into the sense of agency of individuals can happen through various ways, from traditional information channels to interactive experiments of gamification in which a critical play model can serve not only to entertain the users but actually trigger social critique and even become an intervention itself to help the users understand larger, more complex, issues in the “real” world.29

Media, advertisement, and marketing organizations (Robert, Valentina, Ginnie): The role of media in all forms strongly influences systems of production and consumption. The advancement of hyper-targeted advertisements, the inseparability of digital life and advertising, the comparisons engendered by social media, and much more are critical questions that communication studies can address. Social media will give the WGCO opportunity to experiment with online-communication tools. There is an increasing amount of information about sustainability and its relation to lifestyles, nonetheless, commercial media still fails to integrate the content of sustainability messages with “normal” content, preserving this notion that sustainability is only for just a few (e.g., tree huggers, hippies) or is something too radical that the average citizen has no role to play. Advertisement is continuously endorsing consumption traits based on acquisition of more material goods rather than thinking about sufficiency and it is important that communicators, either as media makers, producers, marketing organizations and advertisers harness the message of sustainable lifestyles through the use of efficient existing formats that raise aspirations (i.e., soap operas) as well as explore new formats (e.g., blogging, via

28 K. Abbas, I. Christie, F. Demassieux, B. Hayward, T. Jackson, and F. Pierre, Sustainable consumption and lifestyles? Children and youth in cities, pp. 357–361 in International Social Science Council and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Eds., World Social Science Report:

Changing Global Environments. Paris: OECD and UNESCO. 29 M. Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009.

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social media) that bring sustainable lifestyles to different types of audiences, making the topic more inclusive and tailored to the different aspirations and contexts of the consumer. The increasing number of “reality shows” together with emotionally-oriented content, are continuously spreading messages that users are subconsciously collecting as part of social norms. The consumption of these media products is often seen as “activity to relax” and “disconnect” from “real life,” yet, opinions are being formed, attitudes are being shaped and entire lifestyles are being displayed for judgement, either as means of inspiration or avoidance. The power of the media, advertisers, and marketers is immense. To turn them into allies to communicate sustainable lifestyles, research has to be presented in a way that speaks their language as well, that makes media content appealing to the producers of content as they can then be bolder in the exploration of formats that can captivate their audiences and invite them to change their lifestyles into more sustainable ones.

Communication approaches for SSCP

The shift from mono-directional and transmissive to more interactive and deliberation-oriented modes of communication asks for new communication approaches capable of achieving the more ambitious aims of nurturing collective social learning processes. In light of this, the WGCO will put its focus on the emergence of new communication approaches and the scientific investigation of their effects, including (but not limited to) the following ones.

The role of visions and visioning (Valentina and Ginnie and Philip): There have been many projects that have used visions and visioning as a means of communication. It has often been claimed that a strong positive future vision is mobilizing for individuals and social actors to develop strategies how to realize such a vision in practice. It is however unclear how effective those visions have been in changing production, consumption, and lifestyles. This could be a research project evaluating visions and visioning and how effective these have been in starting and improving processes of social change towards SSCP, we could pursue a practical project co-developing visions as part of change processes and evaluating them as part of the process. A method used during a workshop at the degrowth conference in in Berlin 2012 relied on “visioning” explicitly for collective sustainable lifestyle changes. “Dragon dreaming” is a method that is often used in grassroots movements or transition towns to mobilize people and enact ideas for change.30 Some of the most successful processes for strategy development that have visioning in their core are those designed as participatory backcasting activities, often seen as “bottom-up” initiatives, that help to have a clear pathway of partnerships and deliverables to drive actions toward the fulfillment of the desired vision. The Appreciative Inquiry model

30 http://www.dragondreaming.org/dragondreaming/what-is-it-exactly/dreaming/

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also offers a flexible framework to enable visioning processes that lead to concrete actions and commitments as it is based on the exploration of strengths and ways to turn barriers into opportunities for change. Furthermore, it would be interesting to invite a few researchers who have published on the role of visioning for historical political mobilization such as historians and political scientists who analyzed big shifts/movements in history such as civil rights movement in the United States.

New ways of communicating sustainable lifestyles (Andre, Valentina): We aim to research and explore the applicability of newly designed tools using latest technologies already deployed in other fields of communication on strategies for social impact. It includes the possibilities of interactive tools and filmmaking, such as web-based documentaries and cinematic virtual reality (i.e., interactive and immersive narratives) like Highrise31 and Clouds Over Sydra.32 The idea is to understand their potential as part of wider strategies of communications that include multi-platform and social media outreach. In this perspective, the WGCO will investigate inspiring initiatives, campaigns, and experiments as well as their potential for replication. The focus is not only on the content of communication, but more prominently on the process by which communication has resulted in specific impacts. The emphasis here needs to be on evaluation and development of new projects on sustainable lifestyles: what works, what are criteria for success and failure, and what can be learned from examples?

