Governance for Sufficiency: A new approach to a contested field

There is broad agreement that reducing household energy consumption in industrialized countries is a major task to reach energy transition and climate change mitigation goals. There is also agreement that efficiency measures alone won’t be sufficient to reach the reduction targets. There is, however, much less agreement on what should complement efficiency and on how the change of energy consumption can be accomplished. Out of the three similar and often used interchangeably concepts discussed in the literature – behaviour change, curtailment and sufficiency – the authors argue for the latter. They develop an understanding of sufficiency along the core idea of changes in individual preferences for quality of life. Against the backdrop of such an understanding, they elaborate on different tasks for governance for sufficiency and illustrate this along a specific example. As a result, this conceptual chapter provides a diversified, multi-levelled picture for the analysis as well as for the design of governance for sufficiency.