Mobilising Values for Sustainability Transformations

To enable transformations to more sustainable societies, sustainability-aligned values such as benevolence, care, and cooperation need to be mobilised.Currently, these values are rarely given much space in how society is organised or how consumption is governed.Instead, prevailing consumption patterns tend to be shaped by values associated with status, competition, and individual success, which risk undermining both social and ecological sustainability.Together with actors from the public sector, civil society, and the private sector, we have explored how sustainability-aligned values can be given greater room in policy, in collaboration, and in everyday practices.Values function as organising principles that shape, and are shaped by, how people act, collaborate, and allocate attention and resources.They can therefore be understood as relational and embedded in societal structures, practices, and material arrangements.Values thus become visible in both language and action, for example in decisions and priorities, in policy, in ways of leading and organising, and in everyday ways of acting (often referred to as practices).When these patterns change, that is, when what people do and how they do things in society changes, the values that are given space and legitimacy also change.Steering towards sustainable consumption also involves creating conditions that allow sustainability-aligned values to take shape and gain traction.