Why Behavioral Steering Falls Short: Agency, Practice, and Virtue Ethics in Sustainable Consumption

Abstract

Behavioral steering—through nudges, defaults, incentives, and informational feedback—has become a dominant approach in promoting sustainable consumption. Drawing on a selective, problem-oriented engagement with the related literature, this study notes that a substantial body of studies has reported challenges associated with such interventions, particularly with regard to durability, cross-domain spillovers, and context sensitivity. Rather than providing an exhaustive empirical synthesis, this study uses these findings diagnostically to identify underlying conceptual tensions in prevailing policy approaches. It argues that one contributing source of these limitations lies in an implicit and narrow conception of consumer agency, which frames individuals primarily as reactive decision-makers rather than as agents whose habits, dispositions, and practical judgment develop over time through participation in social practices. Integrating insights from virtue ethics and social practice theory, this study develops a normative framework that emphasizes the cultivation of stable orientations, competencies, and dispositions. It further explores how this framework can inform the design and evaluation of a series of policies and institutions, such as learning-oriented interventions, participatory programs, and practice-enabling infrastructures. By offering a normative diagnosis of problems emerging in empirical sustainability research, the study outlines promising directions for more resilient and ethically grounded sustainability governance.

1. Introduction

Promoting sustainable consumption has become a central concern in sustainability research and policy, driven by growing awareness of the environmental and social impacts associated with prevailing consumption patterns [1,2]. Household energy use, food consumption, mobility, and material-intensive lifestyles contribute substantially to greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, and ecological degradation [3] (pp. 52–60). In response, a wide range of strategies has been proposed to encourage consumers to adopt more sustainable forms of consumption.

Over the past two decades, behavioral steering approaches—including nudges, default options, economic incentives, and information-based interventions—have emerged as the dominant framework for addressing sustainable consumption [4,5]. Their appeal lies in their apparent effectiveness, political feasibility, and relatively low implementation costs. A large body of empirical research reports measurable effects of behavioral steering approaches across different consumption domains [6,7]. These findings have further consolidated behavioral steering as a core policy instrument in sustainable consumption governance.

At the same time, a substantial body of studies points to persistent challenges associated with these approaches. While behavioral steering can influence specific decisions, its capacity to bring about durable and wide-ranging transformations in consumption patterns remains contested [8] (pp. 42–43) and [9] (pp. 269–274). Moreover, changes in individual choices do not necessarily translate into broader lifestyle shifts [10,11].

As attempts to refine behavioral steering, existing debates tend to focus either on the need for stronger or better-designed behavioral tools, or on the importance of addressing systemic drivers of unsustainability beyond the level of consumers [12] (pp. 513–515). While both perspectives capture important aspects of the problem, they often share a common limitation: they treat consumers primarily as recipients of interventions who respond to incentives, cues, or constraints. What remains underexamined is how consumers’ habits, dispositions, and patterns of participation in everyday practices shape their capacity to sustain environmentally responsible forms of consumption over time. In other words, prevailing approaches pay limited attention to agency as something that is formed and exercised through practices, rather than merely activated at moments of choice [13] (pp. 19–20).

This paper seeks to address this gap by offering a normative and practice-oriented analysis of sustainable consumption. It starts with a question: what model of agency underlies dominant approaches to sustainable consumption, and how does this model shape their practical outcomes? Drawing on virtue ethics and social practice theory, the paper develops an alternative framework that emphasizes habits, moral learning, and practice-based dispositions [14,15]. From this perspective, sustainable consumption depends not only on responding appropriately to external stimuli, but on cultivating stable orientations and dispositions that guide action across contexts and over time. Accordingly, the methodological positioning of this study can be characterized as a normative-theoretical analysis informed by empirical literature: existing empirical findings on the challenges of behavioral steering are not treated as objects of systematic review, but as diagnostic inputs that motivate normative reflection, while the introduction of normative theory further provides conceptual resources for interpreting these challenges and for envisioning promising directions for addressing them. Therefore, this approach distinguishes the paper from purely empirical reviews and experimental or data-generating empirical studies, as well as from abstract conceptual analyses detached from empirical concerns.

