Sustainable consumption, resonance, and care

Abstract

Consumption is a key issue for more sustainable development. In our quest to understand the role of care for more sustainable consumption, we make use of the concept of resonance. Resonance assists in explaining the role of care for more sustainable consumption, emphasizing the relationships people have with the world. Through resonance, we add to debates on sustainable consumption that focus on the good life. Resonance describes a responsive mode of being-in-the-world and therefore depends on how we (passively) experience the world and how we (actively) appropriate or assimilate it. It is a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the world through which both are shaped. According to Hartmut Rosa, resonance as world relationship can be detected on three axes on which individuals relate to the world: (1) horizontal (people and politics), (2) diagonal (things), and (3) vertical (collective singulars such as nature, art, history, and religion). Using these axes as heuristic, we analyze solicited journaling method as well as in-depth interview data. Caring relationships can be detected along the three axes of resonance. Resonance thus helps to advance the characteristics of care as not limited to relationships between humans but also for things or collective singulars such as nature. Resonance also highlights how caring relationships support sustainable consumption in a positive way by focusing on its relational and reciprocal dimensions.

Caring and striving: toward a new consumer identity in the process of consumption reduction

“…Apart from when the reduction takes the shape of a specific challenge, such as for example a "no-buy year" or to completely stop eating animal products, the ambitions to reduce one's consumption seldom have a set final goal. Gram-Hanssen, 2021;Godin, 2022;Karimzadeh and Boström, 2023;Wahlen and Stroude, 2023), and, further, calls for placing care at the center of our economies and societies as a necessary step toward the radical transformation that is needed to prevent ecological breakdown and achieve social justice (Lorek et al, 2023). So, how can we understand the many dimensions of care in relation to consumption and to the development of a new consumer identity?…”

“…Considering the increasingly urgent need to curb overconsumption and move to consumption practices that are compatible with the planetary boundaries [see, e.g., Alfredsson et al (2018) and Akenji et al (2021)], it is crucial to understand more about the personal and social obstacles experienced by individuals who try to reduce their consumption, how such obstacles may be avoided or counteracted, and how social support may facilitate consumption reduction. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this understanding by combining the perspective of sufficiency-oriented lifestyle changes (in this case consumption reduction) with a perspective of care, building on the growing interest for care within the field of sufficiency and sustainable consumption (Godin and Langlois, 2021;Karimzadeh and Boström, 2023;Lorek et al, 2023;Wahlen and Stroude, 2023). The multidimensional nature of care is useful to describe the complexities and ambiguities involved in the consumption reduction process and carries explanatory potential when addressing why it can be so difficult to follow through with one's reduction ambitions.…”