Guest editorial: Towards operationalizing sufficiency

Abstract

All the while our world is undergoing several transitions. Improvement of efficiency in resource use is one of them. With every passing day, with technological improvements, all the systems of the world, at every stage, are becoming more and more efficient. Consider, for example, our electricity system. The processes of fuel extraction, processing and transportation have become more efficient over the centuries and decades. Similarly, the efficiencies of power production units have increased over time. So have the power transmission and distribution efficiencies. Also, the efficiency of electrical devices has increased multifold over the years. For instance, LED lighting is ten times more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs (US Department of Energy, 2024). So, the efficiency of the electricity system is on the rise as you read this editorial.An increase in efficiency means that for the same output, one would consume less input. Hence, improvements in efficiency in different energy systems like that of the electricity system discussed above are expected to reduce the overall input of energy. Economic reasoning expects the income-primary energy relation of individual households and societies to follow an inverse-U path, with more avenues of energy use resulting in the initial increase, whereas efficient fuel/technology/process/device combinations resulting in a decrease in the later stage (Foster et al., 2000;Kowsari and Zerriffi, 2011). However, in reality, there is hardly any evidence of an inverse-U curve. It has been observed that with higher income, energy consumption increases for households and societies (Mestl and Eskeland, 2009;Kowsari and Zerriffi, 2011). This increase can be explained by conspicuous consumption and rebound effects (Gillingham et al., 2020). Conspicuous consumption has to do with our pursuit of positional goods, which indicate status: positional goods are valued for their relative abundance or scarcity, especially because they are those that are possessed by a few (Hirsch, 1976;Frank, 2008). In addition to conspicuous consumption, rebound effects manifest as overconsumption of efficient systems. For instance, with a fuel-efficient car, people tend to drive more; with LED lighting, people tend to use more lighting fixtures; or with an efficient computer monitor, people tend to have a larger screen size. Stated succinctly, it is clear that increases in resource efficiency have not led to decreases in our resource consumption. This calls for a paradigm shift in addressing resource consumption vis-a-vis resource efficiency.Here we introduce sufficiency, the significance of which has not been hitherto adequately recognized in the economics of resources. The sufficiency paradigm focuses on reducing excess output, unlike the efficiency paradigm where the focus is on reducing excess input per output. More explicitly, sufficiency goes beyond efficiency, with the objective of reducing total resource consumption at all levelshousehold and higher levels (Thomas et al., 2017). It calls for ...