Why does sustainability still struggle to take hold, despite decades of innovation, policy attention, and growing public awareness? A common answer points to technology gaps, costs, or regulation. But this misses a deeper issue: sustainability challenges are rooted in culture—specifically, in the system of values that shapes how we produce, consume, and define progress.
The Invisible Barrier: A Misalignment of Values
At the heart of the problem lies a structural misalignment. On one side, dominant economic logics and cultural values continue to reward expansion, novelty, ownership, and consumption. More is better, new is better, and identity is often expressed through what we acquire and replace. On the other side, sustainability depends on a very different set of principles: reusability, repairability, refurbishment, remanufacturing, frugality, adaptability, and models based on sharing and access rather than ownership. These value systems are not simply different; they are often fundamentally at odds. A system built on continuous production, replacement, and growth struggles to accommodate practices that emphasize durability, sufficiency, repurposing, circularity. The result is not just slow progress, but systemic resistance, visible in design choices, business models, marketing choices, consumer behavior, and even policy frameworks.
This misalignment also helps explain why sustainability is so often perceived as a limitation. When value is culturally tied to owning more, consuming more, and upgrading frequently, practices such as using products longer, repairing them, or choosing not to replace them can feel like a loss, or definitively as not cool. When “having more” and “replacing more often” are culturally encoded as markers of improvement or success, then sustainability appears as a demand to reduce, to renounce, or to do without, rather than a different form of value. However, this does not deal with an intrinsic property of sustainability itself, but rather the effect of a value system that defines desirability in narrowly expansionist terms, thereby making any deviation from it feel like deprivation.
This perception is reinforced and stabilised at the level of everyday behavioural choices, where everyday decisions are shaped by price rather than value. Practical logics such as “it is cheaper to replace than to repair” or “I bought it because it was inexpensive, even if unnecessary” are not merely individual inconsistencies, but manifestations of a broader systemic orientation in which price becomes the proxy for value. These behaviours reflect a system in which the monetary price of an object becomes the dominant—sometimes exclusive—measure of its worth, while the intrinsic properties of goods—their durability, material quality, repairability, embedded environmental cost, or long-term utility—are systematically underweighted if not rendered invisible. In such a context, consumption is oriented toward acquisition rather than maintenance, and objects are increasingly treated as interchangeable units of consumption rather than as artefacts embedded in systems of care, maintenance, and continuity. This reinforces an economic culture that privileges continuous replacement over preservation, and it subtly undermines any shift toward circular models, because the “rationality” of individual choice is itself calibrated to short-term cost rather than long-term systemic value.
Beneath this tension lies an even deeper cultural divide. Modern industrial societies are largely built on a separation between humans and nature, where nature is framed as a resource to be used rather than as a system of which we are part. This perspective makes it difficult to recognize ecological limits as binding (survival) conditions, and helps explain why environmental thresholds are often subordinated to economic priorities. It also contributes to the ongoing difficulty of recognizing the intrinsic value or rights of ecosystems and non-human life.
In this context, sustainability is easily misunderstood as an external constraint imposed on human activity, rather than as a necessary condition for its continuity.
An interesting aspect of this dynamic is that the same system that has contributed to the emergence of the problem may also offer pathways toward its resolution. Indeed, the market itself offers an important opportunity. It is well understood within market dynamics that demand is not simply not merely discovered but actively produced and shaped. Markets operate through mechanisms of stimulation and influence: marketing actively shapes needs and desires, including the perception of what is “cool”.
Marketing and innovation have long played a central role in defining what people desire, normalising patterns of fast consumption, constant upgrading, and the pursuit of novelty. These same mechanisms can be mobilised differently. Sustainability already represents a growing source of differentiation and innovation and certain sectors have already operationalized sustainability objectives into different business models, objectives, and marketing narratives.
Yet the potential of sustainability remains underexploited, whenever it remains framed in terms of reduction and constraint. What is needed is a reframing that highlights the long-term, distributed, and systemic value that sustainability creates. Narratives that rebrand the aspects of durability, quality, resilience, and shared benefits can support new forms of economic viability while aligning more closely with ecological realities.
Ultimately, the challenge is not only to make growth more sustainable, but to reconsider the relationship between growth and prosperity. As argued by Tim Jackson, prosperity should be understood as the ability to thrive within ecological limits, rather than as the continuous expansion of material production and consumption. This implies a cultural shift from accumulation to sufficiency, from quantity to quality, from ownership to access, and from short-term gains to long-term viability.
The transition to sustainability is therefore not only technological or economic. It is a cultural transformation that requires redefining value, reshaping what is considered desirable, and rethinking what we mean by progress. Until this shift begins to take hold, sustainability will continue to encounter resistance, not because it is unfeasible, but because it remains misaligned with the values that currently structure our systems. And addressing that misalignment may be the most important step of all.
References:
Tim Jackson, “Angst essen Seele auf ” – Escaping the ‘iron cage’ of consumerism” in Economy of Sufficiency, Essays on wealth in diversity, enjoyable limits and creating commons. Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, 2013
Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow, Routledge, 2017, https://timjackson.org.uk/sustainablelifestyles.ac.uk/sites/default/files/newsdocs/ws48_0.pdf
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