engleski

Put your thermostat where your environmental concern is: are national differences in European sustainability-potential driven primarily by national prosperity?

Avoiding a whole-scale collapse of the civilisation supporting ecosystems within this century will require a change in the social metabolism (civilisation’s material throughput), as well as expectations and aspirations, behaviours and attitudes of the majority of the global population. In that context, European societies having the highest level of material and social development carry a significant strategic role in exemplifying ‘metabolic’ practices as sustainability-oriented or collapse-oblivious. Through comparing ‘objective’ development (e.g. GNI, HDI, I-HDI) and environmental impact indices (EF) and population’s attitudes across a range of European countries, we aim to elucidate possible links between society’s objective potential to transform its practices and material throughput to those more suitable to a globally just long-term sustainability, and its population’s support for the required social transformations. Our paper primarily aims to test the respective populations’ agreement or prevalence of support for, some of sustainability-compatible strategies against the dominant prosperity thesis, which claims that greater national wealth is the best predictor of population’s environmental and development concerns (Franzen and Meyer 2010). We present the analyses of comparative findings for 18 European ‘old’ and ‘new’ democracies, based on ISSP survey data from 2011. Indices originally constructed for these analyses reveal comparative insights into the potential within different societies for supporting policies and practices conducive to a sustainability switch. We initially confirm the prosperity thesis, which suggests that individuals in wealthier societies more readily commit to notional individual sacrifice under constraint of environmental limits. Divergences from the ‘prosperity trend’ begin to arise in the general risk- perception of environmental threats and reported proenvironmental behaviour. At the societal level the environmental protection vs. growth trade-of does not show a dependence on prosperity trends. In fact, other factors such as the level of income inequality, presence of an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ and support for redistributive policies nationally and globally are shown to be at play. Finally, the analysis suggests that over a certain development threshold the prevalence of the normative framework of (neo)liberal capitalism among European countries reduces the respective populations’ pro-environmental behaviour

social metabolism; sustainability-orientation; degrowth; Europe; ISSP

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