Search

The roles that individuals can adopt, or get assigned, in processes of global environmental change, can be analyzed with the help of three ideal-type forms of commitment: as environmental citizens, as political consumers, and as individual moral agents. We offer a discussion of the three roles in the context of sustainability changes in everyday life practices of consumption. Sociological accounts of (sustainability) transitions are discussed with respect to their treatment of the concept of agency vis à vis the objects, technologies, and infrastructures implied in globalizing consumption practices. Using consumption practices as basic units of analysis helps to avoid individualist and privatized accounts of the role of citizen-consumers in environmental change, while making possible a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the personal and the planetary in the process of greening everyday life consumption

Globalisation in food production and consumption is fundamentally transforming a wide variety of social practices at different levels in society. Simply adding another level of governance will therefore not solve the problems related to food production and consumption in global modernity. Different layers in the social reality of global modernity are mutually connected and, besides their internal dynamics, interaction between them also takes place. This study has clarified the usefulness of the concepts of global flows and networks to understand these interactions regarding food.