Call for Participation [Special Session] :

Sustainability Transition: Towards a social-psychological understanding of human motivations within the production-consumption system

 

We are looking for participants for a session that we are organizing as part of the conference "Transforming consumption-production systems towards just and sustainable futures" hosted by the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI), the European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production (ERSCP) and Wageningen University & Research (WUR), July 5-8, 2023 in Wageningen, The Netherlands.

 

Session title -> Sustainability Transition: Towards a social-psychological understanding of human motivations within the production-consumption system

 

• Proposed Session: Panel Discussion of 90-120 minutes
  •    Moderator: Soumyajit Bhar, Krea University
  •    Session Type: Paper presented as part of a panel
   

Abstract

There are two major conceptual limitations in the rapidly expanding sustainability transition literature (Fragkias and Bonne 2017; Upham et al. 2020). First, this literature’s underlying theory of change emphasizes the individual agency to bring this change. This overemphasis on the individual agency is oblivious to the political economy-based production-consumption framework, which argues for a position at the intersection of individual choice and structural forces to delineate pathways to achieve sustainable production-consumption (Mathai et al., 2021). The other conceptual limitation is not paying due attention to the private motivations for anyone to supposedly voluntarily adopt a sustainability transition pathway that certainly will entail a private sacrifice in terms of lower material conveniences or the dream of living a life of higher material conveniences (Wollenkard and Hamann 2021). However, the prevailing notion of freedom that dominates this world of consumerism-led growthism is freedom of consumer choice. Not only material possessions but when healthcare and education are rapidly getting privatized, how far can we expect individuals to choose private sacrifices for public gains?

We cannot afford to forget that people consume because of these varied sets of private motivations and the environmental impacts of the consumption-production nexus is always an unintended consequence (Akenji, 2013). The moral argument for reducing one’s private consumption toward environmental benefits faces a significant conundrum. The motivations for consumption are always private, whereas the perceived environmental gains due to lowering consumption demands are public. So, the question is why one would forego her private motivations close to one’s being and sense of wellbeing for perceived public gains in the form of spatially dispersed and temporally distanced improvements of environmental factors, particularly in a globalized production-consumption system. There is a need to conceptually theorize the private-public conundrum from the point of individual motivations.

This panel will be an initial attempt to conceptually unpack these private motivations for subscribing to sustainability transition at the intersection of social psychology and political economy. The objectives of this panel would be to explore a) how to overcome the private-public conundrum in sustainability transition pathways, and b) to that end, can these pathways conceptually be framed around private sacrifices (lower level of consumption) for private gains (enhanced personal wellbeing) (even if that gain is symbolic/intangible)? and c) the socio-psychological dimensions of sustainable consumption motivations.

Inviting submissions on topics such as, but not limited to:

1. Conceptualizing the intersection of social psychology and political economy in sustainability transition literature
2. Methodological approaches and empirical research to understand the intersection of individual private motivations and public goods in sustainability transition literature
3. Juxtaposing existing engagement of psychology in sustainability literature with this attempt to theorize the intersection between social psychology and political economy
4. Sufficiency, consumption, and everyday at the intersection of social psychology of human motivations and production-consumption system
5. The juxtaposition of this broad approach at the intersection of social psychology and political economy with other theoretical frameworks, like practice theory, etc.
6. The challenges of framing institutional and policy interventions at the intersection of social psychology and political economy.
    

 

Please send an abstract of 300-500 words to Soumyajit Bhar (soumyajit.bhar@krea.edu.in), by 15th December 2022 at 17.00. Abstracts should follow the conference guidelines as outlined on the conference website.