Sufficiency Asks for the Right Measure.

Sustainability will be achieved only through a threefold strategy. Eco-efficiency, enhancing the resource productivity, is broadly accepted. Consistency marks the transition to technologies consistent with nature. Both, as indispensable as they are, will miss the goal of sustainability if sufficiency is neglected. It refers to lifestyles and business conduct bringing to an end the overuse of goods and thereby of resources and energy.

Research - The leading questions are:

• Which personal attitudes or social and political conditions stand in the way of an orientation towards sufficiency, and how can these obstacles be overcome?
• Which insights and behaviours of individuals, groups and institutions can help to convince the broad strata of society to use resources less or differently? How can the prevailing concept of prosperity with its strong link to material goods be changed so that sustainable development can take root in society?
• How would lifestyles and business styles predicated on sufficiency affect the structure and growth of the economy?

Strategies and instruments creating political conditons to foster a sufficiency oriented life and business instead of hindering or even preventing it have become most important. It has also to be examined how and to what extent businesses can integrate their share of the responsibility for sustainable development in their corporate goals and which obstacles have to be overcome.

The above named problems are constitutive questions in two recent studies of the Institute. In 2005, the report "Fair Future" was published, investigating the relationship between limited resources and global justice. A new volume is being prepared now as a follow-up to the study "Greening the North" (1998) to scrutinise the ways in which, under globalised conditions, a country like Germany can become sustainable.