Consumption Corridors Living a Good Life within Sustainable Limits

Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life within Sustainable Limits explores how to enhance peoples’ chances to live a good life in a world of ecological and social limits. Rejecting familiar recitations of problems of ecological decline and planetary boundaries, this compact book instead offers a spirited explication of what everyone desires: a good life. Fundamental concepts of the good life are explained and explored, as are forces that threaten the good life for all. The remedy, says the book’s seven international authors, lies with the concept of consumption corridors, enabled by mechanisms of citizen engagement and deliberative democracy. Across five concise chapters, readers are invited into conversation about how wellbeing can be enriched by social change that joins "needs satisfaction" with consumerist restraint, social justice, and environmental sustainability. In this endeavour, lower limits of consumption that ensure minimal needs satisfaction for all are important, and enjoy ample precedent. But upper limits to consumption, argue the authors, are equally essential, and attainable, especially in those domains where limits enhance rather than undermine essential freedoms. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and environmental and sustainability studies, as well as to community activists and the general public. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780367748746, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1. Living Well Within Limits 2. Our Vision: The Good Life But what is a good life? Focusing on needs Slipping through our fingers Can we be responsible for a good life for others? 3. Consumption Corridors as a Vehicle to Pursue the Good Life The idea Limits are already out there What kind of processes are needed? Getting started and building momentum 4. What’s Stopping Us? Limits to the salvation potential of technological innovation Limits to efficiency and markets as solutions Limits to consumer sovereignty and responsibility No limits to freedom in democratic societies? Shedding myths in pursuit of social change 5. Visionary Change: Corridors as a Pathway to the Good Life Annex 1: Needs Annex 2: Indicators of Quality of Life Annex 3: Estimates of upper and lower sustainable limits in floor space

Doris Fuchs is Chair of International Relations and Sustainable Development at the University of Münster, Germany. Marlyne Sahakian is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Tobias Gumbert is a Lecturer at the Institute of Political Science, University of Münster, Germany. Antonietta Di Giulio is a Senior Researcher at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Michael Maniates is Professor of Social Science (Environmental Studies) at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Sylvia Lorek is Chair of the Sustainable Europe Research Institute, Germany, and Adjunct Professor in Consumer Economics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Antonia Graf is a Junior Professor of Global Environmental Governance at the University of Münster, Germany.