3rd year PhD presentation - Gabriele Torma

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On 3 February at 14:30 via Microsoft Teams, there will be a 3rd year PhD presentation by Gabriele Torma entitled:

How to drive sustainable consumption behaviour?

Abstract
How can consumer´s be driven into a more sustainable consumption behaviour? - My thesis takes the consumers' point of view, specifically that of a sustainability-involved consumer. In four research papers, I investigate different research questions that all add to a better understanding of what consumers who care about sustainable behaviour and want to adjust their consumption behaviour can do themselves. However, empowering consumers in individual sustainable consumption is not solely up to the motivated consumer. Also, governments and businesses play a crucial role. Governments and businesses are critical in providing the conditions, so that motivated consumers can achieve the abilities and make use of opportunities required to change their consumption behaviour. To emphasize the three players' interlinking, I exemplarily connect each paper with one of the three actors supporting consumers’ empowerment: consumers, businesses, and governments.

Consumers empowering consumers - Paper 1 offers a variety of coping strategies stemming from a specific group of sustainability-involved consumers. Consumers can adopt the strategies to drive their sustainable consumption behaviour further and learn how to tackle perceived tension along the way.

RQ1. How do Pro-Environmental Behaviour Experts' cope with the perceived tensions associated with sustainable consumption?

Businesses empowering consumers - Paper 2 highlights how consumers themselves can design their choice architecture differently when appropriate products and services are available on the market. Without such products and services, even motivated consumers lack the opportunity to change their consumption decisions.

RQ2. Whether and how do consumers engage in conscious strategies to drive their own sustainable consumption behaviour?

Governments empowering consumers - Paper 3.1 and 3.2 focus is on sustainability labeling on products, enabling consumers at the point of purchase to easily and quickly identify sustainable products. The papers specifically deal with a higher-order label – a meta sustainability label that takes the multidimensionality of sustainability into account. This approach can offer governments a window of opportunity to tackle the growing number of single-issue sustainability labels and potential threats of greenwashing and waterbed effects with rules and regulations.

RQ3.1.  How is a meta sustainability label defined and assessed compared to existing, single-issue sustainability labels?
RQ3.2.  Is a meta sustainability label likely to facilitate more sustainable product choices?

Supervisors: John Thøgersen & Jessica Achemann-Witzel 
Discussants: Klaus Grunert & Polymeros Chrysochou