Research approaches in communication for SSCP

The design of research conducive to the objectives of the KAN requires appreciation of different bodies of knowledge and modes of knowledge production within academia and beyond. It is also characterized by a transformative orientation, spurred by the purpose to contribute to the advancement of strong SSCP. The work of the WGCO thus resonates with some overall characteristics of sustainability science33 and will seek to combine disciplinary with inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches to investigate the frames, topics, narratives, modes, formats, and instruments of communication for more sustainable systems of consumption and production.

31 http://highrise.nfb.ca. 32 http://with.in/watch/clouds-over-sidra. 33 W. Clark, Sustainability science: a room of its own. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(6):1737–1738 (2007).

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Implementation Scheme for the Research and Action Agenda

The work of the WGCO will build on earlier and ongoing activities by its members34 as well as knowledge and expertise that is available through existing networks (e.g. through the UNEP project on communicating sustainable lifestyles),35 or the networks that are part of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI).36 The following table represents an initial conceptualization of this work. It illustrates how the objectives of the WGCO may be addressed with specific research and/or action approaches. It also sketches the scope of possible outputs that may result.

34 Another relevant network is the group that coalesced around development of a concept paper for the Ten-Year Framework of Programs on Sustainable Consumption and Production (Mobilizing Research for Sustainable Lifestyles or MORE-SL). 35 Vergragt et al, Fostering and Communicating Sustainable Lifestyles: Principles and Emerging

Practices. 36 http://scorai.org.

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Objectives (Possible) Research/Action Approaches

(Possible) Output(s)

K1 Frames: identifying different frames and narratives featuring in discourses about SSCP in different societal arenas

Discourse analysis of narratives underpinning communication regarding SSCP (e.g., strong vs. weak sustainable consumption); gaming and exercises with stakeholders to reframe their views on SSCP

Scientific paper, policy paper; discourse map for media-makers; reframing business and governance strategies to include SSCP elements

K2 Examples: collecting and systematizing existing examples of communication approaches and campaigns (including the potential of social media)

Comparative case studies across different media; experiments with communicating various examples through (combinations of) communication tools; engage in collaborative processes with stakeholders to test new communicative approaches

Online database; including outcomes of collaborative experiments

K3 Effectiveness: using inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to synthesizing existing scientific evidence and practitioners’ experiences with regards to effects and effectiveness of such different communication approaches and strategies

Systematic literature review, focus group/expert interviews (academics/practitioners), stakeholder dialogues, inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge integration and synthesis; interviews with selected or random consumers or members of intentional communities

Scientific papers, policy paper, inter- and transdisciplinary conference/ workshops, game(s), living lab simulations, live vlogs

A1 Typologies: providing typologies/heuristics that offer an overview and guidance on different communication approaches and strategies to advance more integrated understandings and a ‘strong view’ of SCP

Literature review of existing typologies, expert review, interviews with “users”, user-experience focused approaches

Scientific overview paper; materials for communication students; communication material for the average consumer (as a test for awareness raising)

A2 Tools: developing tools and giving recommendations for effective approaches and strategies to communicate SSCP and respective dissemination plans (communications, but also education/training/capacity building) to equip practitioners with these tools and the competencies needed to use them

Development of a toolbox, conducting usability studies with target groups (future user of the toolbox to identify their needs); opening a YouTube channel for story sharing

Online interactive toolbox; materials for communication students and practitioners; communication material for the average consumer (tested previously); this material could be a set of flashcards or a game of sorts

A3 Strategy: contributing to a strategic communications plan for the KAN (including strategies for overcoming obstacles to the uptake of strong SCP approaches and positioning to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances when they arise)

Identify key communities of researchers and practitioners with aligned missions; strategic communications guidance for communicating the work of the all work groups in the KAN

TBD (Annapolis)

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Annex 6: Collected Comments by the Working Group on Communication and

