ABSTRACT
Households play a key role in environmental policy in the Western world. Consequent upon the ever-increasing focus on individual responsibility for environmental problems as internationally adopted through Agenda 21, environmental policy has an explicit objective to increase and maintain active, individual responsibility for the environment. In this book we have presented some of the core results from a research programme that has studied how environmental policy impinges on the everyday lives of Swedish households and which implications can be derived for the design of future policy instruments. In this final chapter we attempt to provide a synthesis of the most important findings addressed in the different chapters of the book. We highlight the facts that environmental sustainability in daily life is a matter of both moral concerns and personal sacrifices in terms of money, time and other resources, and while policy instruments often (if not for practical reasons) must be more or less uniform across households we must also acknowledge that household behaviour will typically be highly context-dependent.
