Grassroots Innovations for Sustainable Consumption

Abstract

Everybody, it appears, is committed to sustainable consumption; but not everybody is seeking it in the same way. Moves towards sustainability are generating a variety of social innovations as well as innovative technologies — new organisational arrangements and new tools — in different arenas and at different scales to address consumption issues. Grassroots, niche innovations of the type discussed in Chapter 3 differ from commercial business reforms such as those favoured by mainstream policy in Chapter 2; they practise quite different kinds of sustainable consumption. There is a qualitative difference between, for instance, a community-supported organic vegetable box scheme and the range of organic products sold at a supermarket; the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable consumption are traded-off differently. In order to better understand the role and potential of community-based New Economics efforts to move towards sustainable consumption patterns, this chapter examines the characteristics of grassroots initiatives, and sets out a new conceptual model which views them as specifically innovative activities.