PhD Defence Laura Nießen (Niessen)

Keywords: Sufficiency, Sufficiency Business, Sustainable Business Models, Strong Sustainability
 

"Better, not more: Investigating the paradox of sufficiency-oriented business"

Humanity faces both environmental and social sustainability challenges: the way we produce and consume has already led us to cross several planetary boundaries. At the same time, many people still live in poverty. Current sustainability action has proven inadequate to tackle these challenges because it ignores the need to reduce overconsumption of resources by wealthy parts of the world to sustainable levels.  This is the basis of the sufficiency idea: resource consumption that enables well-being for all while remaining within the limits of Earth. Sufficiency is needed since the economic system is based on the consumption of new products and the overconsumption of resources, which create negative environmental and social impacts. Businesses can shape demand through their offering and advertising. They can act as frontrunners in working towards sufficiency, yet they are often overlooked as potential leaders. Therefore, this PhD thesis focuses on the role that business can play in the transition towards sufficient consumption. It investigates existing examples of companies that promote sufficiency. This thesis attempt to put together different pieces of the puzzle of sufficiency-promoting businesses to generate a clearer picture and shares two practical tools to inspire and support businesses that want to take action and adopt sufficiency and strongly sustainable business principles.

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