Development of action platforms for consolidating sustainable consumption

In the industrialised countries, housing, nutrition, and transport are the consumption categories with the greatest impact on the environment, driven by factors such as income, price, innovation, and marketing. To successfully establish climate awareness and resource efficiency, the patterns of consumption and production by businesses, politics, and civil society will have to be sustainable in the long-term. In the context of the road-mapping processes introduced by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) to promote sustainable consumption in Germany, the specialist foundations for the building of new institutional arrangements for cooperation across a variety of actors must be laid.

The project thus pursued “action platforms” to work out important strategic indicators and concrete proposals. The goal of the project was to promote the necessary structural transformation by creating new institutional arrangements. Alongside the conceptual designs for possible action platforms, adelphi oversaw the process of departmental decision-making among the different ministries for the “Programme for Sustainable Consumption”. At the end of the project, a conference with 400 participants was held in Berlin that set out to explain the political importance of the “Programme for Sustainable Consumption” via political speeches and discussion sessions, while also incorporating expert exchange in six parallel sessions with fishbowl discussion formats.