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Educational Institutions and Sustainable Consumption

Project: Research

Project participants

Description

What is “sustainable consumption” and how can it be promoted? Both questions are the focal points of the three-years programme. The project investigates the development of consumption awareness and purchasing competence and consumer-related behaviour in youths and young adults in educational institutions.
The point of departure is a view of a sustainable consumer culture that was developed (and is supported) in cooperation with professional protagonists. Sustainable consumer behaviour is directly promoted, along with basic research in pilot projects: in doing so, the underlying assumption is that the promotion of sustainable consumer behaviour in educational institutions requires an interrelation of formal and informal settings of learning. Thus, classes and everyday behaviour must be sensibly linked so that they can lead to a “sustainable consumer culture”.
This way, educational institutions can become places that offer a chance to reflect one’s own consumption patterns and to try out sustainable modes of behaviour. The institutions as a whole have an influence on learners in terms of their behaviour, their attitudes and their values. Hitherto there has been no detailed investigation of formal and informal educational offers about sustainable consumer culture or about the promotion of sustainable consumer behaviour in educational institutions. In this context, the potentials for a development towards sustainable consumer behaviour have not been exploited.

It is the goal of the joint project to initiate, stabilise and evaluate processes of change towards a sustainable consumer culture with a number of different interventions and on the basis of empirical studies that are being conducted at the participating universities, vocational schools and schools. In the process, the focus is on the significance and the chances of formal and informal places of learning within the field of nutrition and energy/mobility for the development of such a consumer culture. A further goal at the same time is to promote sustainable patterns of consumption. The interventions will be derived and further developed together with the protagonists of the participating educational institution.

Results
As a result of the joint project, new theoretical and methodical findings as well as knowledge of practical relevance will be compiled regarding the question how educational institutions can promote and stabilise sustainable consumer behaviour. Various partners in research and practice are involved in the transdisciplinary project; all of them work with equal rights and, above all, hand in hand on the tasks of the project.

Partners in research:
Institute for Environmental & Sustainability Communication (INFU) (Project Coordination)
German Youth Institute
Humboldt University
Fresenius University of Applied Sciences
e-fect

Partners in practice:
Gymnasium Grootmoor (upper secondary school)
IGS Bad Oldesloe (comprehensive school)
BBS Friedenstraße, Wilhelmshaven (vocational school)
BBS Osnabrück-Haste (vocational school)
Bremen University of Applied Sciences
Leuphana University of Lüneburg
AcronymBINK
StatusFinished
Period01.06.08 → 30.04.12
Linkshttp://foerderportal.bund.de/foekat/jsp/SucheAction.do?actionMode=view&fkz=01UV0807
http://www.konsumkultur.de/

Project relations

Activities

Research outputs

Links