Book Choice: Waste - Uncovering the Global Food Scandal

I am still waiting for my chosen book to arrive so I can't give any first-hand information yet, but it caught my eye as it deals with the issue of food injustice - people starving in some places of the earth and lots of food actually being thrown away by consumers or even before they reach the consumers by supermarkets.
I stumbled across several articles on a movement of people who want to draw attention to this issue (all in German though, so won't post any links) and thus refuse participating in the game. What they do is that they "steal" food from containers at supermarkets, which is very often still perfectly alright, but maybe the packaging was a bit scratched or dented etc. So they refuse to participate in the game and thereby try to show their criticism.
I am expecting the book to look at similar issues and hoping to learn more about the international connections between goods consumed in one place of the earth having huge implications on people's lives at places very far away...

Make people act - but how?

How can people be encouraged to not only be aware of environmental issues but also to act accordingly in their every-day-life is one of the central questions when developing sustainable policy.
I think that information and also accurate pricing or other economic incentives do form a crucial part of this, they could maybe be described most accurately as necessary prerequisites for sustainable acting. For if I don't know how I can improve my impact on the planet, there is no way of changing habits etc and if I do know but the prices are just not accurate I will probably still be inclined to act unsustainably as the incentives point into this direction.
But this is not the entire story. How can those more obscure factors like habits, convenience, peer influence etc. be twisted towards more sustainable action? One idea could be - although this goes into the direction of consuming differently not less - to make green consumerism "cool". I think this is actually happening - at least it is in Germany - as it's "in" to buy organic and fair trade and vote Green among young people (although I have to admit that this is only my personal perception and thus limited to mostly students). However, a problem with this advertising biased approach is that action taken by people will be very limited and not be extended to areas where it actually might hurt, like boycotting cheap flights with Ryanair or stopping consuming products that are not readily available in organic/ fair trade quality.

To be honest I cannot really think of good mechanisms to make people act more sustainably other than those relying on the rational-choice approach, at the moment, thus hoping to get some ideas in the next lectures on these...

Sustainable Businesses

Andrew commented on my last post stressing that structures always need to be considered when trying to tackle behavioural patterns of consumption and I think that is also true for businesses acting in a sustainable way.
I do believe that businesses have the "moral" task of shaping up their environmental performance but I also believe - all the more since looking at all sustainable development reports last Friday - that this voluntary action will only push them to a certain point. This is because acting in a more sustainable manner does inevitably cost the companies more as it internalises the usually externalised costs and they will only have an incentive to do so as long as consumers are prepared to pay more for their product, which they probably will be - if at all - only to a limited degree. This is why - coming from an institutionalist perspective - I think that more important than hoping that consumers will be constantly on the lookout for companies' misbehaviour would be to actually alter the structures and institutions in which the companies act and interact by some form of regulation. If there were actual incentives to act in sustainable manners in the structure of the market, businesses would surely find much more transparent and convincing ways to adapt to the challenge than they generally seem to be at the moment.

Sustainable consumption - what is it all about?

Sustainability is one of those terms like "globalisation" or "governance" that seem to suffer from their own popularity. As they are thrown in in all sorts of debates and discourses, it becomes difficult to register what exactly they mean. So, I am first of all hoping to leave this course being clear on what the concept of sustainability - and of sustainable consumption - actually entails. This is surely the first step to being able to analyse and evaluate policies that are designed to give citizens incentives to live and consume more sustainably, this being my primary interest in this course.
I come from a political science background with a strong focus on the European Union and would thus find it particularly interesting to analyse and evaluate EU environmental policies with the help of the mainstream and alternative theories that form the core of the module, especially as European environmental policy tends to involve so-called "new modes of governance", implying a shift from hard legislation to other modes of governance as markets or networks. I have a hunge that the theories underlying these new policies still tend to be more on the mainstream site, but it would be interesting to research that properly.

Hi, I'm Antje from Germany, doing MSc Climate Change, welcome to my blog! :)