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Critical Sustainable Consumption: A Research Agenda, Manisha Anantharaman
Critical Sustainable Consumption: A Research Agenda, Manisha Anantharaman
School of Liberal Arts Faculty Works
Sustainability scholarship is increasingly focused on individual behavior change and sustainable consumption as crucial components of engendering more sustainable societies. Practices like bicycling to work, recycling and reusing goods, and eating organic food are heralded as both integral to and generative of larger societal transformations. Scholars have begun to identify the individual and societal conditions that can help enable such practices while also examining social, cultural, and systemic dynamics driving over-consumption, particularly in the developed world. Additionally, questions of social and cultural identity have been interrogated, as the cultural politics of sustainable consumption emerges as a key sub-field in its …
"Lifestyle Leapfrogging" In Emerging Economies: Enabling Systemic Shifts To Sustainable Consumption, Patrick Schroeder, Manisha Anantharaman
"Lifestyle Leapfrogging" In Emerging Economies: Enabling Systemic Shifts To Sustainable Consumption, Patrick Schroeder, Manisha Anantharaman
School of Liberal Arts Faculty Works
This paper combines the concept of leapfrogging with systems-thinking approaches to outline the potentials for and barriers to enabling systemic shifts to strong sustainable consumption in the emerging economies of China and India. New urban consumers in China and India have the potential to “lifestyle leapfrog” the high impact lifestyle models of the industrialized countries while simultaneously improving their quality of life. This paper argues that by implementing systemic approaches in the consumption domains of mobility and housing, the historical trajectory of high environmental footprints of mobility and housing can be avoided. The analysis based on systems-thinking principles identifies existing …
Elite And Ethical: The Defensive Distinctions Of Middle-Class Bicycling In Bangalore, India, Manisha Anantharaman
Elite And Ethical: The Defensive Distinctions Of Middle-Class Bicycling In Bangalore, India, Manisha Anantharaman
School of Liberal Arts Faculty Works
This article applies social practice theory to study the emergence of sustainable consumption practices like bicycling among the new middle classes of Bangalore, India. I argue that expansions of bicycling practices are dependent on the construction of defensive distinctions,which I define as distinctions that draw equally on lifestyle-based and ethics-based discourses to normalize bicycling among Bangalore’s middle classes. With their environmental discourses and signage, middle-class cyclists make claims to being ethical actors and ecological citizens concerned about global environments. Their high-end bicycles and special gear enable them to maintain their social status in personal and professional circles, despite adopting …