Education for Sustainable Consumption: Beyond Green Shopping
What should Education for Sustainable Consumption aim for, if sustainable consumption is about more than green purchasing? In their entry for the Routledge volume Vocabulary for Sustainable Consumption and Lifestyles: A Language for Our Common Future, Ulf Schrader and Daniel Fischer give a short overview of the concept, its history, the debates around it and how it is put into practice.
Building on the UNEP definition, the authors propose a definition that reflects more recent debates: “ESC represents a variety of teaching and learning approaches that support learners in developing their own ways to contribute to fair and just needs satisfaction by means of individual and collective, private and civic, economic, cultural and political activities” (p. 257).
The entry traces the two origins of ESC in consumer education and in Education for Sustainable Development, and takes up the criticism that ESC shifts responsibility to individual consumers. The authors argue that ESC has to go beyond individual behaviour: it views learners as consumer citizens, engages critically with consumption and production systems, and cannot impose predefined “correct” behaviour, but can offer favourable conditions for personal development towards sustainability.
For practice, the entry stresses that ESC takes place in formal, non-formal and informal settings and, in schools, calls for a whole institution approach: what is taught about sustainable food is contradicted if the school kiosk sells only sweets and soft drinks. Two boxes present practical examples, a mindfulness toolkit for ESC and real-world experiments on sustainable fashion consumption. Many more practical examples are collected in the guidebook Teaching and Learning Sustainable Consumption.
Bibliographic reference:
Schrader, U., & Fischer, D. (2025). Education for Sustainable Consumption. In L. Akenji, P. J. Vergragt, H. S. Brown, T. S. J. Smith, & L. M. Wallnoefer (Eds.), Routledge-SCORAI studies in sustainable consumption. Vocabulary for Sustainable Consumption and Lifestyles: A Language for Our Common Future (257-260). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003584056-61
