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35 J. Consumer Pol'y 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/jrncpy35 and id is 1 raw text is: J Consum Policy (2012) 35:1-5
DOI 10.1007/s10603-012-9188-7
E)1 OR        E A  \  I
From Knowledge to Action-New Paths Towards
Sustainable Consumption
John Thogersen - Ulf Schrader
Received: 2 January 2012 /Accepted: 9 January 2012 /
Published online: 4 February 2012
C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2012
Keywords Sustainable consumption - Policy instruments - Consumer behaviour
In March 2011, the Journal of Consumer Policy published a special issue on sustainable
consumption. The main focus of that issue was on how the different relevant actors
(consumers, business, government, and NGOs) are putting sustainable consumption into
practice (Schrader and Thogersen 2011). That issue continued a row of special issues on
sustainable consumption (and production) in 2010 by the Journal of Industrial
Ecology (in January/February, edited by Arnold Tukker, Maurie J. Cohen, Klaus
Hubacek, and Oksana Mont), the Natural Resources Forum (in February, edited by David Le
Blanc), the Journal ofMacromarketing (June, edited by William E. Kilbourne), and the Journal
of Consumer Behaviour (November/December, edited by lain Black). The calls for these
special issues were well received in the research community and so were the published articles.
This, together with the ending of a number of large research projects on sustainable
consumption in 2011, convinced the editors of the Journal of Consumer Policy that they should
once more support the development of this fertile research field by offering space for another
special issue on sustainable consumption, just 1 year after the previous one.
The backcloth of the stream of research reported in these special issues is a shared
understanding that changes in consumer behaviour are crucial if we are to move to a
sustainable development path. Research has shown ways through which it might be possible
to fulfil consumers' needs without harming the ecological, social, and economic well-being
of people today and in the future. However, the prevailing consumption patterns in
modern societies are still far from being sustainable (EEA 2010). For example, the
Global Footprint Network has calculated that it takes the Earth 1 year and 6 months
to regenerate what we currently use in a year (Pollard et al. 2010). The imminent
J. Thogersen (E)
Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark
e-mail: jbt@asb.dk
U. Schrader
Fachgebiet Arbeitslehre/Okonomie und Nachhaltiger Konsum, Technische Universitit Berlin,
Franklinstr. 28/29, 10587 Berlin, Germany
e-mail: schrader(& tu-berlin.de

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