Outreach

Acknowledge changing media-reception behavior (from mass media to social media). Include artists in communication efforts. Engage with companies (e.g., develop a code of conduct for advertising, review literature on

what we can learn from successes and failures of existing initiatives in this field). Citizen responses: Copenhagen/EPA has no good experiences with collecting input from

citizens (who is going to use the data in which ways, how do you keep data updated). There is a need to be critical and careful with the term “sustainable consumption” because

most of the time it refers to less unsustainable consumption. Focus on political messaging but do not forget about the political dimension of sustainable

consumption in “lifestyle communication.” How and what can we learn from other fields on changing cultural norms and values (e.g.,

smoking, driving oversized cars) We need new working formulations that embraces human living in its full breadth (work,

consumption, life). This is a real challenge to communication. Consider metaphors and the concepts they reflect. What they reflect (ideas of “upscaling”

and “mainstreaming”) may be replaced with “seeding” or mushrooming” There is a need to seek alliances (not only with people and organizations) but also with

motifs and causes. How can different social movements (e.g., against gentrification) be connected to SCP?

One of the KAN’s objectives is to provide “timely visualizations and science communication products.” What can the WGCO contribute?

Be aware of the traps of participation. How can communication engage in meaningful co-design of change that does not end up being token participation that effectively sustains the status quo?

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Annex 7: Summary of “Pop Survey” Results

Participant Why is this KAN Important

to You? Top Three Crazy Ideas Best Thing Done Looking

Back Ten Years from Now

#1 It focuses on or promises trans-disciplinary, co-creation, and real action which I strongly believe in and have been promoting.

1. Co-create a product in collaboration with a technology entrepreneur which has the potential to enhance social equity + SCP. 2. Have SCP (in true sense) taught as a core course at high school and graduate school. 3. Policies and laws promoting SCP as part of trade and other government level projects and initiatives especially in developing countries.

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#2 This KAN fills a very clear

need within the research community. Unlike other topics such as cities, health, and oceans which tend to be operating in very crowded spaces, the SSCP KAN fills a unique niche. Because of this reality, this is also the only KAN for which there is a strong bottom-up interest from Colorado State University where I am located.

1. Develop a mobile app for supply chains related to SCP, fair trade, transparency, labor issues, just transitions, and so forth similar to buycott.com and labeyondthelabel.com and the sustainable seafood apps. Or, rather than creating an additional app, we could aim to provide the existing apps and platforms with more information related to SCP. We could partner directly with Buycott or Beyond The Label. I do not see any universities listed as partners on their websites. For example: take a picture of a barcode on a piece of clothing or can of tuna, find out lots of information about how it is made, where it is made, and what the implications of a purchase are. For example: Dole has a traceability system where you can see a Google map of the farm that your banana comes from (see http://www.dole.eu/dole-earth). This could scale via regulations or consumer demand. 2. One thing that I think the resource extractors do better than the sustainability people is drafting model policies and legislation that is ready to go when they find the political will to push their agenda. This is something that conservative think tanks do, which is why when Trump became president, there were thousands of draft bills ready to go to Congress. These draft bills were not written from scratch overnight. They are prepared strategically well ahead of time. Possibly with collaboration of lawyers, there needs to be a bank or database of draft legislation for SCP ready to go and then when the political climate becomes favorable, lobbyists need to go out and put the draft policies in the hands of lawmakers.

Cement our ability to keep in touch with each other, either through the Future Earth Open Network or another website or a mailing list, Facebook group, or other communication. Perhaps the formation of a professional society!!???

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#3 Because I believe in vision and

abilities of Maurie, Philip and Halina.

Documentary Film, television show, and Youtube channel on sustainable consumption and production systems.

The Oscar for best new TV show…

#4 Allows me to explore possible synergies with people that may not agree with me fully but share broad priorities.

1) Introduce workers and labor unions into the mix; 2) Reintroduce work into the mix 3) Learn a new set of terms.

Become part of a counter or non-hegemonic global network or movement.

#5 Interacting with engaged colleagues, fueling inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration, making a contribution to increasing the reputation and importance of SCP on the global research landscape (FE)

Develop a Green Donald Duck Adventures Book

To not have followed short-term hot topics or funding schemes, but to have focused on the essential core questions in SCP beyond science fashion (role of consumption in meeting needs and sustaining our planet)

#6 Honestly, I do not know. It is new to me, but I have decided to participate because I like the people and their research supports our point of view as a publisher and mission as NGO

1. Documentary about sustainable consumption and production in cities 2. A long-term action-research pilot project saturating a town or neighborhood with various SSCP innovations, see if it works, replicate it if it does. 3. Great literature review and original research clearly outlining effective ways to communicate SSCP

I do not know specifically, but now is the time for bold action. We should be swinging for the fences. We have nothing to lose and our future as a species probably depends on taking big risks.

