Workshop Report: Climate Change Mitigation: Considering Lifestyle Options in Europe and the US

This report summarizes the presentations and outcomes of a European-American Workshop about lifestyle changes as a mitigation strategies for global warming. The conference was held on May 1, 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley and sponsored by the European Commission. The participants discussed various lifestyle approaches as a promising way to address environmental behavior and action within social and cultural contexts. The presenters and discussants acknowledged the theoretical and practical difficulties of this multi-faceted concept which relies on several sometimes virtually incommensurable traditions. Both a merely individualist interpretation of lifestyles (“green consumption”) and a rather socio-structural view (“green milieus”) are not well-geared to explain the often observed discrepancies between environmental attitudes and people’s action. Lifestyle research must address this gap by explaining individual decisions within societal contexts that provide but also limit the possibilities of lifestyle changes. Despite these difficulties, the huge appeal of the lifestyle approach that makes the work on these problems worthwhile is the prominent role of the term “lifestyle” in the public and political discourse about environmental change. However, many policy attempts to influence lifestyles are barely grounded in sociological grounded theories of social change. The report shortly introduces the problem, summarizes the workshop presentations, and outlines central discussion points.