Dissertation - Details
Dissertation of Laura Spengler:
“Towards a sufficiency policy: a theoretical and empirical analysis of the possibilities and limitations to a political implementation of the sufficiency strategy” (working title)
Short description:
Within the debate on sustainability, some actors have for years been calling into question the prospects of success for efficiency and new technologies (“consistency”) to solve resource use and emissions problems alone. However, the advocates of the “sufficiency strategy”, i. e. the request to reduce consumption to sustainable levels, are a minority and face the problem that such ideas are hard to maintain from a political point of view. Therefore, sufficiency approaches usually relate to the individual and it is argued that in a liberal society, it should be up to each person what and how much he or she wants to consume. However, this view disregards existing structures which sometimes make it difficult to do without resource intensive goods or services. Hence it does not seem to be effective to implement sufficiency on the individual level only.
The planned dissertation aims at examining how sufficiency approaches could at least be encouraged through (environmental) policies. At first a theoretical part links the debates on sufficiency and economic growth and examines the sufficiency strategy from the perspective of political steering theory. The following empirical part analyses on the basis of case studies where political instruments exist that (can) lead to consuming less. Finally, the results are to be incorporated into a “political concept” of sufficiency.
Time frame: Oct. 2010 - 2013