ABSTRACT
Considering the inadequacies of China’s current sustainable consumption policy, this chapter emphasizes the framework of practice theory, advocates understanding consumer behavior from the perspective of consumer participation in daily life, and analyzes sustainable consumption behavior by integrating the supply-consumption system with temporal order. It focuses on the consumer end and consumer education creates a dichotomy between sustainable consumption and consumer sovereignty. With a focus on the urban middle class, the chapter analyzes the crux for the lack of motivation for sustainable consumption and gives relevant policy recommendations, while working to understand the middle-class consumption pattern. In order for empirical analysis to form a theoretical framework, it discusses the three main dimensions of research: the supply-consumption system, the temporality of practice, and the middle-class consumer. The practice theory as applied to the field of sustainable consumption mainly comes from two theoretical contexts: One is Giddens’s theory of structural duality; the other is Bourdieu’s practice theory.
