Political-administrative policies for sustainable household behaviour

A sustainable society will have to be accomplished not only through new production methods, but will also require different consumption patterns, if only because these are necessary to follow up on sustainable production. While influencing production processes to the extent needed is indeed a difficult task for any ‘environmental governance’ system, the complementary influencing of consumption processes poses even more difficult challenges. Consumers are everybody, in a role that is often regarded as belonging to the private sphere of life. ‘Command and control’ measures soon meet cultural and ethical barriers. Market incentives to consumers need corrections, so that ‘prices tell the truth’. But with very open economies and strong ideologies in favour of freeing markets as much as possible from all government interference, price manipulation is far from a switch board freely at the disposal of environmental policy. Next, consumers are numerous, too numerous to deal with separately, too diverse to regard them as one ‘target group’. There are organisations that strive to represent them in their role as consumers, but these organisations’ membership is only a low percentage of consumers and they cannot conclude agreements binding anyone else than these organisation themselves. Of course there is representative democracy. Most consumers are voters. But this might illustrate the more how diverse consumers are, rather than show the way to a viable strategy of consumption oriented policies. This chapter deals with ways to face the challenge posed when trying to govern into the direction of a sustainable consumption. The central thesis will be that consumption, rather than a separate target group or issue, is a perspective on sustainability issues and hence a basis for a complementary policy strategy for environmental governance.