Expansion of Policy Domain of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP): Challenges and Opportunities for Policy Design

The authors examine how the focus of SCP policy has shifted and widened over the last 30 years, and pay particular attention to the development of SCP policy discourse. This paper summarizes and describes this shift in three phases—SCP 1.0, SCP 2.0, and SCP 3.0. It provides a streamlined narrative on how the SCP-related policy domain first expanded from pollution prevention and cleaner production (SCP 1.0) to increasing efficiency throughout the lifecycle of materials, products, and services (SCP 2.0). Then, in the late 2000s, policy discussions on the SCP-related domain expanded to include the systematic transition of socio-technical systems, lifestyles, and infrastructure driving consumption and production (SCP 3.0). This expansion can be observed in the recent international policy agendas of sustainability such as the Paris Agreement, and agreements emerging from the G7 and G20 processes.

3 Phases of SCP Policy Domain

Therefore, one of the paper’s major contributions to sustainable consumption and production is the authors’ in-depth examination of the three phases of SCP policies. The rise of the first phase of SCP, or SCP 1.0, corresponded with the need to prevent environmental pollution resulting from rapid industrialization in developed economies in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the need for more energy-efficient and cleaner production in response to the energy crisis of the 1970s. Typically emerging in Japan, SCP 1.0 policies focus on pollution prevention and cleaner production. During these two decades, the Japanese government enacted strong environmental regulations to decrease pollution and promoted structural changes in Japanese industry from energy-dependent, heavy to assembly-based industries in response to the oil crisis. While strict environmental policies are vital to pollution prevention are important, the cleaner production (CP) process in Japan, as induced by the structural change, as well as the accompanied environment technologies improvement and energy-saving, contributes more to pollution prevention. CP focuses on the efficient use of resources while minimizing waste and pollution, the re-engineering of production processes and the international transfer of environmental technology.

In the 1990s, the SCP policy domain expanded from SCP 1.0 in the 1970s and 1980s, to focusing more on the efficiency in product lifecycles in the 1990s, which marked the start of the second phase of the SCP policy domain (SCP 2.0).

Global environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity loss emerged during the 1980s, SCP 2.0 takes on a global scale with the focus on global production and consumption, along with indirect and lifecycle-based issues. SCP 2.0 aims to harmonize the environment and economy towards sustainability by increasing efficiency throughout the product lifecycle at the product or facility-unit level. Policies in this domain bring improvements from the upstream (e.g., more environmentally conscious product designs, promoting energy efficiency and product recyclability), to the downstream (e.g., waste reduction, reuse, recycling, and environmentally appropriate treatment) of the product lifecycle. This also means that SCP 2.0 policies are extending to each stage of the lifecycle and integrating environmental impacts.

Since the 2000s, the SCP policy shifted from SCP 2.0 to the current SCP 3.0, the third phase of SCP policies. Instead of mainly focusing on efficiency and individual products or process in the previous stage, SCP 3.0 is a call for fundamental socio-technical system transition that focuses on enabling or constraining behaviour and reducing consumption of non-renewable resources/materials. It looks beyond individual product systems and aims to foster the society-wide demand side/civil sector to transition to a sustainable regime, by modifying business models, lifestyles, and infrastructure. They encourage the social constraints on society’s pattern of consumption and promote the concept of one-planet living, which emphasizes the theme of sufficiency and sustainable growth.

SCP 3.0 in the Recent International Policy Discussions

The authors also examine how SCP 3.0 has emerged and promoted as a way to achieve a shift in socio-technical system transition. The authors demonstrated how international collaboration efforts have used SCP 3.0 to achieve ambitious sustainable development, using the example of the Paris Agreement, the G7 Toyama Framework on Material Cycles in 2016, Ocean Plastic Charter and G20 Osaka Blue Ocean Vision, and the OECD’s Green Recovery plan. The authors showed how those agreements have set different SCP goals that will facilitate the socio-technical changes to the system, as well as concepts like planetary boundaries, sufficiency, or one-planet living.