Climate crisis necessitates the decarbonization of our economy which is intensely discussed in science and society. The expanding use of terms such as transformation suggest that fundamental changes in the socio-economic foundations are necessary and about to come. However, the underlying mechanisms of the ways of life and modes of production in modern capitalism are discussed with less attention. Instead, public debates strongly focus on particular measures to decarbonize consumption and production, such as political instruments to support the introduction of new technologies. Following Norman Laws (2015), these two strands of debate can be transferred into two kinds of sustainability and climate change mitigation policies. First order policies include specific measures that directly or indirectly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, first order policies contain many well-known instruments, such as subsidies for green technology or the rollout of renewable energy production. Second order policies on the other hand contain measures that address the social and economic driving forces and structures underlying climate change. The goal of this cumulative dissertation project is to analyze concrete measures of first and second order climate change mitigation policies and to empirically assess the status quo, potentials and challenges regarding implementation in Germany.

For this endeavor, sufficiency serves as a starting point. While an expanding body of literature discusses the importance of sufficiency for sustainability and climate change mitigation alike, conceptual vagueness continues and hinders effective implementation. My first article “Sufficiency as relations of enoughness”, published in Sustainable Development (https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.3090), wants to tackle this lack of conceptual precision by introducing the concept of relations of enoughness. Hence, diverse uses and understandings of sufficiency share a common structure: ‘Enough/ too little/ too much of X regarding Y’. Exemplarily, a widespread use of sufficiency articulates that currently for many persons in the global north, there is too much consumption regarding limited individual carbon budgets. By constructing relations of enoughness, scientists and practitioners can explicate underlying normativities, assumptions, and areas of interest, contributing to more accuracy in the sufficiency and sustainability debate.