Prosumption for sustainable consumption and its implications for sustainable consumption governance

Abstract

The market economy has turned individuals in Western societies from self-sufficient, low-throughput producers of goods to highly interdependent, high-throughput consumers of goods. It has also turned our societies into massive resource-consuming and waste-creating operations. Dramatically improved production methods offer access to new goods at lower prices. This has shifted the economic logic of maintaining and repairing goods to replacing them frequently instead. However, this development has also turned once resource-efficient sufficiency economies into industrialized overconsumption societies with high environmental impacts. There are two main reasons for the replacement of sufficiency with overconsumption; (1) productivity gains in industrial production processes resulting in increased purchasing power, and (2) sophisticated marketing and sales tactics.