About us / Background / Origins


The origins of the It's your choice! programme

‘Sustainable production and consumption’ was identified as one of the major themes for consideration in the UK preparations for Earth Summit 2002, at the Kent seminar in November 2000, organised jointly by the Sustainable Development Commission and UNED UK - Committee, under the chairmanship of Jonathon Porritt. At that meeting it was proposed to set up a working group to review progress on this front and to explore possible strategies to advance real change in the UK. Following an initial ‘brainstorming’ at Imperial College in early March 2001, the issues were discussed more widely at one of the ‘breakout groups’ at the UNED UK conference on 20 March 2001, and the following is a summary of those discussions.

Such issues as Food production and consumption are placing enormous burdens on the global environment and generating inequities at all levels. The recent increase in demand in the UK for ‘organic’ produce, for example, which now outstrips the ability to meet that demand from ‘home’ production, means that large quantities of ’fresh’ produce are being shipped from the other side of the world. Even assuming appropriate ‘organic standards’ of production are being enforced, the international transport and distribution causes major impact. Furthermore, prices of organic foods are often much higher than the ‘conventionally grown’ alternatives and in the absence of significant scientific evidence confirming a greater health benefit from ‘organics’, many people are led to argue that this trade is neither necessary nor sustainable. Yet it is equally argued elsewhere that ‘conventional’ methods of farming are not delivering the kind of food which UK consumers are demanding.

• How should the future strategy for UK fresh food production be developed and on what basis?
• How should the UK consumer be made aware of the real benefits and environmental burdens of particular types of food and their production?
• Is the UK general public ready to accept higher prices for food products if the true environmental costs are included?

Personal Transport within UK contains equal dilemmas.

• How do we reduce the impact of private car use without first providing acceptable and viable alternatives?
• Should these alternatives be based solely on creating a modal switch to an ‘integrated’ public transport system or should there be a mix of solutions, involving introduction of new technology into car design?
• Who should lead the transition? Is it in the interests of car manufactures to ‘lead’ or ‘follow’ the market?

International tourism by UK citizens continues to increase rapidly, based mainly on ‘cheap’ air travel, causing environmental and social impacts at home, at the ‘host’ destination, as well as contributing to global changes.

• Is severely restricting the ‘right’ to unlimited air travel by individual citizens the answer? Should the quality of the ‘tourism experience’ be enhanced, which, coupled with increased prices reflecting the true ‘environmental cost’ and an improvement of the ‘home environment’ might lead to reduced demand?
• What effect would any reduction in international tourism have on host communities in ‘developing countries’ who often have no other way of obtaining external revenues to support their own desire for increase standards of living?
• Are sufficient flows of revenue generated by the tourist trade reaching the local host community in any case?

Programmes for reducing UK Domestic Energy consumption have not been entirely successful.

• Are the right signals and information being given to the consumers about reducing energy use, installing home insulation, switching to alternative energy sources, including renewables?
• How could greater progress be made in this area?

Domestic Water purification, supply and consumption are also areas of much debate.

• Does it make sense to produce very high quality water for domestic consumption though a large proportion is used for washing, flushing toilets, even irrigating gardens, with people purchasing additional filtration/purifying equipment, and/or purchasing their drinking water in bottles from the supermarket?
• What alternative strategies would be acceptable to all?

These are just some of the issues facing Policy makers and on which there is currently little apparent consensus, other than the fact that urgent action needs to be taken.

But action by whom and encouraged by whom?

There is clearly a need to adopt the ‘right’ language such that the main issues can be communicated widely to those who are in positions to effect change, including individual citizens. We should avoid use of such terms as ‘sacrifice’, employing instead the notion of ‘responsible choice’ and linking to a concept of what the truly ‘sustainable lifestyle’ (the ‘good life’) would mean and the benefits it would bring to everyone. It was even questioned whether the term ‘sustainable production and consumption’ should be used at all.

Is there a term which would convey the meaning in a simpler way, without the need for a time-consuming search for ‘new’ definitions?

Perhaps ‘responsible production and consumption’ is more appropriate.

• What is the role of the advertising and media industry which seems perfectly capable of persuading consumers to buy products they may not want?

• Could this ‘power’ be used to influence more ‘responsible’ (sustainable) purchasing practices and deliver goods and services which are more in tune with peoples ‘needs’ rather than their ‘wants’?

• What changes in infrastructure, technology, regulation and market mechanisms would be needed to encourage such shifts?

Undoubtedly, innovation and radicalism, not incrementalism, are the keys to success.

There was considerable discussion around these themes during the breakout session on 20 March 2001. This concluded by giving support to the overall programme being developed by UNED UK and Imperial College. It was agreed that as a start, we should identify those areas where it would be relatively easy to reach consensus and where there would be least resistance/greatest potential for a culture shift, i.e. where it would be easiest to make a connection between personal action and local/global changes and thus relatively easy for individuals to take action supported where appropriate by Government. We should not ignore the issues on which it would be more difficult to reach consensus but these should not be allowed to hinder progress in the first instance. We would record the more difficult issues and identify them for further work.

