Towards sustainable consumption? Professional discourses and institutional material arrangements

Over the past century, global carbon emissions have surged alongside increasing consumption levels, with food, mobility, and housing accounting for the majority of consumption-related emissions. This paper investigates how professional actors discursively frame sustainable consumption in a Danish context, where consumption emissions are particularly high, and sustainability is widely recognized as a priority across businesses, policymakers, and civil society. Drawing on seven focus groups with 52 professional actors from key organizations - including major companies, public authorities, NGOs, and grassroot organizations - the study examines how professional discourses and institutional material arrangements shape and constrain consumption. Our findings show that sustainability is discursively institutionalized across food, mobility, and housing sectors, however with significant variations in terms of how change is perceived. Three discourses are identified: 1) a market discourse centered on economic competitiveness and consumer demand; 2) a system change discourse centered on sufficiency, reductions, and redefinitions of the good life; and 3) a governance mediation discourse centered on experimentation, pragmatism, and political feasibility. These discourses shape how professional actors position themselves in relation to sustainability and how they contribute to the reproduction or destabilization of existing institutional material arrangements that frame consumption patterns. The paper highlights the need for regulatory interventions, experimental projects, and active citizen participation to disrupt unsustainable institutional material arrangements. Strengthening grassroots initiatives through economic, legal, and institutional support can enable systemic change, and a rethinking of governance structures can help unlock pathways toward more sustainable consumption and production. • We apply the concept of institutional material arrangements (IMAs). • IMAs both constrain and enable sustainable consumption and production. • Professional discourses reproduce and destabilize IMAs. • Three key discourses are identified cutting across food, mobility and housing. • Reveals tensions between market logics and sufficiency-oriented change.