This is a repository copy of Building common cause towards sustainable consumption: A cross-generational perspective.

This article has been published in a revised form in Geoforum. Diprose, K. et al. ( 2019) 'Caring for the future: climate change and intergenerational responsibility in China and the UK',

Sustainability and sustainable development are prominent themes in international policymaking, corporate PR, news-media and academic scholarship. Definitions remain contested, however sustainability is associated with a three-pillar focus on economic development, environmental conservation and social justice, most recently espoused in the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. In spite of its common usage, there is little research about how sustainability is represented and refracted in public discourse in different national contexts. We examine British national press coverage of sustainability and sustainable development in 2015 in a cross-market sample of national newspapers. Our findings show that key international policy events and environmental and social justice frames are peripheral, while neoliberalism and neoliberal environmentalism vis-à-vis the promotion of technocratic solutions, corporate social responsibility and 'sustainable' consumerism are the predominant frames through which the British news-media reports sustainability. This holds regardless of newspaper quality and ideological orientation.

This article explores the concept of sustainability in a postsocialist context through an analysis of official discourses relating to sustainability in more than 700 articles published in the Chinese‐language newspaper People's Daily in 2015. The Chinese conception of sustainability, which emerges as a top‐down model built upon traditional ideologies and Chinese socialist legacies, inclusive of economic growth, environmental sustainability, social justice and quality of life. This Chinese official discourse of sustainability places less emphasis on individuals' rights and more on the state's interests, and is encompassed in the Chinese concept of the “ecological civilization.” This article argues that if we are to build a full picture of the internationalized idea of sustainability we need to adopt a more international approach to thinking about the issue, drawing upon the sustainability‐related discourses constructed from different national contexts using local languages and rhetoric.

This article examines how ordinary people practice the notion of sustainable consumption in relation to their everyday lives and experiences of the wider environment and, further, how these understandings relate to public discourses of sustainability in contemporary China. The paper is based on an empirical analysis of 129 narrative interviews with local residents in urban Nanjing, collected as part of an interdisciplinary and international comparative research project. It argues that in popular narratives, a combination of being green living a healthy lifestyle which has less impact on the environment and being rational through qinjian jieyue by reducing both consumption and waste is regarded as key to sustainability. Such attitudes align with recent Government campaigns to create an environmental-friendly and resource-conserving society. However, the analysis demonstrates how this sustainable way of consumption is restricted by Chinese mianzi and guanxi cultures, the anxieties caused by scares related to food safety, a social welfare system that does not promote a sense of security, and a widespread distrust of products made in China which has diffused across society. We argue that, studies on discourses and practices of sustainable consumption must strive to take more account of diverse local contexts and socio-cultural frameworks.