This article aims to uncover diverse perspectives regarding what sustainable consumption is and should be in the future. We draw upon and combine critical futures studies with recognitional justice. Futures studies enables inclusive approaches and divergence from current narratives of the future that are perceived as dominant. Recognitional justice allows for reflection upon who is usually not in the room when consumption futures are discussed. The article analyzes sustainable consumption-futures workshops held with four groups in Sweden. The first was with partners in a research program focusing on sustainable consumption. The second workshop enlisted elderly rural retirees, the third newly-arrived women from Syria and Eritrea, and the fourth high-income earners. A variety of traits in the discussions were noticeably influenced by the local context and backgrounds of the participants. Several issues brought up in the discussions dealt with issues that are on the political agenda in Sweden, such as circulating materials and more information and knowledge. There were also matters not on the political agenda such as eating a vegetarian diet, reducing consumption, and spending less time working. In addition, the newly-arrived women and, to some extent, the retirees, framed peace and ending the use of weapons as a vital element in sustainable consumption. This diversity and divergence highlights that, if it is to become relevant and inclusive, both research and policy need to recognize a multitude of perspectives and incorporate the distribution of power and critical futures perspectives to navigate a pathway toward consumption that is just and sustainable.

In policy debates around sustainable consumption, the term is often associated with buying products or services that have lower environmental impact when compared with mainstream options. This paper contributes to the growing body of research that seeks to nuance understandings of sustainable consumption by providing a taxonomy structured into three ‘types’ of sustainable consumption practices: 1) buying, 2) using and 3) making. The taxonomy highlights that sustainable consumption concerns not only the decisions made around the acquisition of a product or service, but also how products and resources are maintained, reused, repaired, shared and enabled – while also considering wider socio-environmental aspects such as community empowerment. The policy relevance lies in the argument that sustainable consumption goes beyond the buying type – enacted through, for example, public procurement – to also include the using and making types, i.e. public policy that facilitates sharing, making and repairing beyond market-relations.

Given the significant sustainability challenges related to food consumption, particularly in Western countries, this study explores transitioning to sustainable eating practices in Sweden through a household intervention. The aim of the paper is to enhance understanding of how structural factors may constrain or enable transitions in household eating practices. We relate structural factors to the metaphor of a glass ceiling that consumers bump into, with limited agency to enable a full transition beneath it. The paper explores barriers and enablers households face when attempting to make a dietary transition and examines related issues of agency and power. In an experiment lasting 4–8 weeks, 14 households chose to fulfill one or several goals for sustainable food consumption, reporting back their experiences through diaries, questionnaires, and interviews. The intervention showed that transitioning to sustainable eating might be achievable for households, but requires significant effort, time, and resources. Households encountered several barriers and enablers in their interactions with food provisioning actors such as restaurants, school canteens, and food stores, mainly due to the lack of healthy and vegetarian options. Household economy is also a crucial factor; despite being middle- to high income, households argue that sustainable and healthy food is less affordable than unhealthy options. Several households believe that the government and politics bear a significant responsibility in pushing the transition through. Other barriers include unclear information about sustainable foods and conflicts between fulfilling different goals. This highlights the need for supportive measures from various sectors, including politics, planning, food stores, and restaurants. Government policies may play a crucial role in promoting sustainable eating.

Recognizing the great potential of civil society organizations (CSOs) as drivers of social change, this study examines how CSOs’ work directed towards consumers—in this case, to make food consumption sustainable—could be analyzed and improved through insights in practice theory. This research scope adds to the sustainable consumption literature by shifting the lens from the rich body of scholarship examining the practices of households or organizations themselves to how CSOs can influence household practices. Interviews with five different Swedish CSOs serve as the study's main empirical basis. To analyze CSO activities that target households, we use practice theorist Alan Warde's well-established categorization of four integrative social practices of eating: (1) the supplying of food, (2) cooking, (3) the organization of meal occasions, and (4) aesthetic judgments of taste. Unlike some perspectives in sustainable consumption research that focus on consumer attitudes and behavioral change, a practice theory perspective encourages a view of consumption patterns as arising from complex and necessarily social configurations of human action formed in relation to evolving infrastructures and institutions in a cultural and historical context. In agreement with this, we suggest that the CSOs would generally benefit from focusing on particular practices, practice elements, and communities of practice. The different preconditions under which CSOs operate—such as material resource constraints and symbolic power resources—should further inform their chosen types of activities. However, we also conclude that the scale of the necessary societal changes ultimately requires increased integration and coordination of practical and political activities, not just among CSOs but throughout all spheres of society. Finally, we briefly outline avenues for further research.

The food system is a major driver of anthropogenic environmental impacts and in Sweden a sizeable proportion of the country’s relatively large per capita ecological footprint is attributable to food. In short, sustainable eating practices need to become mainstream. Actors within the food-provisioning system likely have valuable insights into how such a transition could be enabled. This article presents the results of a qualitative study that aimed to examine the perspectives of these individuals on such a transition in Sweden using a social practice framework to identify framings of barriers and potentials for mainstreaming sustainable eating practices. We found that conventional framings and models for explaining change and transitions dominate. These approaches center on providing alternative food products, with some attention devoted to normalizing sustainable eating through product design, communication, and marketing. However, exceptions to these strategies include calls for redefining business profitability in terms of human and planetary health and notions of a decentralized food-provisioning system consisting of small-scale actors and limited by the regional and seasonal supply of food. Our analysis suggests that interventions for mainstreaming sustainable eating practices need to move beyond a constrained recrafting of mainstream eating practices and toward systematic practice substitution that favors considerations regarding how eating practices connect to other practices that constitute people’s everyday lives. We conclude by discussing implications for the food-provisioning system and suggest directions for further research that could lead to the development of strategies for mainstreaming sustainable eating practices in Sweden and elsewhere.