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This study investigated relations between consumers' sustainable development self-efficacy, attitudes, norms and intentions to purchase sustainable groceries such as ecological and fair trade foods. Demographic variables were also investigated. Attitudes and norms were positively associated with intentions to purchase sustainable products. The importance of different types of attitudes and norms for explaining sustainable consumption depended on the facet of purchasing intentions that was investigated. Self-efficacy explained variance in purchasing intentions over and above attitudes, norms and demographic characteristics. Of the self-efficacy components, people's perceptions of their indirect impact gained by encouraging others to contribute to sustainable development showed the strongest association with purchasing intentions. This could mean that believing that one can have an impact on other consumers is a strong motivator for buying sustainable products. Implications of these findings for practitioners and environmental policy are discussed.

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An important step in promoting sustainable consumption is to find out how consumers understand the concept of sustainability. In this paper, we report on a study among Norwegian consumers in which we explored their understanding of sustainability at two levels. First, we investigated consumers' understanding of the general sustainability concept; specifically, we studied how important the following five sustainability dimensions are in consumers' conception of sustainability: the environmental, social, economic, temporal and the developmental dimension. Second, we investigated how consumers' understanding of sustainability manifests itself in consumption decisions: We studied consumers' opinions about how important various attributes are for sustainable products and which product labels they consider indicative of sustainable products. We found that all five sustainability dimensions occurred as elements of consumers' understanding of the sustainability concept. The environmental dimension, the social dimension and the developmental dimension were particularly outstanding. With regard to attributes that are important for sustainable products, consumers placed high emphasis on recyclability of the packaging, fair payment of producers, low energy use and low carbon dioxide emissions during production and shipping. Humane animal treatment was also considered an important attribute of sustainable products. The product labels that were considered most indicative of sustainable products were the Nordic Swan and the Norwegian Debio label. Consumers' judgments of how indicative the labels are of sustainable products were related positively to familiarity with the labels.

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