Sustainable Consumption ― Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives in Honour of Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta

If global society is to address the many environmental and other sustainability challenges that confront us in the twenty-first century, such as climate change and water resources, it will be necessary to make significant changes in our patterns of consumption, production, and distribution. There is a growing realization that while changes in production and distribution are formidable, the proposed solutions may not succeed unless it is possible to persuade individuals and households to change their patterns of consumption to make them more sustainable.

However there are significant differences in how key disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, and history conceptualise consumption, empirically test their theoretical predictions, and use these to inform policy-makers across the private, public and third sectors on how to make consumption more sustainable. This book contains chapters from world-leading experts in these different disciplines that seek to explain the perspectives on sustainable consumption of their disciplines, suggest how these might be further enriched by taking on board some of the findings from other disciplines, and consider what this implies for new policies to address the key sustainability challenges outlined above.

The book is dedicated to Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, one of the world's leading economists who has worked across a range of topics, including environmental and resource economics and development economics, and throughout his career has sought to incorporate into his economic thinking ideas from a range of other disciplines.

Alistair Ulph, Professorial Research Fellow, Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester,Dale Southerton,Director, Sustainable Consumption Institute and Professor of Sociology, The University of Manchester,

Alistair Ulph is Professorial Research Fellow of the Sustainable Consumption Institute and formerly Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute, The University of Manchester, where he was also Vice-President and Dean of Humanities (2004-2010). His research interests are mainly in the field of environmental and resource economics, recently focussing on international aspects of environmental and trade policies, though he has also published in labour economics, industrial economics, and public economics. Over his career he has published eight books, including Trade and the Environment,Selected Essays of Alistair Ulph (Edward Elgar, 1999) and over 100 refereed papers. In 2000 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and President of European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.


Dale Southerton is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute at The University of Manchester, and Director of the Sustainable Practices Research Group (funded by the ESRC, Defra, and the Scottish Government). His principal areas of research interest are consumption, sustainability, theories of practice and social change, innovation and material culture, time-use, and everyday life. He has published extensively in these fields, is the author ofCommunities of Consumption: Place, Geographical Mobility and Identification (VDM Verlag, 2009), editor of theEncyclopedia of Consumer Culture (Sage, 2011) and co-editor (with Alan Warde) ofThe Habits of Consumption (Helsinki: Open Access Book Series of the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, 2012) and (with H. Chappells and B. Van Vliet)Sustainable consumption: the implications of changing infrastructures of provision (London: Edward Elgar, 2004).