Environment, consumption and everyday life practices

The project studies how people, for environmental reasons, try to change lifestyle, with a particular focus on reduced consumption. Previous research about sustainable consumption has primarily focused on barriers and opportunities for individuals to change some part of their consumption in favour of something else, e.g. to change an environmentally damaging product for something that is labelled as environmentally friendly. However, it is increasingly emphasized how global problems, like climate change and biodiversity loss, are associated with the huge volume of our total consumption. There is so far limited research on peoples’ responsibilities, including the challenges and opportunities they face when they try to reduce consumption for environmental reasons. Therefore, an important theoretical and empirical contribution with this project is how infrastructure as well as cultural and social aspects facilitate or prevent such lifestyle change. For example, many consumers are embedded in family life that discloses many other desires and aspirations along environmental values.

Three sub-projects are included: i) based on interviews and memory notes, barriers and opportunities that people experience when they try to reduce consumption for environmental reasons are analyzed; ii) based on public communication about environmental issues, the way lifestyle changes are motivated, and how responsibility is discussed and allocated between private and public actors are analyzed; and iii) based on group interviews, the family as an arena for environmental choices is analyzed.

Publications with connections to this project:

Boström, Magnus & Klintman, Mikael (2019) Can we rely on ‘climate friendly’ consumption? Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 19(3) 359–378.

Boström, Magnus 2020. The social life of mass and excess consumption. Environmental sociology. 6(3):268-278. OA: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1755001

Boström, Magnus (2019) Rejecting and embracing brands in political consumerism. In Boström, Magnus; Micheletti, Michele & Oosterveer, Peter (eds) Oxford International Handbook of Political Consumerism. Oxford University Press.

Boström, Magnus & Klintman, Mikael (2019) Mass-consumption and political consumerism. In Boström, Magnus; Micheletti, Michele & Oosterveer, Peter (eds) Oxford International Handbook of Political Consumerism. Oxford University Press.

Uggla, Y. (2019). Taking back control: Minimalism as a reaction to high speed and overload in contemporary society. Sociologisk forskning, 56 (3-4), 233-252.

Uggla, Y. & Uggla, F. (2016). CHANGE: The European Commission's Climat Campaign as a Technique of Government. I: H. Bulkeley, M. Paterson och J. Stripple, Towards a cultural politics of climate change: devices, desires, and dissent (ss. 24-36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Soneryd, L. & Uggla, Y. (2015). Green governmentality and responsibilization: new forms of governance and responses to "consumer responisibility". Environmental Politics, 24 (6), 913-931.