Social Innovations in Creative Communities for Sustainable Consumption: is it promising?

Sammanfattning: In the current discourse on sustainable consumption, there have been major interventions by the businesses and governments, focusing on changing consumer behavior through greening products and services. However, the problem of consumption is not limited to greening products and environmental impacts, but it is also a social issue. Together with the increasing consumption around the world and materialistic aspirations, a decline in well being and happiness can also be observed, particularly in industrialized countries. Recently, the sustainable consumption process has started to draw attention to individual value shifts reflected on peoples consumption patterns and social behavior. To examine and explain phenomenon, examples from creative communities are being analysed. According to some experts on sustainable production and consumption, these creative communities are showing promising outcomes through increasing well being and developing sustainable lifestyles. Still, they have been unable to disseminate their practices to the mainstream markets. This indicates a need for developing strategies to explore the creative communities in terms their values, principles, social innovation strategies, practices and their perspectives of sustainability. Unless these are well understood and an exchange platform is established between relevant actors including citizens, it is unlikely that creative community practices (i.e. sustainable lifestyle cases) will be incorporated the society as a whole. This research addresses the challenges and opportunities facing creative communities, their behaviours and social innovation solutions using both theoretical and empirical studies. The results are based on five field case study communities from the US, Scotland, Sweden and Italy, each with different types of social innovations. The main findings on individual value orientation and action incurring benefits demonstrate the potential of the communities or their practices to be adapted by wider society. Moreover, the nature of their practices, which highly depend on ethical responsibility, transfer of knowledge and networking relations, have shown the potential of linking between creative communitycitizens, external actors-community and between individuals. This can be established through creating relational spaces, which can take varied forms to stimulate social innovation in the agenda of sustainable consumption.