The discourses and material consequences of the crisis dynamics of capitalist societies increasingly spawn practices of production and supply that are situated outside capitalist market logic. One example of such an alternative practice is Community‐Supported Agriculture (CSA), a social innovation that is comprehensively analyzed here in the German context. Applying the concept of social innovation, the authors carried out a standardized survey, semi‐structured interviews and a discourse analysis of CSA farms in Germany. This paper identifies the (international) crisis discourses to which Community‐Supported Agriculture is a reaction, and the motivations of CSA members are outlined. Innovative facets of CSA such as solidarity, de‐commodification, and prosuming are identified. It becomes apparent that Community‐Supported Agriculture is not a homogeneous phenomenon, but can be differentiated into various types ? sociopolitical, spiritual‐communal, and pragmatic‐economic ‐ which differ in respect of how they express (social) innovation as well as in their attitudes to crises.
Consumption and sustainability are complex issues-they cannot be reduced to the choice of consumer goods or to "green consumption." Doing so would neglect the multifaceted embeddedness of consumer acts and the multidimensionality of sustainability. To understand patterns of consumption and move them toward sustainability means dealing with this double complexity. A coherent reference framework is therefore needed, to enable locating and correlating research questions, theories, and findings. Such a framework should provide a basis for interdisciplinary understanding, mutual acknowledgment, and collaborative knowledge creation. Therefore, it needs to be the result of an integrative approach; otherwise it would not allow a wide variety of disciplines to work with it. This article presents such a framework, developed in the course of an interdisciplinary process in a research program. In this process, the researchers of the focal topic asked four questions: 1) How can consumption be conceptualized? 2) How can consumption and sustainability be related? 3) How can sustainable consumption be assessed? and 4) How can changes to individual consumption be motivated? The article condenses the researchers' overall answers to these questions into four complementary core statements capturing the key elements of the reference framework and concludes by sketching the framework's benefits for future research.
This paper discusses the sustainability impact (contribution to sustainability, reduction of adverse environmental impacts) of online second-hand trading. A survey of eBay users shows that a relationship between the trading of used goods and the protection of natural resources is hardly realized. Secondly, the environmental motivation and the willingness to act in a sustainable manner differ widely between groups of consumers. Given these results from a user perspective, the paper tries to find some objective hints of online second-hand trading’s environmental impact. The greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the energy used for the trading transactions seem to be considerably lower than the emissions due to the (avoided) production of new goods. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for second-hand trade and consumer policy. Information about the sustainability benefits of purchasing second-hand goods should be included in general consumer information, and arguments for changes in behavior should be targeted to different groups of consumers
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