By focusing on the daily and leisure mobility of well-to-do people in Finland, this study contributes to the discordant discussion on the sustainability of well-to-do consumers, whose consumption levels are relatively the highest, and concerns whether they are both aware of environmental matters and willing to pay for environmental protection. The interview analysis revealed that, despite general knowledge of environmental issues, sustainability is not relevant to daily practices, and the well-to-do studied here are not to any significant degree engaged in sustainable mobility practices, but in a complex organization of daily life. This study also shows that, while there is a shared understanding of saving money and saving time, 'living according to one's means' and having more money results in more travel, for instance. Furthermore, repetition and being used to a certain way of doing things resist change in 'normal' mobility practices, such as car-driving and travel by plane, to which dispersed and incoherent policy measures, as well as the inconvenience of alternatives, further contribute. Doing sustainability is mostly viewed as an inconvenience not contributing to personal or family well-being, and as requiring time. Allocating time for it is not prioritized when organizing a hectic professional life and active leisure time. These findings set a further challenge for the pursuit of sustainable mobility, as they accentuate the need to recognize the forceful nature of 'normal' practices co-evolving with technologies and policies in transforming the unsustainable matters of course, as well as the need for coherent, strong and integrated policy measures.

Two streams of literature have become especially prominent in understanding social change toward sustainability within the past decades: the research on socio-technical transitions and applications of social practice theory. The aim of this article is to contribute to efforts to create dialogue between these two approaches. We do this by focusing on the concept of reconfiguration, which has become a much-used, but poorly defined notion in the discussion on sustainability transitions. To understand what is defined as reconfiguration in systems and practices, and how the understanding of reconfiguration in regimes could benefit from insights about reconfiguration in practices, we conducted a systematic and critical literature review of 43 journal articles. The findings showed a trend toward a focus on whole-system reconfiguration and interlinked dynamics between practices of production and consumption. However, our study suggests that a less hierarchical understanding of transitions utilizing insights from practice theory might be fruitful. Future research on sustainability transitions could benefit from addressing the tensions between and within niche and regime practices; the dynamics maintaining and challenging social and cultural norms; the efforts in creating new normalities and in recruiting actors in practices; and investigating the different roles the various actors play in these practices.

Tensions between the well-being of present humans, future humans, and nonhuman nature manifest in social protests and political and academic debates over the future of Earth. The increasing consumption of natural resources no longer increases, let alone equalises, human well-being, but has led to the current ecological crisis and harms both human and nonhuman well-being. While the crisis has been acknowledged, the existing conceptual frameworks are in some respects ill-equipped to address the crisis in a way that would link the resolving of the crisis with the pivotal aim of promoting equal well-being. The shortcomings of the existing concepts in this respect relate to anthropocentric normative orientation, methodological individualism that disregards process dynamics and precludes integrating the considerations of human and nonhuman well-being, and the lack of multiscalar considerations of well-being. This work derives and proposes the concept of planetary well-being to address the aforementioned conceptual issues, to recognise the moral considerability of both human and nonhuman well-being, and to promote transdisciplinary, cross-cultural discourse for addressing the crisis and for promoting societal and cultural transformation. Conceptually, planetary well-being shifts focus on well-being from individuals to processes, Earth system and ecosystem processes, that underlie all well-being. Planetary well-being is a state where the integrity of Earth system and ecosystem processes remains unimpaired to a degree that species and populations can persist to the future and organisms have the opportunity to achieve well-being. After grounding and introducing planetary well-being, this work shortly discusses how the concept can be operationalised and reflects upon its potential as a bridging concept between different worldviews.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the material conditions of peoples’ daily lives by investigating changes in the self-perceived necessities of ten technology- and leisure-related consumer goods and services between 1999 and 2009. The authors also look at the socio-demographic predictors of the perceptions and the development of the ownership of the goods under investigation. Design/methodology/approach – The data are derived from surveys “Finland – Consumption and way of life” 1999 (N=2,417), 2004 (N=3,574), and 2009 (N=1,202). The statistical analysis methods include ANOVA and descriptive statistics. Also official statistics are used. Findings – Many technological goods, in particular, have become necessities for most people, and the ownership rates have increased notably. Age, type of household, place of residence and gender affected the necessity of most items. Income affected the necessity of expensive goods and services. Practical implications – The ways goods become social decencies does not always follow economic rationalities or are explained by conventional socio-economic determinants. The meaning of life course stage and related daily practices are probably more important than is usually recognized in social studies. Particularly many ICT goods become socially perceived necessities soon after their emergence, which changes the perceptions of adequate living standards, affecting thus the definition of “basic needs” and related social policy. Originality/value – The perceptions of necessities and other measures of living standards have been mainly looked at from the viewpoint of poverty and income. This study explains the perceived necessity of goods and services by several socio-demographic variables.

This article investigates how necessity is ‘done’ and ‘negotiated’ in Finnish well-to-do households’ domestic practices and asks whether and how households are engaged in sustainable practices. The main research material consists of 14 in-depth interviews. In this study, necessities are viewed as something that householders perceive they ‘cannot manage without’ in their normal domestic daily life. At collective level, necessity is considered to construct ‘expectation horizons’: what is considered normal for people to have and to desire and how to live their lives normally within a certain socio-economic frame. With a novel theoretical approach, this article views necessity through three kinds of agentic capacities: distributed agency in the material world, socio-cultural surroundings and mental and bodily dispositions. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion on the problematics of rising living standards and household sustainability efforts. The findings show that in carrying out daily life, the leeway provided by higher income and education collides with the internalised ethos of ‘not wasting’ (habitus), lack of seeing real possibilities and often blurred views of responsibilities and power to pursue sustainability. Sustainability is seen as distant to daily life and as an inconvenience that requires familiarisation, time and/or money. It also lacks practical meaning. Instead, domestic necessity contributes to personal and family well-being and effortlessness and straightforwardness in daily life. This article provides three key conclusions. First, any vision or innovation for pursuing sustainability is inadequate if it does not carry meaning in everyday functionality. Second, it is important to critically account for the ‘stickiness’ (capacities for resisting change) of non-negotiable parts of domestic practices with embedded consumption of materials, water and electricity; third, based on the previous two, research and policy should take seriously the difficulty of thinking or seeing outside of the ‘expectation horizons’ that incorporate the co-evolving aspirations and conventions.