Exnovation for Sufficiency: Exploring pathways to low-impact consumption futures

Sufficiency, i.e. reducing the total consumption volume and demand for resources while ensuring the well-being of all, is a key strategy to achieve the climate goals.

However, today the focus is often on promoting sustainable consumption through innovations, overlooking the need to phase out unsustainable structures, policies, practices and products.

This project questions whether innovation – the introduction of something new – is the path to sustainability and instead explores how exnovation – the removal of something existing – can contribute to consumption in line with climate targets.

By exploring  exnovation from both a theoretical and practical perspective, focusing on the consumption of textiles and electronics, the project aims to investigate how an exnovation mindset can be developed and used at the household, organisational and societal levels, to contribute to sufficiency practices.

Key elements of exnovation journeys and conditions facilitating such journeys will be identified through literature studies, focus groups, and field experiments, and synthesised into a theoretical framework, future scenarios, and descriptions of exnovation journeys.

Furthermore, iterative co-creation sessions will be carried out to develop exnovation tools to support actors at different levels.

The project results will be disseminated through scientific publications, seminars, and dissemination of tools and other materials to policy makers, organisations and the general public.