#7 It is important to me because I work on SCP in different ways.

1. To come up with future visions for radically different SCP systems and look into their implications. 2. To explore where SCP and circular meet and where they are different. 3. To develop a win-win collaborative relationship with the action and practitioner sides and develop usable knowledge for them.

Defining a research agenda for SCP that shapes research and action agendas worldwide

#8 For access to a network of similarly minded researchers for collaboration.

Create resource kits for educational purposes at all levels. Develop frameworks for business reporting to align with the UN sustainable consumption and production goal.

To be known for putting these issues firmly on the public agenda and taking this conversation to the mainstream

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#9 To find a community to

discuss, to build alignment, and to collaborate on moving toward more sustainable consumption; and to give me inspiration and hope!

1. Challenge unsustainable consumption regimes, strategically 2. Embed ourselves within diverse, somewhat aligned movements 3. Start a reality TV show

Create foundations for more powerful actors to adopt our ideas and drive them into widespread use.

#10 Offers opportunities to work with very knowledgeable and dedicated people. The opportunity to build up something new that tries to transgress conventional boundaries. Its focus on one of the really key aspects of a sustainability transformation. A space for critical thinking. The linkage to Future Earth, with increased chances for funding, enhances legitimacy/credibility.

Developing some new concepts (such as ecological footprint, planetary boundaries, the doughnut or decoupling) that convey key ideas in relation to the why and how of SCP. That these concepts become widely referenced and used far beyond the KAN community itself.

#11 Because it binds knowledge and action on these topics that I have cared about.

1. To shape the evolution of the conversation we are in the midst of having. 2. Develop a process for sustained engagement and action going forward. 3. To synchronize this effort with the considerable churning that is also underway in India on these matters (albeit with a different language) in the social movement space as well as a few scattered academic venues.

To build bold and creative functioning partnerships that shape knowledge and action for strong sustainability; to make common cause with civil society and social movements in the less-industrialized, industrializing countries (that account for 80% of the world population). The sentiment of this group is right on the money. Its future relevance depends on: 1. Demonstrable effectiveness on turning around the energy and material footprints in Europe and the US. 2. Reach and resonance with these vocabularies, discourses and practice outside Europe and the US.

#12 This is an important opportunity to connect to a broad range of thought leaders and to build partnerships to help advance our mission to inspire social, economic, and environmental change in cities.

1. Share information. 2. Encourage submissions to our website about changes in cities. 3. Find ways to create video journalism, including mini-documentaries.

Provide specific examples of how urban provisioning has changed, that can inspire other local leaders to tackle the challenge.

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#13 It builds on previous work I

have done with some of the people involved, so in a way it is continuation of what I have been doing. But it is also an opportunity to link up with new people and together amplify the work we have been doing and make it bigger.

1. Publish a book. 2. Make a movie. 3. Plant a forest (of trees and mushrooms).

Really bend the trend and make SCP happen.

#14 Summarize research on how to facilitate change and use that summary to advise agents of change in key fields

Documentary and infographic on SCP for social media, educational, and other use. I also like the Nature article idea (would help to reach the dominant actors)!

Use research to facilitate large- scale change.

#15 Enlarge my network, get and give inspirations, and do more intercultural research and action

1. To organize an international critical consumer mob and evaluate its effects. 2. To build a database of case studies, cultural probes, survey and interview results, and so forth and engage in a multi-national, multi-stakeholder process of interpreting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions (“mega-co-design-project”). 3. To build an international crowdsourcing platform with tools, strategies, trainings, communications material, and so forth to observe, understand, and foster change and to enhance mutual learning, feedback, and supervision.

Be part of the compilation, implementation, and evaluation of a global agenda for a sustainable future.

#16 It is for a NGO very important to exchange ideas and goals with (progressive) researchers with a common long-term vision

One of the organizations that ”translates” science-results in advocacy recommendations and delivers needs of civil society for research questions

To develop a scheme of contraction and convergence of use of natural resources that is accepted by IRP and that is part of UNEA negotiations in 2033.

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#17 All initiatives aiming to do

something for sustainability are important and the KAN is a chance to connect to knowledgeable people.

1. Re-price global economic output based on how it improves SDGs (or human well-being). 2. Write down a new narrative about the ecological and social sustainability development. 3. Write a state of the art article on SCB for Nature or Science together.

Influence the discourse on SCP though the above.

#18 The connection between knowledge and action is close to my heart. Also it is important to get recognition from the research community about the importance of SCP research.

