Fifty Shades of Sufficiency. Semantic Confusion and No Policy

Fuchs, Doris; Lorek, Sylvia; Mamut, Pia; Rossmoeller, Anica

Abstract

Sufficiency is a concept that receives increasing attention in environmental policy research and practice as well as societal discourse. For a long time, a focus on improving eco-efficiency had dominated environmental governance. Today, however, many sustainability scholars and activists see sufficiency as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for a socio-ecological transformation. This is especially the case as sustainability research has documented the failure of eco-efficiency measures as leading to an actual reduction in resource use. Indeed, it appears to have become more and more impossible to ignore the need for an accompanying focus on sufficiency measures. Against this backdrop, the present chapter explores what “sufficiency” is and how we can assess its political diffusion. To what extent and in what ways do we find sufficiency policies being implemented? In pursuit of this question, the authors show the wide variance in definitions of sufficiency and the associated challenges in evaluating policies with respect to their sufficiency focus. They illustrate these challenges by drawing on policy examples from the consumption areas of mobility, food, and housing. At the end, they show that “true” sufficiency policies are scarce, notwithstanding the wide range of valuable policies that may contribute to some extent to its pursuit.