The spirit is willing, but the urge to consume is stronger
Oliver Klaffke
“Promoting sustainability is not about preaching self-denial.”
For Antonietta Di Giulio from Basel University’s Man-Society-Environment (MSE) program, “promoting sustainability is not about preaching self-denial. The key question is, what needs must a person meet to enable them to lead a good life?” The goal of the sustainability movement is to make it possible for everyone to have a good life. Di Giulio is convinced that having money or a certain standard of living is not enough to guarantee that. “When we try to pinpoint the criteria that make for a fulfilling life, we find that other values take priority: engaging in social interaction, having a satisfying job that pays a living wage and being able to control your own destiny.”
At MSE, Di Giulio and her group are working on three topics important for sustainability in everyday life: sustainable consumption, inter/transdisciplinarity, and education for sustainable development. The focus of the work is on identifying ways of promoting sustainable behavior.
Participatory methods
To find them, the group has long since abandoned the famous ivory tower of academia. Instead of relying solely on deductive reflection or empirical investigation for answers, they have developed an approach based on dialog with people. “We often use participatory methods,” Di Giulio says. “Members of the public are involved in our projects.” Their transdisciplinary approach takes interdisciplinarity a step further. To gain a broader view of sustainability, they draw not only on contributions from different disciplines but on the widest possible range of perspectives, including from society more generally. This reflects their conviction that academia cannot work in isolation. “Where, for example, do we set the limits on consumers’ personal freedom, to prevent them from harming others or the environment? That is not a simple question for academics to answer,” Di Giulio says. To ensure that their conclusions have broad-based support, the group seeks to initiate debates. This is the approach being followed by a Swiss National Science Foundation project for National Research Program (NRP) 71, in which Di Giulio, along with biologist Patricia Holm and other researchers, is looking at energy policy measures. They want to find out how people see such measures as impacting on their lives and what influence this has on acceptance levels.
Both individuals and manufacturers have a role
“We want to act as a stimulus, to ensure that the political goals can gain support within society and be realized,” Di Giulio says. But because achieving sustainability is not dependent on individual behavior alone, the Basel research team is looking at the whole system. For example, sustainability can be promoted by setting limits on consumption, but this is not so much about changing the purchasing habits of every individual; often it is much more effective to start with the manufacturer.
Thus in recent years there has been growing debate about the issue of planned obsolescence – the fact that appliances have been shown to have a lifespan built into them by their producers. This explains why, for example, printers give up the ghost after printing a certain number of pages. “By banning built-in wear and tear or having extended warranty periods, we can force industry to offer products that don’t need to be replaced as often,” Di Giulio says. Without such measures, we are unlikely to achieve sustainable consumption across the board.