Energy sufficiency potentials and policy instruments

Sufficiency aims to achieve a state in which overconsumption and overproduction are reduced to ensure that ecological limits are not exceeded, while underconsumption is also reduced to provide an adequate social foundation for everyone. Due to its potential to enable the achievement of several ecological and social goals, sufficiency is labelled a 'multi-solving strategy'. This thesis focuses on the potential of sufficiency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit energy consumption. For sufficiency to contribute as much as possible to achieving these goals, it must extend beyond individual behavioural changes and lifestyle issues. Only politically designed framework conditions, such as infrastructure and incentives, can ensure a reliable transition towards sustainable energy and resource use on a large scale within society and the economy, thereby changing social practices. However, the current framework conditions are not oriented towards sufficiency, and only a few examples of ambitious sufficiency policy instruments have been implemented to date. This thesis concentrates on the intersection of energy sufficiency potentials and policy instruments.

Firstly, quantitative sufficiency saving potentials are required at the level of energy services and explicit saving measures in order to integrate sufficiency in models and scenarios. These guide policy-making, but are currently strongly biased towards energy-intensive variants. Secondly, a systematic inventory and analysis of sufficiency policy instruments are required to assess the current state of sufficiency in politics, to explore the variety of proposed instruments and to compare the feasibility of those already implemented, planned or proposed. The overarching research question of this dissertation is: ‘What are potentials of sufficiency to reduce energy demand directly and indirectly and what instruments can be used to implement it politically?’. This thesis contributes to answering this overarching research question on the basis of five individual research questions, each of which is answered in a separate research article. The methods applied span systematic literature reviews, text coding, data extraction, categorisation, harmonisation and clustering, and impact chain analyses based on expert consultations, as well as the design and set-up of different databases. These methods address a major gap in research, namely the lack of structured evidence of sufficiency potentials and policy instruments.

The key results with a view to sufficiency potentials are that, according to scenario studies, the food sector has the greatest relative potential for reducing energy service levels (-60 %) with regard to the key indicators 'meat consumption per capita per day' and 'food waste per capita per year'. The systematic literature review shows that measures lowering per capita floor area have the highest absolute saving potential, with an estimated reduction in energy consumption of up to 150 TWh/a. Data gaps on quantified saving potentials were identified for regional economies, local production, product labelling, and specific saving potentials in the mobility, industry/production, and food sectors. With regard to sufficiency policy instruments, the main finding is that these instruments have played a minor role in the decarbonisation policies of EU Member States to date, but they enjoy high approval rates and are frequently recommended, particularly regulatory instruments, by Citizen Assemblies with well-informed participants. A comparison of the National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) of eight EU Member States with the climate change recommendations of their Citizen Assemblies (CAs) revealed that the CAs' recommendations have a sufficiency share of 39 %, whereas the NECPs' sufficiency share is significantly lower at an average of 8 %. In terms of feasibility, the results with a view to individual policy instruments are highly specific.

At the policy target level, the two strategies 'promotion of active modes' and 'reduce motorised individual transport' pose the fewest risks because they are often not costly, labour-intensive or material-intensive. This dissertation advances the research field by providing a comprehensive and comparative view of sufficiency policy options. It achieves this by combining quantified sufficiency potentials with analyses of existing, planned, and proposed policy instruments, and by assessing their feasibility. The structured and harmonised data provided by the sufficiency saving potentials and sufficiency policy instrument data collections – the first systematic collections in their field – makes this knowledge visible and usable.