Stewardship of things: The radical potential of product stewardship for re-framing responsibilities and relationships to products and materials

Abstract

Abstract:In the context of broad-based concerns about the need to move towards a more sustainable materials economy, particularly as they are expressed in debates around ecological modernisation (EM), we argue that product stewardship has radical potential as a means to promote significant change in the relationship between society and the material world. We focus on two important dimensions that have been neglected in approaches to product stewardship to date. Firstly, we argue that immanent within the basic concept of stewardship is a problematisation of dominant understandings of property ownership in neoliberal market economies. In the space opened up by notions of stewardship, different ways of enacting both rights and responsibilities to products and materials emerge which have potential to advance the sustainability of material economies. Secondly, through exploration of existing expressions of product stewardship, we uncover a neglected scale of action. Both policy and dominant articulations of EM focus primarily on the efficiency of production processes; and secondarily, the attitudes and behaviours of individual consumers. Missing from this is the 'meso-scale' of social collectives including households, neighbourhoods, more distributed communities and small scale social enterprises. Based on a review of existing research from Australia and the UK, including our own, we argue that understanding of embedded practices of material responsibility at the household scale can both reinvigorate the concept of product stewardship as a potentially radical intervention, and reveal the potential of the meso-scale as a challenging but worthwhile realm of policy intervention.Stewardship of things: The radical potential of product stewardship for re-framing responsibilities and relationships to products and materials Lane and Watson 2

Geographies of E‐waste: Towards a Political Ecology Approach to E‐waste and Digital Technologies

“…An example of an empirical way forward might be Lane and Watson's discussion of product stewardship (). They argue that notions of stewardship link people, products, and material flows in ways that re‐work settled notions of ownership and responsibility by focusing on the public impacts and civic responsibilities entailed by “private” consumption activity ().…”

“…An example of an empirical way forward might be Lane and Watson's discussion of product stewardship (). They argue that notions of stewardship link people, products, and material flows in ways that re‐work settled notions of ownership and responsibility by focusing on the public impacts and civic responsibilities entailed by “private” consumption activity (). They suggest that the scale of the household and neighborhood is a neglected meso‐level arena for exploring economies of sharing and stewardship that are by‐passed in favor of studies that focus on either producers or individual consumers.…”

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“…In fact these kinds of efforts might lead to more active resistance. Rather, new kinds of relationships with things will need to be fostered, in a new phase that extends well beyond municipal recycling schemes (Lane and Watson 2012).…”

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“…In this system, the consumers' stewardship of things ends with this final stage (Lane and Watson 2012).…”