Between routine and moral obligation: Exploring family consumption, emotions and sustainable lifestyles

Abstract

Consumption and production are crucial areas for reducing societies’ impact on the climate and environment and this is also one of the United Nations’ global goals for sustainable development. Despite that the risks of climate change and environmental degradation is well-known, lifestyle changes where it is needed have not reached sufficient scales. This study focuses on the emotional aspects of sustainable choices to highlight the ambiguousness of consumption. The purpose is to explore possibilities and barriers for sustainable consumption by investigating the family as one unit of consumption, as well as families’ emotional orientation and reasoning about consumption and sustainability as a way of living. It does so by conducting interviews with six middle-class families in Gothenburg, Sweden, that to some extend try to make sustainable choices in everyday consumption. The results indicate that changing consumption patterns are intertwined with changing emotional attachments to consumption practices, re-negotiating relationships connected to these practices, and developing an emotional obligation to sustainability or environmentalism. Emotions also inform and express barriers to sustainable living, in that even the interested have to balance sustainable consumption with conventional consumption to manage everyday family life.