The United Nations formulated the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in 2015 as a comprehensive global policy framework for addressing the most pressing social and environmental challenges currently facing humanity. In this paper, we analyse SDG 12, which aims to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.” Despite long-standing political recognition of this objective, and ample scientific evidence both on its importance and on the efficacy of various ways of promoting it, the SDGs do not provide clear goals or effective guidance on how to accomplish this urgently needed transformation. Drawing from the growing body of research on sustainable consumption and production (SCP), the paper identifies two dominant vantage points—one focused on promoting more efficient production methods and products (mainly through technological improvement and informed consumer choice) and the other stressing the need to consider also overall volumes of consumption, distributional issues, and related social and institutional changes. We label these two approaches efficiency and systemic. Research shows that while the efficiency approach contains essential elements of a transition to sustainability, it is by itself highly unlikely to bring about sustainable outcomes. Concomitantly, research also finds that volumes of consumption and production are closely associated with environmental impacts, indicating a need to curtail these volumes in ways that safeguard social sustainability, which is unlikely to be possible without a restructuring of existing socioeconomic arrangements. Analysing how these two perspectives are reflected in the SDGs framework, we find that in its current conception, it mainly relies on the efficiency approach. On the basis of this assessment, we conclude that the SDGs represent a partial and inadequate conceptualisation of SCP which will hamper implementation. Based on this determination, this paper provides some suggestions on how governments and other actors involved in SDGs operationalisation could more effectively pursue SCP from a systemic standpoint and use the transformation of systems of consumption and production as a lever for achieving multiple sustainability objectives.

中文翻译：

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转变消费和生产体系以实现可持续发展目标：超越效率。

联合国于2015年制定了可持续发展目标（SDG），作为解决人类当前面临的最紧迫的社会和环境挑战的综合性全球政策框架。在本文中，我们分析了可持续发展目标 12，其旨在“确保可持续的消费和生产模式”。尽管这一目标长期以来得到了政治上的认可，并且有充足的科学证据证明其重要性和各种促进它的方式的有效性，但可持续发展目标并没有就如何实现这一迫切需要的转变提供明确的目标或有效的指导。该论文借鉴了越来越多的可持续消费和生产（SCP）研究，确定了两个主要优势——一个侧重于推广更高效的生产方法和产品（主要通过技术改进和知情的消费者选择），另一个强调需要还要考虑消费总量、分配问题以及相关的社会和制度变化。我们将这两种方法标记为效率和系统性。研究表明，虽然效率方法包含向可持续发展过渡的基本要素，但它本身不太可能带来可持续的结果。与此同时，研究还发现，消费和生产量与环境影响密切相关，这表明需要以保障社会可持续性的方式减少消费量和生产量，而如果不重组现有的社会经济安排，这是不可能实现的。分析这两种视角在SDGs框架中的体现，我们发现在目前的构想中，它主要依赖于效率方法。根据这一评估，我们得出的结论是，可持续发展目标代表了 SCP 的部分和不充分的概念化，这将阻碍实施。基于这一决定，本文就政府和其他参与可持续发展目标实施的参与者如何从系统角度更有效地追求可持续发展目标，并利用消费和生产系统的转型作为实现多个可持续发展目标的杠杆，提出了一些建议。