ReviewMindfulness and sustainable consumption: A systematic literature review of research approaches and findings
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Consumption has emerged as a key priority area in research and policy-making related to sustainable development. Given the significant impact of such different consumption areas as food and nutrition, mobility, housing or textile consumption (Ivanova et al., 2015, Tukker et al., 2010), the search for approaches to promote more sustainable consumer behaviors has become somewhat of a “holy grail“ (Kenis and Mathijs, 2012) for researchers and policy makers alike. Despite advances made in recent years in sustainable consumption research (SCR) (Reisch and Thøgersen, 2015), the search for evidence on how consumer behavior can be more effectively influenced towards sustainability remains an ongoing and pressing issue for the SCR agenda (Kaufmann-Hayoz et al., 2012). Debates about future directions for SCR commonly refer to three key challenges.
A first key challenge addresses the question of how individual factors like knowledge, problem awareness or attitude actually relate to respective actions and behaviors – commonly referred to as knowledge-action gap, awareness-behavior gap or attitude-behavior gap (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). SCR has shown that consumption behaviors are, to a significant extent, shaped by routines and habits (Fischer and Hanley, 2007, Schäfer et al., 2012) and embedded in broader social practices (Spaargaren, 2003) that entail often unquestioned conventional, or “normal,” standards for consumption behaviors (Shove, 2003). Hence, researchers in SCR are called upon to explore and advance approaches that effectively reduce the attitude-behavior gap by enhancing the capacity of individuals to reflect upon these routinized behaviors and to re-align them with their underpinning values and intentions.
A second key challenge emerges from the fact that SCR does not represent a single discipline, but is constituted by a field of disciplines related to specific SCR issues (Lorek and Vergragt, 2015). SCR is characterized by innovations and insights drawn from quite varying inter- and multidisciplinary perspectives (Di Giulio et al., 2014). Given these variations, a major task for SCR, as a largely problem-driven field, is to promote work on the interface between different disciplines and discourses in related fields without becoming too fragmented.
A third key challenge refers to a lack of comprehensive, systematic overviews of SCR findings on policy-relevant topics. Studies in SCR indicate that perceived inconclusiveness of findings may hamper decision-makers’ utilization of relevant evidence from the field (Heiskanen et al., 2014), causing what has been termed “implementation gap” (Tukker et al., 2006). In light of this, a key challenge for SCR is to advance and consolidate an evidence base of effective approaches to study and promote sustainable consumer behavior, from which both the interdisciplinary scientific community and societal decision-makers can draw.
The research presented in this paper attempts to address these key challenges within the framework of a specific issue. We focus on mindfulness research as a vibrant and rapidly emerging area that has inspired researchers in many fields in the past years, including SCR (key challenge 2, section 3). A strong interest in respect to SCR is to elucidate the possibility of mindfulness for influencing the attitude-behavior gap and consequently promoting sustainable consumption behavior (key challenge 1; section 4). As with any new field of research, the existing body of empirical studies on the connection between mindfulness and sustainable consumption is, so far, rich in pilot studies among different disciplinary fields, but rather fragmented and hardly integrated into an overall perspective. For this purpose, we have conducted a systematic literature review (SLR). In light of the lack of integrating and synthesizing reviews in this emerging field, this paper seeks to provide a systematic overview of the state of empirical research on mindfulness and sustainable consumption (key challenge 2; sections 5 Discussion, 6 Conclusion). The main research questions (RQ) underpinning this study are the following:
RQ 1 How many empirical studies exist on the nexus between mindfulness and sustainable consumption?
RQ 2 How were these studies conducted?
RQ 3 What are their results?
As a necessary foundation for answering the research questions outlined, we first give some theoretical background to the notion of mindfulness, as well as its relevance for SCR. The main part of the paper describes the specific methodology of the SLR used in this study and presents and discusses the findings of the review. Finally, we provide recommendations for the future development of this promising field of research and its overall contribution to address key challenges in SCR.
Section snippets
Mindfulness and sustainable consumption research
Mindfulness has become a subject of interdisciplinary research in recent years. In what follows, we sketch the origins of the concept, highlight key characteristics and elaborate on the potential of mindfulness for SCR based on empirical findings that have sparked interest in mindfulness among different research communities.
Method: systematic literature review
To address the research questions, we conducted a SLR, which is a rigorous approach to provide an overview of a research field and the results it has produced. This method has received growing attention in past years for a number of reasons. SLRs meet the need for orientation in light of the rapidly growing body of publications that can hardly be overlooked by individuals anymore (Ridley, 2012). Not least there is need to base policy decisions on syntheses of high-quality, rigorously
Results
The first important result of our review is that only seven publications met our criteria and represent empirical studies on the nexus between mindfulness and sustainable consumption (see RQ 1). Of these seven publications (see Table 3, Table 4), five use an exclusively quantitative approach (publication 1–5), one employs an exclusively qualitative approach (publication 7) and one publication uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches (publication 6). However, it is a rather cumulative
Discussion
The discussion of the results of the literature review is divided in two parts, one on methodological issues and one on the results reported in the studies. For each part, recommendations for future research are provided. We conclude this section by discussing limitations of the review approach used in this SLR and by providing recommendations for future research in the field.
Conclusion
This SLR relating mindfulness and sustainable consumption shows preliminary evidence for characteristics associated with mindfulness to be subtly, but consistently, correlated with measures of individual sustainable consumption behavior. Most of the results obtained with cross-sectional studies revealed small, but stable, effects over a range of different sustainability behaviors. The most comprehensively researched potential role of mindfulness is its capacity to reduce materialistic values
Acknowledgement
The present work is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) in the project BiNKA (Education for Sustainable Consumption through Mindfulness Training) under grants 01UT1416 and 01UT1416B. The authors would like to thank Laura Ditges, Angelika Haaser, Lena Kaupmann and Teresa Ruckelshauβ for their support in data preparation and processing.
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