Community Currencies and Sustainable Consumption - GPI Atlantic精品.pdfVIP

BARTERING FOR A BETTER FUTURE? COMMUNITY CURRENCIES AND SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION By Gill Seyfang CSERGE Working Paper EDM 04-10 Bartering for a Better Future? Community Currencies and Sustainable Consumption By Gill Seyfang Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK Author contact details: Gill Seyfang: email - g.seyfang@uea.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 1603 592956 Fax: +44 (0) 1603 593739 Acknowledgements The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. This work was part of the interdisciplinary research programme of the ESRC Research Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE). Thanks to Beth Brockett for research assistance with the time banks national survey, and to Tim O’Riordan for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. ISSN 0967-8875 Abstract Sustainable consumption is gaining currency as a new policy objective, requiring consumers to enact preferences for sustainability through the marketplace. But there is a limit to the changes in consumption behaviour which individuals can make within social institutions, and current policies do not question the materialism inherent in current development policies. New social institutions, or structures of provision, are needed to enable the lifestyle changes required for sustainability. This paper critically assesses the potential of one such alternative system of provision: namely mon