Description
Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life within Sustainable Limits explores how to enhance peoples’ chances to live a good life in a world of ecological and social limits.
Rejecting familiar recitations of problems of ecological decline and planetary boundaries, this compact book instead offers a spirited explication of what everyone desires: a good life. Fundamental concepts of the good life are explained and explored, as are forces that threaten the good life for all. The remedy, says the book’s seven international authors, lies with the concept of consumption corridors, enabled by mechanisms of citizen engagement and deliberative democracy.
Across five concise chapters, readers are invited into conversation about how wellbeing can be enriched by social change that joins "needs satisfaction" with consumerist restraint, social justice, and environmental sustainability. In this endeavour, lower limits of consumption that ensure minimal needs satisfaction for all are important, and enjoy ample precedent. But upper limits to consumption, argue the authors, are equally essential, and attainable, especially in those domains where limits enhance rather than undermine essential freedoms.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and environmental and sustainability studies, as well as to community activists and the general public.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780367748746, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Table of Contents
1. Living Well Within Limits
2. Our Vision: The Good Life
But what is a good life?
Focusing on needs
Slipping through our fingers
Can we be responsible for a good life for others?
3. Consumption Corridors as a Vehicle to Pursue the Good Life
The idea
Limits are already out there
What kind of processes are needed?
Getting started and building momentum
4. What’s Stopping Us?
Limits to the salvation potential of technological innovation
Limits to efficiency and markets as solutions
Limits to consumer sovereignty and responsibility
No limits to freedom in democratic societies?
Shedding myths in pursuit of social change
5. Visionary Change: Corridors as a Pathway to the Good Life
Annex 1: Needs
Annex 2: Indicators of Quality of Life
Annex 3: Estimates of upper and lower sustainable limits in floor space
