Social Practices and Sustainable Consumption
Summary
Social practices offer a lens for understanding how everyday routines, norms and material arrangements shape patterns of consumption and environmental impact. Rather than focusing on individual choice, this perspective examines how elements such as technologies, infrastructures, skills and shared meanings combine to form stable but evolving practices. Sustainable consumption therefore becomes a matter of reconfiguring interconnected bundles of activities—cooking, laundry, shopping and waste handling—to reduce resource use and waste generation. This approach highlights the role of institutional settings, supply chains and policy frameworks in enabling or constraining change, and underscores the importance of moments of disruption, such as economic or technological shifts, as opportunities to recruit new participants and reconfigure practices. By tracing the dynamics of practice formation, maintenance and transformation, scholars identify leverage points for interventions that go beyond information campaigns and target the socio-material conditions in which consumption unfolds. Globally, this has led to collaborations between researchers, designers, policymakers and communities to co-produce interventions that align with existing routines while nudging entire systems towards circularity and greater resource efficiency.
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Social Practices and Sustainable Consumption publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in social practices and sustainable consumption across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Social Practice Theory: A framework that analyses consumption as a composite of materials, meanings and competencies arranged in routinised activities.
Circular Economy: An economic model aiming to eliminate waste and keep materials in use through reuse, remanufacture and recycling.
Practice Architectures: The material, institutional and relational conditions that enable and constrain the formation and transformation of social practices.
Socio-material Bundles: Interlinked sets of objects, skills and shared understandings that constitute everyday practices.
Peer-to-Peer Economy: A system in which individuals exchange goods or services directly, often mediated by digital platforms, to extend product lifespans and reduce consumption.
References
- Countering exclusionary infrastructure in apartment waste management: Towards a relational place-based governance in Victoria. npj Urban Sustainability (2024).
- The emergence of plastic-free grocery shopping: Understanding opportunities for practice transformation. Journal of Environmental Management (2023).
- Conceptualising the peer-to-peer second-hand practice-as-entity. Cleaner and Responsible Consumption (2023).
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