While critical social science research on sufficiency has grown during the past ten years (led by French academic efforts on sobriété), often in opposition to policy measures including efficiency-oriented proposals, there is no clear-cut or shared definition of sufficiency in the academic community. Nonetheless, the definition of sufficiency established by the IPCC is a starting point for this project, defining sufficiency as “a set of policy measures and daily practices that avoid the demand for energy, materials, land, water, and other natural resources while providing wellbeing for all within the planetary boundaries.” (AR6, WG3). Although this emphasizes daily practices and the demand for materials and resources, this definition also includes the infrastructural component of sufficiency.
Infrastructure is crucial to sufficiency . This project analyses how infrastructures are built, retrofitted or repurposed to meet and generate current and future needs, adapting and responding to external pressures (such as severe droughts and heatwaves in Europe or geopolitical tensions), and how demand is shaped and transformed accordingly along with transformations of provisioning systems.
This project is novel, as it takes seriously the material and infrastructural components of sufficiency , not only daily practices. It bridges the social studies of infrastructure with the emerging interdisciplinary literature on systems of provision. Using cases across food, energy and mobility systems, will explore the connections between infrastructures and provisioning systems by using sufficiency as an organising concept and consequently analyse the infrastructural transformations a sufficiency-oriented provisioning system entails. A sufficiency lens is helpful to understand current needs met and reproduced through these provisioning systems and how provisioning systems could operate more resiliently through robust infrastructures designed for flexibility and adaptation.