Taking Responsibility for Climate Change

Isenhour, Berry, Victor, and Yoder trace the development and diffusion of proposals to address climate change by encouraging greener forms of consumerism. Consumer responsibility rhetoric and policy have become ubiquitous, imagined as a means to address over-production-consumption-disposal and the associated emissions. The authors argue that the consumer responsibility model has very little transformative potential given that it does not address structural issues in the global political economy – and particularly considering the urgency and scale of action required to address climate change. This chapter begins with a historical review of the emergence of sustainable consumption as a dominant theme in international sustainable development, in environmental movements, and more recently, climate governance. The second section discusses the imagined promise of the “consumer choice” model. The third section addresses critiques of consumer-based environmental governance. In the final section, this chapter links various perspectives to their policy implications and proposes strategies that might help reconcile the promises and perils of efforts to achieve more sustainable consumption patterns and reduce associated emissions.