SAMFUNN: Leisure and Sustainable Development: part of the problem or part of the solution?

The overall focus of the project is the relationship between leisure time consumption and sustainable development in post industrialised countries, and how policies can influence on this relationship. Our proposed project is very much based on the finding s from the project "Environmental aspects with leisure time consumption: Theoretical developments, empirical analysis and normative discussions" financed by the RAMBU programme, which defined what leisure-time consumption ?is? and presented figures for th e volume of consumption and the total energy use. In the proposed project we will follow up the RAMBU project by doing a serious of case studies, in order to assess the drivers of leisure-time consumption and a more detailed assessment of how leisure-time consumption have developed over time within a limited number of consumption categories. We will study the increased use of outdoor recreation equipment (case 1), second homes (case 2), leisure boats (case 3) and leisure-time transportation (case 4). In t he final part of the project we will gather relevant stakeholders in order to discuss possible means and policies to a) reduce the environmental impacts of leisure-time consumption, and b) enhance the transfer of low-impact practices from leisure to every -day consumption; thus also in reality establishing the "leisure sector".