The Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) has, with financial support from the V. K. Rasmussen Foundation, been sponsoring a year-long colloquium on social change and sustainable consumption. This book is the capstone of this multifaceted project and brings together leading interdisciplinary experts on these developments and aims to provide a systematic understanding of the challenges and opportunities created by these new arrangements for provisioning goods and services, deriving and expressing personal identity, and engaging in processes of social and cultural communication.

I. Consumption and Social Change: An Introductory Discussion and Synthetic Framework

1. Introduction, Halina Szejnwald Brown

II. Niches of Social Innovation

2. The New Sharing Economy: Enacting the Eco-habitus

3. Toward a More Solidaristic Sharing Economy: Examples from Switzerland

4. Social Change at the Nexus of Consumption and Politics: A Case Study of Local Food Movements

5. Institutionalization Processes in Transformative Social Innovation: Capture Dynamics in the Social Solidarity Economy and Basic Income Initiatives

6. Consumption and Social Change: Sustainable Lifestyles in Times of Economic Crisis

III. Post-consumerist Transitions

7. Learning from History: When "Gestures of Change" Demand Policy Support

8. Finance: An Emerging Issue in Sustainable Consumption Research

9. Beyond "GDP" Indicators: Changing the Economic Narrative for a Post-consumerist Society?

10. Consumption, Governance, and Transitions: How Reconnecting Consumption and Production Opens Up New Perspectives for Sustainable Development

IV. Social Change Toward Post-consumer Society

11. Conclusion and Outlook

Maurie J. Cohen is Professor of Sustainability Studies and Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society in the Department of Humanities at the New Jersey Institute of Technology , USA.

Halina Szejnwald Brown is Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Clark University and a Fellow at the Tellus Institute, USA.

Philip J. Vergragt is Professor Emeritus of Technology Assessment at Delft University, the Netherlands, and currently a Fellow at the Tellus Institute and a Research Fellow at Clark University, USA.