1. Raise $10 million for a professional media burst. 2. Create a website with really cool interactive narratives and videos. 3) Interest a movie star to work with us on a blockbuster Hollywood movie showcasing sustainable lifestyles and how to get there.

Work with 5 medium-large cities around the world to introduce SCP policies.

#19 KAN is unique because it attempts to actively bring together many different groups of people with various backgrounds and expertise to collaborate and further SCP. I think this is not going to be easy as each group has its own strategy and approach to SCP, but it is a promising way to move SCP forward.

A few ideas that can be considered: 1. Regular meeting (networking for exchanging knowledge). 2. For this purpose we will need funding and therefore need to also work with companies. Well, companies are one of the key players who will need to adopt SCP measures, too. So this is not overemphasizing their roles, but rather embracing all key actors in designing an action plan accepted by those players. 3. Recruit involvement of financial institutions in a thematic meeting of the KAN to hear their opinions and learn about their priorities in relation to SCP or sustainability in general. Banks and financial institutions have their own “logic” which we need to recognize and they are important especially in providing access to finance for SMEs wishing to embrace more sustainable ways of production, to name a few.

In ten years, one of the best things that we could do is to make our SCP action plan realized or implemented for example by particular businesses. Similarly, it would be a success if we could help some governments from developing countries to formulate their national SCP policies and help them implement those policies at the local or national level. Bringing SCP onto the national agenda is already a success in itself, when there was nothing as SCP policy before. However, it will be something when we as SSCP KAN could be part of its implementation (a partner for governments for SCP).

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#20 (Another) try to bring the

sustainable consumption (research) an important step forward on the global level. I would hope that meaningful concepts and messages appear from it which lead to relevant change toward more sustainability.

1. To establish “consumption corridors” and through approach create the conditions of sustainable well-being for all. 2. To ensure that the interests of workers and consumers of products and services are more important for companies than those of the shareholders.

#21 Because this KAN addresses the drivers of environmental change instead of just describing it.

1. See if the idea of consumer society is also applicable to health/medicine. 2. Publish the main agenda of the SSCP (a mostly social science undertaking) in a major natural science journal.

Reorient the public discourse away from a singular focus on economic growth.

#22 I love the “globalness” and inclusiveness of the KAN, and it is very fulfilling to be part of a group of people from all around the world, working toward a sustainable future. Particularly in a world where nationalism and fear of other people is growing, there is something very gratifying in being part of a group that intentionally aims to work together, across nations, cultures, and genders. I think Future Earth is a very important organization and platform for research and action for sustainability!

Besides joining other KAN members in writing proposals together, for interesting projects, I think it would be 1. Great to write a joint contribution to Nature or Science, as Maurie and Hein introduced on Day One. I think it would be a very strong message to send. 2. Cool to maybe produce some interactive workshops, like the ones Tom introduced as part of Next City, focusing on sustainable consumption. 3. Interesting to start a movement – like the Science March, or Earth Day, we could start a Sustainable Consumption March or Day.

I would love to be able to say that I was part of unlocking ways of communicating successfully about sustainable consumption and production to policy makers. It would be so cool if we were to end up contributing to the making of a global SCP law (if that is even possible), like the Swedish Climate Law.

#23 An opportunity to doing things that are not business-as-usual; bridge the gap between the sustainable consumption and sustainable production communities. An opportunity to develop solutions WITH stakeholder from the start.

1. Consider alternative ways of enabling transdisciplinary and action-oriented research for the urban well-being WG. 2. Develop pilot projects on circular economy in small neighborhoods such as Ecoblock, Urban Prosperity Prize on RENEWW Zones 3. Develop pilot projects in global value chains with business alliances 4. Use different formats (such

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as Challenges and prizes) to entice community to undergo action-oriented research 5. Explore the potential of community initiatives and social innovations-- focusing that those that provide sustained livelihood and job creation and exploring how the successful models emerge, what are the enablers, how they are implemented, what kind of barriers they encounter, and how they can be replicated and scaled-up within a neighborhood, city, nation, region, sector. 6. Test out research findings in local grassroots initiatives 7. Build portfolios of ongoing projects which can enhance each other’s objectives, while also be packaged to funders and other partners to create net-new initiatives (e.g. Accelerator Project idea). Has the strength to build on projects that are already funded and bridge gap between applied science and stakeholder community 8. Produce alternative and innovative synthesis products such as solutions mapping per stakeholder type, mapping and Innovation Databases that could be useful for stakeholders and easily funded.