We should include a wide range of stakeholders in each group and indeed most of the participants of the session volunteered to participate further in one or more of the workshops. However, the challenge was to identify and encourage wider participation to ensure adequate representation and thus acceptance of the process and its outcomes. It was felt the following should be specifically targeted:

It was decided to conduct a further series of specific multi-stakeholder workshops during the summer of 2001, on the following key themes/issues, identified during the session:

1. FOOD & DRINK: Fresh fruit and vegetables; other food and drink.
2. OTHER DOMESTIC GOODS: Non- food domestic consumption.
3. TOURISM*: Non- business travel (UK inhabitants national and international).
4. TRANSPORT: Personal transportation (domestic).
5. WATER: Domestic consumption
6. ENERGY: Domestic consumption.

Participants in those preliminary workshops were invited to discuss the specific issues related to the theme and agree those on which consensus could be achieved. This served as the starting point for preparation of ‘position papers’ outlining the key points for each theme, which were circulated widely for comment, amended and then reissued as preparation papers for a high-level workshop in February 2002. At that workshop the issues were debated further and separate papers produced for each theme which after consultation with the workshop participants, have been incorporated into the individual chapters of the final report.

Click here to view the completed report.

This report and the multi-stakeholder process of which it was an outcome, have identified key recommendations for action within the UK, both by members of Civil Society and by the Government on their behalf. If implemented, these actions should achieve progress towards more sustainable patterns of production and consumption. However, it will require the participation of everyone if success is to be achieved. We are confident that the participants in the process to date are representative of Civil Society in general. We hope that this report will encourage even greater numbers of people to become involved – both in implementing the recommendations contained therein, and also in using the ‘neutral space’ we have created to communicate widely about what is already being achieved. In that way we expect the process to become a ‘living resource’ of current information which will chart the progress which the UK, at least, is achieving on these vital components of Sustainable Development.

In taking this multi-stakeholder process forward we are grateful to BIFFAWARD and Marks & Spencer, for providing funding for a programme which will continue over at least the next two years.

The project will develop an easily accessible, central source of information which demonstrates the progress the UK is making in achieving the principles of Agenda 21, in particular in the areas of reducing solid waste generation, as part of the overall move to more sustainable patterns of production and consumption.

This aim will be achieved by obtaining information from sustainability projects, particularly, but not limited to, those funded under the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme, assessing their outcomes, and assembling the information on an ‘It’s your choice!’ web-site, which will enable others to draw on these experiences in planning future policy and infrastructure developments. We will also provide links to all the other programmes from a variety of sources which have the ideals of sustainable development at their core.

In the first stage of the programme, the information on past and present projects will be incorporated into the website. In the second stage, a common on-line reporting format will be developed which will enable future projects to communicate their outcomes centrally and thereby contribute directly to the continual updating of the information source via a dedicated website.

Overall the project will deliver a national source of information for the general public, policy makers, future project and infrastructure design, appraisal and communication. Specifically it will achieve the following outputs in the lifetime of the project:

1. An information base on sustainable production and consumption initiatives made available via the ‘It’s your choice!’ website (with appropriate links to specific websites of the organisations concerned) containing details of:

2. First phase development of ‘read only’ access to the website which would allow widespread dissemination of information.

3. Second phase development of the website would allow for remote input and expansion of the information such that continual updating of the information base could be done ‘remotely’ via on-line templates.

It is believed there is currently no single information source which brings together all the various initiatives and organisations which have been working in this area.

The programme to date has already created a ‘neutral’ space to which all stakeholder groups have been invited to contribute and thereby communicate with a much wider audience than they might otherwise reach. We will be approaching all these stakeholder groups, and many more, over the coming months to encourage their continuing and expanded participation. We are quite sure there are many other initiatives which have not been brought to our attention during the first phase of this work and which have not therefore been included here. We encourage everyone to make contact with us so that the information they already have may be recorded and communicated far and wide. We also encourage them to make use of the information in any future planning, whether projects, infrastructure or policy instruments. Once the website is fully developed, we hope they will all use it both as a reference source of continually updated information and as a means of communicating to all levels of UK civil society.

We will also be working closely with advertising and promotion companies to develop public communication programmes based on the information and experiences identified.

It’s your choice! Together we can make a difference, such that by the time we are reviewing the outcomes of the WSSD in Johannesburg in 10 years time, if not before, we hope we will be able to demonstrate considerably greater progress than we have achieved in the last 10 years since Rio.

Our overall aim is to help achieve real change in the way we live today so that together we can build a truly sustainable future. We invite everyone to work with us to transform lifestyles together.

Please contact us with details of your current programmes and experiences, your comments on the original ‘It’s your choice!’ report, and your suggestions for practical actions arising from it: Contact us

* Footnote: Because of a parallel initiative which was established at the same time by The Royal Institute for International Affairs under the title "UK Sustainable Tourism Initiative", tourism was not considered further in the process reported here, pending the outcome of that initiative. We propose to provide links to the outcomes of this tourism initiative via the website.