Business action for sufficiency –towards viable business strategies

Urgent action is needed to counteract the crossing of planetary boundaries and excessive extraction of natural resources. This requires a radically revisited approach to sustainable consumption and production. Hence, recently, scholars have been calling for a “sufficiency approach”, which advocates meeting human needs while recognizing the limits to resource extraction and excessive consumption. Even though sufficiency is anchored in sustainable consumption, the consumption-enabling business sector has largely been overlooked as a potential enabler of sufficiency. Research on businesses driving sufficiency is still nascent. In this study, the authors investigate the following research question: What are possible business strategies for sufficiency? The paper takes stock of the research on companies enabling sufficient consumption through a literature review followed by analysing the business practices of 97 sufficiency-enabling firms. Based on this review, the authors present a conceptual framework of ‘Business for sufficiency’ (BFS) strategies. The BFS framework combines two conceptual approaches to sufficiency; merging the ‘four lessens’ of sufficiency with consumption choices derived from the highest strategies in the waste hierarchy. The framework is populated with sufficiency business strategies from the literature and practice review and highlights the range of strategies available to businesses, thereby creating the context for a wider discussion around sustainable consumption through business intervention.