MILJØ2015-Norsk miljøforskning mot 2015

Interrelationships between production and consumption in global supply chains represent a significant challenge in policies for environmental sustainability. Consumers have become increasingly important in such policies terms of adaptations as well as act ive responsibilities, eg in the form of product labelling. There is considerable uncertainty and often little success with regard to implementing policies emphasising consumer self-regulation. This project focuses on the ways in which consumption can be r egulated in order to become more sustainable, including strong measures of state intervention as well as softer, more indirect and voluntary forms of regulation. In particular, the project aims to get a better understanding of how consumer self-regulation develops within global/national systems of provision, consumer cultures, and regulatory initiatives. A comparative approach is employed in order to identify basic political, market and cultural conditions and path-dependencies. Two items, beef and cotton , are selected, both with significant and complex environmental impacts, globally and nationally. The items represent different areas of consumption. While beef supply chains vary, supply chains for cotton seem more generally globalised. Moreover, regulat ory traditions are highly diverging. We compare how the environmental impacts of these items are handled in three countries with different regulatory traditions, provisioning systems, and consumer cultures, Norway, the UK and France. The comparative analy ses are obtained by linking up with ongoing research in France and the UK. Collaboration is also established with India and the US for studying the regulation of global supply chains. The budget in this proposal includes first of all studies based inNorwa y, with some funding for complementing studies in France/UK (some institutional investigations, media study in France) and a small study in India (all via SIFO budgets).