“How Do I Carry All This Now?” Understanding Consumer Resistance to Sustainability Interventions

Abstract

Given the increasingly grave environmental crisis, governments and organizations frequently initiate sustainability interventions to encourage sustainable behavior in individual consumers. However, prevalent behavioral approaches to sustainability interventions often have the unintended consequence of generating consumer resistance and undermining their effectiveness. With a practice-theoretical perspective, the authors investigate what generates consumer resistance and how it can be reduced, using consumer responses to a nationwide ban on plastic bags in Chile in 2019. The findings show that consumer resistance to sustainability interventions emerges not primarily because consumers are unwilling to change their individual behavior, as commonly assumed by existing literature. Instead, consumer resistance emerges because the individual behaviors being targeted are embedded in dynamic social practices. When sustainability interventions aim to change individual behaviors, rather than social practices, they place excessive responsibility on consumers, unsettle their practice-related emotionality, and destabilize the multiple practices that interconnect to shape consumers’ lives, ultimately leading to resistance. The authors propose a theory of consumer resistance in social practice change that explains why consumer resistance to sustainability interventions emerges, including how it distracts, discourages, and delays the required social practice change. They also offer recommendations for policymakers and social marketers in designing and managing sustainability initiatives that trigger less consumer resistance and therefore foster sustainable consumer behavior.

On the Sustainability of Virtual Platforms: A Behavioral Intervention

“…Faced with a selfish or altruistic decision, it is very difficult to opt for the latter. Maybe this placed excessive responsibility on end users [30].…”

The Sustainability Pyramid: A Hierarchical Approach to Greater Sustainability and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals With Implications for Marketing Theory, Practice, and Public Policy

“…They have also resisted and voiced strong opposition against nationwide sustainability initiatives (e.g. ban on plastic bags) (Gonzalez-Arcos et al, 2021).…”

The role of teleoaffective profiles in practice adaptation

“…Most practice adaptation research tends to use what Shove et al (2012, p.23) described as the "collapsed" concept of 'meanings' to conceptualise the "social and symbolic significance of participation in any one moment" (ibid) (eg. Epp et al, 2014;Gonzales-Arcos et al, 2021;Kadibadiba et al, 2018;Phipps and Ozanne, 2017;Thomas and Epp, 2019). Theorization of 'meanings' can appear somewhat fixed in this research, yet Schatzki conceptualises teleoaffective structures as multi-faceted, evolving and relational (Reckwitz, 2017).…”

“…In this view, a practice is "a routinised way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood" (Reckwitz, 2002, p.250) and consumption is understood as a moment in every practice (Warde, 2005). The practices template comprises elements that are integrated in practice performances, and when disruption occurs, configurations of elements require realignment, reassembly, or reconfiguration (Phipps and Ozanne, 2017;Gonzales-Arcos et al, 2021) so that practitioners might comfortably 'carry on'. There has been a particular focus in recent research on practice adaption as a result of environmental catastrophe (Venugopal et al, 2019), poverty (Mguni et al, 2020), becoming a parent (Thomas and Epp, 2019), divorce (Molander, 2017), the physical separation in families (Epp et al, 2014) and the dramatic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (Campbell et al, 2021).…”

“…Within practice theoretic repertoires, 'meanings' are an important part of the practice template, integrated with materials and competences during practice performance (Shove et al, 2012). Existing adaptation research highlights how meanings can condition practice adaptation efforts, such as the meanings of convenience in using plastic bags for shopping that constrain consumers shifting to reusable bags (Gonzales-Arcos et al, 2021); meanings of cleanliness and hygiene or aesthetically pleasing gardens that make adapting to drought conditions difficult (Phipps and Ozanne, 2017); the moral legitimacy of traditional livelihood practices that constrain adaptation to modern fishing practices in the face of environmental catastrophe (Venugopal et al, 2019); or the 'core' meanings of family meal times that must sustain even when other elements are radically adapted to cope with family separation (Epp et al, 2014). However, we know little about the characteristics of meanings in how they condition practice adaptation processes and experiences, and the focus of existing research tends to be on practitioner striving to realign practice elements to carry on (Thomas and Epp, 2019).…”