The Influence of Religion on Sustainable Consumption: A Systematic Review and Future Research Agenda

Abstract

Background: Due to the current environmental crisis, sustainable consumption (SC) behaviour and its drivers has gained significant attention among researchers. One of the potential drivers of SC, religion, have been analysed in the last few years. The study of the relationship between religion and adoption of SC at the individual level have reached mixed and inconclusive results. Methods: Following the PRISMA guidelines, a systematic review of articles published between 1998 and 2019 was conducted using the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Search terms included sustainable consumption, green consumption, ethical consumption, responsible consumption, pro-environmental behaviour and religion. Results: This systematic review reveals that contradictory results are due to methodological and theoretical reasons and provides a unifying understanding about the influence of religion on SC practices. Results highlight the role of religion as a distal or background factor of other proximal determinants of environmental behaviour. Conclusions: This paper contributes to the literature concerning SC by synthesising previous scholarship showing that religion shapes SC indirectly by affecting attitudes, values, self-efficacy, social norms and identity. The review concludes with a research agenda to encourage scholars the study of other unexamined mediating constructs, such as beliefs in after life, cleansing rituals and prayer, moral emotions, moral identity, the role of virtues and self-restrain.

Probing Environmental Sustainability Through the Diversity-Pollution Nexus—a Global Perspective via PM2.5 and NO2

“…Thus, religious beliefs, ideas and practices may drive the adoption of energy consumption behaviour by fostering salient and inner motivations for behavioural change. Other studies have shown that ethnicity and religion are the most important determinants of consumer behaviour (Bailey & Sood, 1993) and more specifically, consumer ethics, evaluation of product quality, product pricing and materialism (Orellano et al, 2020). In view of this evidence, it is plausible to think that ethnicity and religion at the individual level may influence the patterns of environmental sustainability as well.…”

“…Among the drivers that have been receiving growing attention in the literature are ethnic and religious diversity (Amin, 2018(Amin, , 2019. It is estimated that 84% of the world's population belong to a religious group, where approximately 32% are Christians, 23% are Muslims, 15% are Hindus, 7% are Buddhists, 0.2% are Jews, 6% are folk or traditional religionists and less than 1% are people of other religions (Orellano et al, 2020). These religions are a significant source of wisdom, morality and ethics for individuals (Orellano et al, 2020).…”

“…Ethnic and religious diversity with environment sustainability is an emerging interdisciplinary subfield in the academic disciplines of anthropology, religious ethics, the sociology of culture and religion, and theology, with environmentalism and ecological principles as the primary focus. By the 1990s, many scholars of culture and religion had joined the debate and begun to generate a substantial body of literature discussing and analysing how environmental quality is valued in the world's various ethnic and religious systems (Orellano et al, 2020). Abruzzi et al (1982) explained in their paper regarding the relevance of ecological theory in explaining human ethnic differentiation and attempted to find out if the formation and maintenance of ethnic boundaries could be one area of social behaviour to benefit from the explicit application of ecological modernization theory.…”

“…Conceptually, ethnic and religious diversity may be negatively or positively associated with airfriendly environment depending on the channels of influence. Drawing on Hofstede and Usunier (2003) cultural dimensions, a growing body of literature has examined how a country's cultural features influence energy efficiency and environmental sustainability and performance (Orellano et al, 2020). The literature has shown that cultural values, which vary across different ethnic groups, are important to environmental outcomes because such values determine the attitudes of groups and individuals that collectively determine the institutional and social capacity for energy efficiency and environmental sustainability (Amin, 2019c;Güney, 2019).…”

Citizen Science and Citizen Energy Communities: A Systematic Review and Potential Alliances for SDGs

“…Our initial results-or lack thereof-required a slight adjustment to the PRIMSA guidelines for a systematic literature review. The objective, four-stage process-selection, screening, eligibility, and articles included in analysis-has proven effective for visualizing the academic output related to various environmental issues [42,43].…”