Sufficiency – A Scoping Paper

The aim of this scoping paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the concept of sufficiency and to show or recommend how it could be operationalised in the context of EU or national policymaking. Furthermore, open questions related to sufficiency are named and partly discussed in the different parts of the paper. These can be seen as proposals for  future research. In the first – theoretical – part, the concept of sufficiency is introduced and explained, reasons why it should be included in future policymaking are given and the different actors and notions of sufficiency as well as its mitigation potential are described. In the second part, we describe energy consumption developments and compare them with  EU targets, we analyse different EU processes on the occurrence and importance of sufficiency and present backgrounds and implementation examples from France as well as other interesting policy approaches for fostering sufficiency followed by recommendations how knowledge, data and analyses on sufficiency could be fostered. For both parts, we reviewed a broad set of literature on sufficiency and did own data analysis.