Sustainable consumption, everyday life and social change - workshop series

The Nordic Network for Sustainable Consumption (NONESCO) is a network for all Nordic scholars interested in sustainable consumption, everyday life and social change.

Beginning in the late 1980s, “sustainable development” has been on the global political agenda and became even more explicit through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of Agenda 2030. While development in technology and natural sciences hold the key to solving many crucial questions involved in the SDGs, social sciences and humanities are pivotal in analysing issues of individual routines and habits, societal structures and political systems in the transition toward achieving them. Most, if not all, SDGs directly or indirectly concern peoples’ everyday-life consumption of resources (including waste). In recent decades, the sociology of consumption has brought forth its positions in analysing and explaining such questions – largely, although not exclusively, as part of the “practice turn” in social theory.

This Nordic network has the ambition of moving this social-scientific development even further. The aim is to provide new insights into the role of everyday practices in social change. By discussing the newest theoretical and methodological developments together with ongoing empirical studies in the field, we want to identify factors that are important for research and policy on sustainable consumption and everyday life in the future.

The first activities of the network are three workshops to be organised in Nordic countries in years 2020 and 2012. The workshop series is funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS).