Building the Business case for Sufficiency

The rebound effect

PSS are not ‘rebound effect-free’. According to Alcott (2008) the rebound effect is the main weakness of the sufficiency strategy. The sufficiency rebound is once again connected to a price reduction, but in the sufficiency strategy instead of ‘engineering saving’, this is called ‘sufficiency saving’ (Alcott, 2008). The mechanism is as follows: a reduction in final demand initially lowers prices and this in turn raises other consumers’ demand (also referred to as ‘marginal consumers’) , so that “in the end some of what we saved is consumed by others” (Alcott, 2008, p. 775). From another perspective, a negative rebound effect may occur when the consumers decide to use the saving generated by less consumption to buy more goods.
In the case of car sharing, for example, the user reduces its use of the car and this generates savings: the way the customer will then decide to allocate those monies will be crucial.

Equity and fairness

The sufficiency strategy is a controversial approach because of its ‘moral’ feature: it encompasses the question of ‘how much is enough’ or ‘who’ should decrease their consumption. Sufficiency is a qualitative and subjective concept, far from being as politically neutral as the efficiency strategy (Darby, 2007). There are ‘equity’ arguments about the fact that the strategy typically addresses the ‘rich countries’, alias the ‘North’. However, in a globalised world where there are weak economic boundaries and economies are highly interdependent, if prices decrease because of a possible drop in demand, consequences happen all around the world and may induce over-consumption of poorer countries. “The common claim that the rich are responsible for negative impact is ambiguous” (Alcott, 2008, p. 778). Furthermore, the sufficiency strategy can wrongly end up calling for a voluntary individual action, but “any ‘personal shift’ to frugality guarantees neither less impact nor more present equality, nor more inter generational equality” (Alcott, 2008, 778).