Changing Paradigms of Policymaking: Towards Environmental/Sustainability Citizenship in the European Union?

In this presentation, I outline the interim results of a research aimed at identifying and characterising the main episodes of policy development in the European Union concerning the promotion of sustainable household consumption, particularly in the field of resource and waste management in the last about 20 years. The aim of this analytical work – and which is an integral part of a PhD research project – is to contribute to relevant policy-oriented learning and thereby to pave the way for the prudent design of a Blueprint Policy Paradigm for the Promotion of Sustainable Household Consumption in the European Union. In the first part of the document, I outline the methods of research, which was qualitative content analysis applied on relevant 32 EU policy papers (related strategies, action plans, and so on), supported by the MAXQDA software. In the second part of the document, I present the results of research, that is, the main identified episodes of policy development and their characterisation in a tabular form. The preliminary results of analysis show that since 2001 (and when the European Union published its 1st Sustainable Development Strategy) relevant policies have been evolving in stepwise, cumulative manner, roughly in three main and overlapping episodes. In the first stage (roughly until 2009), the explicit or implicit problems in the focus of relevant policies were the lack of environmental information for consumers and the insufficient presence of environmentally (more) benign products on the common European market. In the second stage (roughly between 2010 and 2017), new concepts for environmental protection at the macro-economic level (such as the 'resource-efficient' and later 'circular' economy) turned attention on the lack of alternative/novel types of business models of provision (such as product-service systems and/or the sharing economy) that would enable an enhanced participation of private consumers in the transition towards sustainability. In addition to this, gradually, it also has become the aim of relevant policymakers at the level of the European Union to create a comprehensive and coherent framework for the promotion of sustainable consumption. Yet, in a third and most recent stage (since about 2018) – in addition to problems that had been identified in the earlier stages of policy development – the reviewed policy papers has gradually started to address also the issue of consumption inequalities, even if only tacitly and under the general headlines of 'affordability', 'inclusive economy', 'economic equality' and/or 'just transition', whereby the environmental quality of the lives of EU citizens play an important role. Altogether, this observed trajectory of development indicate that relevant policies at the level of the European Union have been tending towards the creation of an implicit (explicitly not communicated) environmental / sustainability citizenship framework. In the third part of the presentation, I am going to introduce some preliminary ideas towards the above mentioned Blueprint Policy Paradigm for the Promotion of Sustainable Household Consumption in the European Union, based on the interim results of the above introduced research.