Sustainable consumption is an essential element for the transition towards sustainable lifestyles. In our daily lives, care is intertwined with processes of looking after oneself, family, households and friends as well as distant others and the community as a whole. As such, it addresses all planes of human lives. From a sustainability perspective, care also relates to the living environment and the resources necessary for production and consumption. Looking at sustainable consumption through the lens of care offers us conceptual tools to reframe how to safeguard the planet, its biodiversity and the people living on it. In a classic definition, care is summarized as ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. Fisher and Tronto (1991) mention, that world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. Care highlights our vulnerability as living beings and the way a complex network of life-sustaining relationships holds us responsible to each other. Care is thus a significant thread that links together the ecological, economic, social and political systems we act within, with important implications for sustainable consumption and building sustainable societies.

Scholarship on how care and sustainable practices interact is fragmented, but the interest is growing. Care originates in feminist scholarship first developed in relation to health. In more recent years, its uses have been also expanding to environmental and sustainability realms. Today, the work on sustainable consumption and care can be roughly divided into four categories. The first area of work relates to whether ethical or political consumption can allow caring relations to flourish and develop. The second area of research is concerned with sustainability in the context of motherhood, mostly showing how gender relations and caring activities tend to send sustainability in the background in favor of a focus on health. A third and growing body of work pertains to how inconspicuous consumption is intertwined with care activities, for example in relation to food or energy consumption. Such work also addresses gender and social inequalities in sustainable consumption, as well as notions of communities built through consumption practices and caring relations. Finally, care as a dimension of geographical communities or communities of interest that supports sustainability and resilience is also gaining traction.

The goal of this Research Topic is to delineate and differentiate the interplay between sustainable consumption and care. We are interested in ‘care’ in the context of sustainable consumption including social, economic and ecological sustainability. Resource use and material, energy and time demand differ widely amongst caring practices. We want to identify and explore tensions, common ground, innovations and key issues in these areas. We consider care as a useful concept to imagine and bring about societies oriented towards sustainable wellbeing and to define the pathways and practices necessary to achieve them.

As they wish to define a new research area, this topic aims to discuss the interrelation between care and sustainability by addressing (but not limited to) the following themes from a variety of perspectives, amongst others feminism, gender studies and intersectional approaches, socio-technical systems, social practice theories, critical theory, transformative approaches, time-use studies, socio-ecological transformation or Actor-Network Theory:

• An ethos of care as a pathway towards more sustainable forms of production and consumption
• Conceptualizing needs and wellbeing through the lens of care
• Analyzing caring practices from a perspective of climate change, resource use and energy demands
• Methodological implications of care and an intersectional feminist approach to sustainable consumption
• Time for care in the unpaid and paid world of work (incl. commodification and outsourcing of care in the global economy)
• Teleoaffectivities, emotions, the body and social norms
• Agency, social and environmental justice, inequalities and sustainable wellbeing
• Care for the community and the public good as a way towards a more sustainable society

They are particularly interested in original research, methodological and theoretical papers, case studies as well as policy and practice reviews.