Abstract
It is argued within this article that the marginalisation of climate change as a significant economic challenge within the current downturn has led to highly problematic strategies of economic recovery. This article aims to highlight the role of carbon-intensive and debt-fuelled consumerism in instigating both the financial and environmental degradation of recent times, and discusses the appropriate role of consumption within an economic recovery more sensitive to broader economic challenges. It is argued that when a more holistic understanding of the recent economic and environmental outcomes is adopted, it is clear that recent consumption patterns – which have acted as a central driver of economic growth – has produced deleterious financial and environmental consequences and should now be considered unsustainable. Yet these consumption patterns have been entrenched by the policies undertaken to revive growth. Only alternative models of consumption and growth constitute credible responses to the current crisis.
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Notes
The carbon associated with production is undoubtedly also significant, but this article will focus on consumption rather than production for two key reasons. First, because of the UK’s specific growth model that is driven not by manufacturing and export markets as in Germany and China but by domestic consumption. In the UK context, therefore, it is primarily issues of consumption that lie on the fault-line of environmental unsustainability and the demands of the British growth model. Second, but strongly related to the first point, the UK government has in recent years been able to claim that the UK’s carbon footprint is decreasing on the basis of production-based modes of carbon accountancy. Yet as Helm (2012) has demonstrated the UK’s growing carbon footprint is not acknowledged by production-based frameworks where it is possible to ‘outsource’ carbon output to elsewhere in the globalised supply chains. Consumption-based carbon accountancy demonstrates the steadily rising carbon output attributable to the United Kingdom These forms of decarbonisation need to be addressed in political discourse. As such, I attempt to account for consumption more systematically here.
Consumption is defined here in line with the definition given by the UNDP (1998) as the ‘material and non-material goods and services within and sometimes outside of the monetised economy’.
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Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for the financial support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council that has allowed him to conduct his research. He would also like to thank Prof. Colin Hay, Dr Owen Parker and Scott Lavery for their insightful comments on earlier drafts that have undoubtedly strengthened the article. Usual disclaimers apply.
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Bailey, D. Situating consumption in a sustainable economic recovery: Bringing the environment back in. Br Polit 11, 119–140 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2015.15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2015.15