Participatory Decision-Making for Sustainable Consumption

This chapter concerns the impact of public involvement in public decision-making processes as related to household consumption patterns, and the impact on consumer behaviour of active participation.1 The call for participatory decision-making is common in the field of sustainable consumption (Murphy & Cohen, 2001). Implicit in many of these calls is the assumption that increasing the awareness and engagement of the public in decision-making processes for environmental protection will, ultimately, strengthen that protection. A second assumption is that public participation may also result in behavioural change by consumers. At a minimum there is the hope that an engagement of consumers will mean a greater awareness by consumers of the environmental impact of their purchases and behaviour (Barry, 2006). From a functional perspective there is the idea that the active participation of the consumer/citizen in public decision-making processes, as one of several 'stakeholders' or 'partners', could lead to alternative developments in sustainable consumption patterns.