ABSTRACT

Long marginalised by the dominant approaches to environmental reform, the idea of sufficiency – and the related question of “how much is enough” – is increasingly important for sustainability governance. This chapter examines sufficiency’s meaning in the context of sustainability governance and reasons why it persists in environmental debates despite significant obstacles within growth-oriented, capitalist, and consumerist societies. Sufficiency is more than an individual-level strategy to reduce consumption; it is a political project requiring supportive policies and changes in societal priorities. The chapter discusses ways that sufficiency could be incorporated into policy and provides examples where the idea has made some policy inroads. Further advances for sufficiency in the political sphere will depend, in part, on the degree to which it can be linked to high levels of wellbeing, for which there are both opportunities and significant challenges. The chapter concludes that sufficiency deserves to be a core organising principle for society, but given the scale of the challenge in meeting human needs within planetary limits, other approaches are also needed to complement it.