(Un-)sustainable transitions: The case of the sharing economy

The recent rise of the sharing economy - consumers granting each other temporary access to under-utilised physical assets (“idle capacity”) - has attracted the growing attention of policy-makers, businesses and the media as a potential new pathway to sustainable production and consumption. Nevertheless, there is mounting evidence that the sharing economy also has unintended negative effects such as increasing consumption and social inequality. Whether or not the sharing economy will be able to deliver on its sustainability promises is difficult to say. In this paper we use theories of practice to provide insights into the dynamics of socio-technical change, including the sharing economy, and how this may result in (un)sustainable patterns of everyday consumption. We use Shove et al.’s formulation conceptualising practices as bundles of dynamically interconnected elements: materials, competences and meanings. The different ways in which these elements are brought together have implications for how each sharing economy practice will eventually normalise and diffuse. Meanings, we argue, play a major role in the stabilisation of more or less resource-intensive sharing economy practices, thereby affecting the trajectory of sustainability transitions. In particular we illustrate how the association of meanings by prospective users to novel sharing practices may result in the sharing economy reproducing - and even reinforcing - existing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption. The sharing economy may enable the transition towards a more sustainable society. However, redirecting the sharing economy towards a desirable (sustainable) direction require multiple strategies to be set, including a comprehensive understanding of how sharing economy practices are enacted in situated contexts; trialling localised, customised, small-scale interventions engaging multiple actors simultaneously; reframing (sustainable) targets and directions progressively and in response to intermediate reconfigurations of the elements.