Sufficiency in European Product Policies

Technological innovations and efficiency measures have been the primary focus of many policies aimed at meeting global sustainability and resource security goals. However, it has been established in literature that these measures alone are unlikely to drive long-term sustainability or reduce absolute resource demands. Sufficiency-oriented approaches, which focus on slowing down and minimising resource use, are often overlooked in current policy frameworks and business strategies, especially in resource-intensive sectors like the electronics industry. Given the pressing need to address resource overconsumption and its environmental impacts, it is essential to explore how sufficiency can be incorporated into product policies. This paper analyses the current state of sufficiency-oriented measures in European product policies, taking consumer electronics and electrical devices as a case study, and proposes supplementary instruments that can advance sustainability targets. We also develop a categorization framework for sufficiency policies to lay the groundwork for future empirical research, which can help guide policy developments and encourage broader adoption of sufficiency strategies.