Sustainable Consumption Institute

The manner in which sustainability problems are understood plays an important role in shaping efforts to stimulate progress towards more sustainable societies. Diverse classes of actors compete to promote alternative problem framings and potential solutions. Professional trade associations, communications agencies, CSR and marketing departments of firms, political parties, social movements and others engage in a range of activities contributing to the production of sustainability narratives.

Our focus is on how cultural understandings are produced and on the effects that they have on the patterns of everyday practices and innovation processes. We are interested in: the detail of specific visions and politics around, for example, waste; accounting for the ebb and flow of interest in specific issues such as climate change; and in how longer standing cultural institutions (neoliberalism, egalitarianism, deep ecology) are reproduced through the shaping of sustainability problem and solution framings.