I would like alert you to this special issue. Ideally read some of these articles and post your reactions to ONE-L@aomlists.pace.edu to generate a collegial rumble.
Best regards,
Charles Wankel
ONE-L List Director
St. John's University, New York
http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~wankelc
Add me on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wankelc
MANAGEMENT EDUCATION FOR GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY is on Amazon etc.
SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE DAY: Sustainable consumption and production: Policy efforts and challenges, Natural Resources Forum 34 (2010).
CLICK FOR IT: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117987076/home?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
EXCERPTED FROM DAVID LE BLANC 'S INTRODUCTION:
This issue of Natural Resources Forum is devoted to sustainable consumption and production (SCP), one of the themes of the upcoming discussions at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in 2010 and 2011. SCP, a concept that dates back several decades, has recently regained the spotlight under the influence of several global crises and trends, which have sparked budding interest in more sustainable living. The recent oil and food crises have highlighted once again the dependency of our global economy –– and its Western model –– on finite natural resources. The implications of the rapid emergence of China, India and other economies in terms of natural resources consumption have spurred a broad literature examining the consequences of a global alignment on the production and consumption patterns set by OECD countries. These ideas have increasingly been brought into the public arena through powerful messages such as the "Five earths" image popularized by the work on the Ecological Footprint index (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996). There has also been a growing realization that economic growth has not been synonymous with an absolute decrease in the consumption of natural resources, what economists call "absolute decoupling". While limited success has been registered in some sectors for some economies, when trade is accounted for, it appears that by and large advanced economies are consuming more and more natural resources and generating more and more waste. Recent work accounting for consumption of natural resources over the last century puts humanity squarely in front of ever-rising trends (Krausman et al., 2009). There seems to be broader and broader recognition that a decoupling of consumption and growth will not happen on its own. The crisis has given a new lustre to the role of governments, if not in steering societies, in facilitating more sustainable choices on behalf of its citizenry and consumers. As Candice Stevens argues in her article, governments should do more than educate citizens on sustainable or greener consumption: they should regulate and provide incentives for producers to foster the transition to goods and services that more closely match public preferences.
Acknowledging the potential role of governments to facilitate the transition to a more sustainable economy opens the question of which policies should be selected. There are conceptual and practical difficulties in answering this question. First, and a common obstacle to all policy evaluation work, it is generally quite challenging to estimate the impacts on consumption patterns of individual policies when those policies operate within an array of taxes, subsidies and regulations that may be contradictory and inconsistent across sectors. Therefore, knowing "what works" is not as easy as it might seem. More fundamentally, as shown by recent work in social practice theory, consumption behaviour is a very complex system of practices governed by dynamics that extend way beyond the control of consumers themselves or of specific policy interventions. Consumption patterns did not emerge as a result of policy interventions, but as the result of centuries of development in collective conventions and socio-technical systems. As such, the ability of policy interventions to bend or break such dynamics significantly is not obvious. While a consensus seems to have developed that no single policy can address SCP in a satisfactory way and that an array of policies targeting the different actors is needed, there remain
many gaps in our knowledge of the costs, effectiveness, and reasons for success or failures of policy mixes in addressing consumption goals and targets. More broadly, there seems to be an increasing skepticism that decreasing the ecological impacts of the global economy can be realized by relying only on clever marketbased policies such as taxes, subsidies, provision of information, and other incentives. That is, marginalist thinking may not by itself bring in a reduction in the consumption of natural resources. The financial crisis has given more space to the notion that market systems may not spontaneously drive the economic fabric in the "good" direction - in this case, a society less profligate in the use of its finite resources. The crisis has given new currency to old ideas such as Herman Daly's notion of a "steady-state society". It has also led thinkers to question without putting into question the fundamental mechanisms at the heart of the capitalist system. Among a burgeoning literature, the work of Tim Jackson and the UK Commission on Sustainable Development is one of the most influential so far (see Jackson, 2009). In his perspective, the reliance of the capitalist model on growth is the fundamental obstacle to achieving a sustainable society, and "solutions" that do not address this issue are in fact dead ends.the possibility of achieving sustainability at a global level .
.....
There is of course no way that a handful of articles can do justice to an issue as complex as SCP.By its very nature, SCP is multi-faceted and can be examined through many lenses. My aim in composing this special issue has been to provide the NRF readers with an impressionist picture, where individual articles are the dots hopefully composing a coherent picture when considered together. In short, the policy research agenda on SCP remains widely open and largely uncharted. I hope that this special issue can stimulate interest in this fascinating and rapidly evolving realm.
Sustainable consumption and production: Trends, challenges and options for the Asia-Pacific region (p 4-15)
Wei Zhao, Patrick Schroeder
Linking sustainable consumption and production: The government role (p 16-23)
Candice Stevens
Green procurement in the Asian public sector and the Hong Kong private sector (p 24-38)
Linda W.P. Ho, Nicholas M. Dickinson, Gilbert Y.S. Chan
Policies to promote sustainable consumption: Innovative approaches in Europe (p 39-50)
Gerd Scholl, Frieder Rubik, Harri Kalimo, Katja Biedenkopf, Ólöf Söebech
Sustainable consumption in Brazil: Identification of preliminary requirements to guide product development and the definition of public policies (p 51-62)
Ângela Maria Marx, Istefani Carísio de Paula, Fabiane Sum
A differentiated approach for sustainable consumption and production policies (p 63-70)
Christian Brodhag
The vertical integration of Lisbon and sustainable development strategies across the EU: How different governance architectures shape the European coherence of policy documents (p 71-84)
Reinhard Steurer, Gerald Berger, Markus Hametner
Viewpoints
"Should sustainable consumption and production be a policy priority for developing countries and if so, what areas should they focus on?" (p 85-88)
Zhenling Liu, Serban Scrieciu, Leena Srivastava, Luis G. García-Montero, Gregory Borne, Xin Deng, Geurt van de Kerk, Norbert Wohlgemuth, Chiung Ting Chang, Matty Demont, Luz Stenberg, José Rafael Peña de la Cruz, Rudzani Makhado, Kgabo Masehela