Politics of consumption

The project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the politics of consumption in a re-regulating and globalizing world . Through several sub-projects, we aim to focus on the entanglements of private and public regulations and the institutional contingent nature of consumers’ trust and activism. The purpose is to explore the political aspects of consumption and its institutional framing in an evermore complex, multi-layered and changing regulatory environment. Through their everyday practices as well as through more defined political actions, consumers increasingly react and mobilize on these regulations. In several sub-projects we focus on, on the one hand, the interrelatedness of private and public regulations (“from above”), with a special focus on more indirect instruments of governance (standards, guidelines, codes of conduct and so on), and on the other hand on consumers’ own ‘value-for money’ and ethical-political mobilization and handling in their everyday lives (“from below”). In this perspctive consumer policy is developed in between the parallel and somewhat contradictory tasks of disciplining consumption , protecting and empowering consumers. At the same time, consumption as social issue and a political field is contested through consumers’ practices and mobilizations. Empirically, the project aims to compare the politics of consumption in different fields and regulatory settings (food, financial services and product safety and environmental sustainability) in different countries.