| No | SDES-2024-4 |
|---|---|
| Title | Does future design induce people to make a persistent change to sustainable food consumption? |
| Author | Rahman Md. Mostafizur, Khatun Mst. Asma, Moinul Islam, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Koji Kotani |
| Abstract | It is crucial whether or not people make sustainable food consumption (SFC) for resolving climate change, health and environmental problems as well as achieving SDGs. However, little is known about what encourages people to make a sustained shift to SFC. This research considers a future design (FD) approach where people are asked to think of a problem and take actions through taking a perspective of future generations, investigating the question “how does the FD approach impact food consumption?” and the hypothesis “FD induces a lasting shift to SFC.” We employ a social experiment with three treatments of “baseline,” “deliberation” and “FD,” collecting data on organic and nonorganic vegetable consumptions with 300 households in Bangladesh over three months. In baseline, households report the consumptions. In deliberation, they additionally deliberate among their family members to think of a vision, a mission and a strategy for the consumptions. In FD, they additionally take each perspective of past, current and future generations and then deliberate to think of the same issues. The result indicates that FD affects people to have a sustained increase (decrease) in organic (nonorganic) vegetable consumption as compared to any other treatment, and the effect under FD is approximately twice as much as that under deliberation in magnitude and in each round. Overall, FD demonstrates a great potential for inducing people to make a persistent change to SFC. |
| Revised version published in |