Feature: Sustainable production meets sustainable consumption

News

Posted on Friday 6 March 2020

Sustainable consumption and production is often treated as a single concept, but the two agendas have, in practice, operated in virtual isolation – often talking about each other, but rarely interacting, and in the process critically weakening both. In 2015, SEI launched a new research initiative to explore why that is, and how to get the two working together.

SEI initiatives explore key issues on sustainable development and serve as hubs for our research. The SEI Initiative on Producer to Consumer Sustainability explored the links and interactions within production-to-consumption systems – encompassing global flows of commodities and the impacts, dependencies and wider dynamics associated with production and consumption – in order to find new opportunities to enhance their sustainability.

Over the course of five years P2CS launched, supported and drew on a very broad range of projects looking at different aspects of production-to-consumption systems. Some of these have become influential forces in policy and practice, as well as academic research. P2CS also brought together novel groups of stakeholders to pool their experiences and deepen our understanding of how the sustainable consumption and sustainable production agendas relate.