A literature review of sustainable consumption and production: A comparative analysis in developed and developing economies

Highlights

• Sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in two distinct economies is studied.

• A three-dimension taxonomy is designed for performing the content analysis.

• It is found that Europe hold international leadership in SCP practices.

• SCP is a complicated and slow process with uncertain grounds in both economies.

• Current trends and future research opportunities in SCP practices regarding different economies' status are articulated.

Abstract

Sustainable consumption and production is identified as one of the essential requirements for sustainable development. Due to different economic conditions and socio-cultural factors, sustainable consumption and production requires a diverse focus in developing and developed economies. To date, few efforts have been made to systematically compare the status of sustainable consumption and production and its direction from the perspective of developing and developed economies. This paper provides a literature review of published articles in international scientific journals related to sustainable consumption and production between 1998 and 2018 inclusive. Three carefully designed questions are proposed and answered in this article, forming the basis for conducting a comprehensive comparative analysis of the differences and challenges in sustainable consumption and production practices within developed and developing economies. The findings strongly suggest that countries in Europe hold international leadership in sustainable consumption and production practices. This finding, alongside others, is analyzed and discussed in greater detail in this paper, resulting in the articulation of gaps and future research opportunities in the current body of the literature.

Introduction

In the 1970s, the scientific community began to realize that unsustainable development was leading toward environmental and economic collapse. This warning is also known as “limits to growth”, which was proposed by the Club of Rome (Meadows et al., 1972). After decades of economic development, sustainable development (SD) is assumed to be an attempt “without alternative” for the survival of humankind (Seiffert and Loch, 2005). As a predominant goal and crucial necessity for establishing SD, the integration of consumption and production systems with SD was formulated and implemented (Akenji and Bengtsson, 2014; Lozano et al., 2015). The concern over sustainable consumption and production (SCP) patterns has been elevated to an unprecedented level and has gained international prominence. A series of international conferences related to on-going climate changes and SCP matters have been held. The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation in 2002 called for all countries to promote SCP patterns with the developed countries taking the lead and with all countries benefiting from the process, and a decade later, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) reaffirmed that SCP was a cornerstone of SD, proposing a 10-Year Framework of Programmes on SCP patterns.

Such triggers have encouraged various stakeholders, such as government regulatory agencies, relevant international organizations, and education and science institutions to incorporate SCP at their corporate and strategic planning levels. A number of prior studies in SCP related research have substantially addressed the integration of economic growth, environmental protection and social inclusiveness from both the consumption side and production side. Based on the boundaries outlined in Sub-section 2.2, previous reviews papers in this field have been identified (see Table 1). Only three papers were identified as having reviewed the SCP literature from different perspectives (Brizga et al., 2014; Pallaro et al., 2015; Roy and Singh, 2017). Brizga et al. (2014) provided a review on SCP policy development and implementation based on publications from 1990 to 2010. Pallaro et al. (2015) centered their review on SCP considerations in the automotive sector. Furthermore, Roy and Singh (2017) performed a review of related literature on SCP with a focus on business areas. Apart from these reviews, three articles have solely focused on the sustainable consumption field (Caeiro et al., 2012; Grabs et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2016). To our knowledge, no research has been carried out attempting to systematically compare SCP developments and shortcomings with respect to developed and developing economies.

Hence, the major contribution and theoretical underpinnings of this work are to (a) conduct a comprehensive literature review in the SCP research domain with respect to the carefully defined taxonomies and (b) to utilize the results of the literature review in performing a comparative analysis to shed light on the fundamental SCP differences and areas of focus between developed and developing economies. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the research design of this paper. Section 3 encompasses the descriptive and content analyses of the related articles. A detailed comparative analysis and discussion on the results of Section 3 are presented in Section 4. Furthermore, Section 5 discusses the opportunities for future work based on various research gaps identified in Section 4. Final remarks and limitations are presented in Section 6.