UTFacultiesBMSDept TPSCSTMResearchSustainable production & consumption

Sustainable production & consumption

Sustainable Development Goal 12: Sustainable consumption and productionThe CSTM domain Sustainable Production and Consumption comprises five areas for special attention. In the area of “Environmental policy approaches and their effectiveness”, CSTM researchers analyse ways of changing governmental sustainability strategies towards environmental governance, industrial production and consumption. 
“Networks and organizations for sustainable development” concentrates on multi-actor/network constellations joining forces and working together in the greening of industry. Furthermore, corporate collaborative strategies of companies are objects of research, especially when network approaches and capacity-building partnerships are used for increasing corporate and product legitimacy.
The firm-level mitigation of environmental impacts of products and production processes – the greening of industry – describes the theme “Environmental management and sustainability at the firm level/Greening of Industry”. This includes among others corporate environmental strategy and environmental management systems. Besides, this area includes topics such as market development/preparation for new products, technologies or services.
Opportunities for better environmental quality that come with socio-economic development and innovations are addressed in the theme of “Green Economy and Eco-innovations”. To decrease social costs and benefits while reducing natural resource use and industrial pollution is at the theme’s heart.
Finally, the theme “Sustainable development” focuses on smart ways for balancing the social, environmental and economic dimensions of sustainable development. For example, the projects “Building with Nature” and “NatureCoast” are long-term research programmes aimed at development and application of new design concepts for the layout and sustainable management of wet infrastructure.

Current projects

  • Managing telecoupled landscapes in Myanmar, Laos and Madagascar

    The debate about Sustainable Development Goals following the United Nations “Rio+20” reveals the difficulty of simultaneously addressing social and economic development challenges and the degradation of Earth’s life support systems. Land systems in the humid tropics illustrate these challenges prominently. Local people’s land use strategies are facing competition from large-scale land acquisition, logging etc., but also biodiversity conservation. Remote decision-makers reshape flows of ecosystem services to their benefit, whereas the consequences hardly reach them. Land change scientists have recently conceptualized this phenomenon under the term “telecoupling”. The project within the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d programme) pursues the overall goal of devising and testing innovative strategies and institutional arrangements for securing ecosystem service flows and human well-being in and between telecoupled landscapes at study sites in Laos, Myanmar, and Madagascar.

    More information

    Project website: https://www.telecoupling.unibe.ch
    Videos: Cash crops: Opportunity or Challenge? Voices from Maroantsetra region, Madagascar

    Key publications

    Andriamihaja, O. R., Metz, F., Zaehringer, J. G., Fischer, M., & Messerli, P. (2021). Identifying agents of change for sustainable land governanceLand use policy100 [104882]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104882

    Pham-Truffert, M., Metz, F. A., Fischer, M., Rueff, H., & Messerli, P. (2020). Interactions among Sustainable Development Goals: Knowledge for identifying multipliers and virtuous cyclesSustainable development28(5), 1236-1250. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.2073

    Andriamihaja, O. R., Metz, F., Zaehringer, J. G., Fischer, M., & Messerli, P. (2019). Land Competition under Telecoupling: Distant Actors’ Environmental versus Economic Claims on Land in North-Eastern Madagascar. Sustainability, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.3390/su11030851

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  • The role of informal practices in convivial post-growth rural lifestyles (2019 - 2024)

    Socio-economic precarity in Japan’s shrinking society has given rise to a range of alternative lifestyles that reject contemporary ideas of work and market dependency. One common feature of these “convivial” lifestyles are informal food practices (IFPs) and ways of food self-provisioning, such as gardening, wild food procurement, and food processing and sharing. Despite many modern-day pressures for them to disappear, IFPs continue to exist for a reason, but explanations as to why this is the case are lacking. This research will catalogue the range and diversity of IFPs performed as part of convivial lifestyles in rural communities popular with in-migrants as sites of experimentation with rural living. This will clarify how IFPs 1) contribute to peoples’ well-being and livelihoods as well as 2) inform and improve policy and planning related to IFPs to strengthen local food economies. Results will create a new research space on social practices, well-being, and food policy.

    More information

    Project information in KAKEN database: https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-19K15931/

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  • Social system and policy towards regeneration of agri-food system from local perspectives in post-Corona era (2021 - 2026)

    Food and agriculture in Japan are caught between global issues such as global environmental problems and internal issues such as the consistent regression of domestic agricultural production. The recent coronavirus pandemic has made the future image even more uncertain. This comparative study regards the coronavirus pandemic as a turning point in the revitalization of the food and agriculture systems, and aims at embedding new policy ideas and frameworks in local policies as social institutions, while comprehensively mobilizing local socio-historical, comparative sociocultural, and socio-practical research methods to explore future social forms of linking food production and consumption.

    More information

    Project information in KAKEN database: https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-21H04745/

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Selection of past projects

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