Third International Conference of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative

[su_heading size=”34″]To the official conference website. Download the draft program.[/su_heading]

Third International Conference of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI)

June 27‒30, 2018

Sustainable Consumption: Fostering Good Practices and Confronting the Challenges of the 21st Century

Mitigating the social and environmental impacts of contemporary provisioning systems constitutes a grand challenge in the 21st century. Academics and practitioners from across disciplines as diverse as architecture, business, industrial ecology, sociology, and beyond are actively engaged both in deepening understanding of the scale of these problems and articulating solutions. Yet movement to implement sustainable consumption lags significantly behind these advances in knowledge.

In collaboration with the VELUX Endowed Chair in Corporate Sustainability and hosted by the Copenhagen Business School, the Third International Conference of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) will be held in Copenhagen on June 27–29, 2018. The event will comprise paper presentations, panel discussions, and keynote presentations by acclaimed speakers. Copenhagen has been in the vanguard of cities around the world actively engaged in facilitating more sustainable lifestyles and the conference will enable participants to learn firsthand about some of the world’s most sustainable solutions to challenges in the domains of transportation, food, energy, and urban design.

Building on earlier events at Clark University (2013) and the University of Maine (2016), the conference is expected to attract an international assemblage of researchers who value close interaction with policy makers and practitioners while pursuing co-designed interventions to enable progress toward a more sustainable future. We therefore enthusiastically encourage participation from representatives of academia, industry, government, and civil society organisations. Across these sectors, we invite those with recognised and emerging expertise in topics related to sustainable consumption from interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and disciplinary perspectives. Topics that are anticipated to have prominent visibility at the conference include:

  • Emergence of post-consumerist lifestyles
  • Impact of the decline in wage labor on consumption practices
  • Role of behavioral economics and related strategies on consumption routines
  • Social practices research related to sustainable consumption
  • Sustainability and the transformation of agro-food systems
  • New conceptual approaches to social change
  • Alternative business models for new systems of provisioning
  • Collaboration and mutuality in creating more sustainable provisioning opportunities
  • Degrowth as a pathway for sustainable consumption
  • Policy frameworks to promote a circular economy
  • Consumption-based greenhouse gas accounting
  • Decoupling and dematerialization
  • Grassroots innovation to facilitate sustainable consumption
  • Redesigning socio-technical systems
  • Fostering sustainable prosperity
  • Financial system innovation
  • Challenges of reconciling sustainable consumption priorities in a globalized world
  • Post-consumerist and post-capitalist visions of the future
  • Social movements as enabling agents of societal transformations
  • Consumption and sustainable cities
  • Sustainable mobility
  • Renewable energy transitions

Conference Co-chairs

  • Maurie Cohen (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
  • Lucia Reisch (Copenhagen Business School)
  • Wencke Gwozdz (Copenhagen Business School)
  • Emily Huddart Kennedy (Washington State University)

Scientific Advisory Board

  • Halina Brown, Clark University
  • Anna Davies, Trinity College Dublin
  • Edgar Hertwich, Yale University
  • Sylvia Lorek, Sustainable Europe Research Institute
  • Oksana Mont, Lund University
  • Jeremy Moon, Copenhagen Business School
  • Jaco Quist, Delft University of Technology
  • Inge Røpke, Aalborg University
  • Martina Schäfer, Technische Universität Berlin
  • Juliet Schor, Boston College
  • Ulf Schrader, Technische Universität Berlin
  • Linda Steg, University of Groningen
  • John Thøgersen, Aarhus University
  • Arnold Tukker, Leiden University
  • Philip Vergragt, Tellus Institute

Special Note of Thanks

The Conference Co-chairs are grateful to Professor Jeremy Moon, VELUX Endowed Chair in Corporate Sustainability at the Copenhagen Business School, for generous financial support. Other organizational partners of the conference include the Future Earth Knowledge-Action Network on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production, the Virtual Community in Research in Sustainable Consumption, and the European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production (ERSCP).

Further Information

Questions regarding SCORAI 2018 should be directed to as.msc@cbs.dk.