Global Environmental Politics Problems, Policy and Practice

Introduction

For many environmentalists, the defining vision of unsustainability is probably the modern shopping mall: those vast consumerist temples compelling the masses towards mindless and wasteful consumption. If unsustainable consumption is the result of individual actions and behaviour then surely it stands to reason that change needs to start with individual consumers. This is a compelling argument and it is one that underpins the efforts of many green business and civil society initiatives. Given the difficulty of addressing questions of individual lifestyles within intergovernmental institutions like the UN, it is unsurprising that many voluntary initiatives have proliferated within the private sector. This is a pattern of action we increasingly see in global environmental governance: as impatience grows with the slow pace and weak results of government-based action, businesses and civil society organise themselves to fill the governance gap. We saw this in Chapter 7 where ‘governance experiments’ are growing alongside intergovernmental climate change mitigation efforts, as well as Chapter 8 where private ‘eco-labels’ try to control deforestation.

In this chapter we will examine the rise of consumer culture in Western countries in the mid-twentieth century, followed more recently by the emergence of a high-consuming middle class in China, India, and other emerging economies. We will see how the cultural phenomenon of a global consumer class is the result of demographic and socio-economic changes, as well as deliberate efforts to reshape people's desires and preferences. To appreciate the impact that high-volume luxury consumption has on the natural environment, we will then look at two popular items: mobile phones and fashion. Here we see how the environmental effects of consumption are often hidden rather than easily detected. Choices about the design of products and the materials used determine much of their environmental impact before they reach the shop floor. In the following section we examine how the issue of consumption made its way onto the international political agenda in 1992 and how UN programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) have since evolved. While these initiatives aim to coordinate international action on unsustainable consumption, results have so far been very limited. Outside intergovernmental institutions, we have seen many voluntary initiatives developed by the private sector and civil society to encourage change in people's consumption habits and patterns.