The paper makes three main contributions. First, it provides a focused review of behavioral steering in sustainable consumption research, synthesizing empirical findings while highlighting challenges that appear across the literature, including limited durability, context dependence, and weak spillover effects. It is important to note that this review does not aim to offer a comprehensive or exhaustive survey of behavioral steering studies. Rather, it adopts a problem-oriented and narrative approach, organizing selected strands of the literature around tensions and challenges that call for clarification. Second, it offers a normative diagnosis of these challenges, arguing that they reflect an implicit and overly narrow understanding of consumer agency that overlooks the role of habits, dispositions, practical judgment, and participation in socially embedded practices. Third, it develops a practice-oriented ethical framework inspired by virtue ethics and translates this framework into implications for policy design and evaluation aimed at fostering more stable and resilient forms of sustainable consumption.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 offers the problem-oriented and narrative review mentioned before. Section 3 examines why these problems arise in practice, with particular attention to the limited conception of agency embedded in prevailing approaches. Section 4 develops a practice-oriented ethical framework grounded in virtue ethics and social practice theory. Section 5 explores the policy design and evaluation implications of this framework. Section 6 concludes the main arguments, reflects on the broader significance of reorienting sustainable consumption research beyond behavioral steering, and clarifies the unresolved issues of the present study, thereby outlining directions for further research.

2. Behavioral Steering in Sustainable Consumption: A Problem-Oriented Narrative Review

Behavioral steering has become the dominant paradigm in sustainable consumption research and policy, encompassing a heterogeneous set of interventions aimed at influencing consumer behavior without direct coercion. This section reviews the literature in a problem-oriented and narrative manner. A substantial body of research suggests that while behavioral steering interventions can be effective in shaping specific choices, they also exhibit limitations and challenges in practice. Empirical findings in this field are therefore mixed rather than uniformly positive. The review is organized around this problem, drawing on selected strands of the literature to construct a narrative that foregrounds tensions and unresolved issues associated with behavioral steering. It first examines the empirical effectiveness of behavioral steering by reviewing the main types of interventions and their reported outcomes. While acknowledging this documented effectiveness, it then synthesizes a range of studies that highlight limitations and mixed results. Finally, it reviews recent calls for more integrative approaches and identifies a persistent conceptual gap concerning how consumer agency is understood. Overall, this review is not intended to be exhaustive, nor does it aim to provide a comprehensive assessment of all behavioral steering research. Literature selection is guided by the relevance of studies to the problem-oriented narrative developed here, as well as by considerations of scholarly quality, including empirical rigor and engagement with existing debates.

2.1. Empirical Effectiveness: Main Intervention Types and Findings

Behavioral steering approaches typically draw on behavioral economics, social psychology, and decision science. Despite differences in terminology, the literature converges around several recurring intervention types, including informational feedback, social norm messaging, default options, and economic incentives [4] (ch. 2–4). For each type, empirical research reports positive effects, though results vary by intervention type and context.

Informational feedback and social comparison are among the most widely studied interventions, particularly in the energy sector. Household-level studies show that providing consumers with information about their own energy use, often combined with comparisons to similar households, can lead to short-term reductions in consumption [6] (pp. 3003–3010). These effects are commonly attributed to increased awareness and norm activation rather than changes in prices or regulations.

Social norm messaging, such as eco-labels and informational cues are extensively studied in the domain of food and consumer goods [7] (pp. 179–181). Experimental and survey-based research suggests that labels indicating environmental impact or sustainability attributes can influence purchasing decisions, although effects depend on label credibility, consumer trust, and prior knowledge [7] (pp. 183–185).

Default options represent another prominent intervention type. Research on green energy tariffs indicates that setting renewable options as the default can significantly increase participation rates [16] (p. 70), especially when opt-out costs are low [17]. Similar default-based strategies have been explored in contexts such as waste sorting and sustainable procurement [18,19].

Economic incentives, including subsidies and pricing mechanisms, are often combined with informational measures. While incentives can amplify behavioral change, several studies note that their effectiveness may depend on continued financial support and tend to diminish once incentives are removed [20,21].

Taken together, this body of research supports the claim that behavioral steering interventions can influence consumer behavior under specific conditions and for particular decisions.

In policy contexts, these interventions are often favored because they are perceived as politically acceptable and administratively feasible. Reports by international organizations such as the OECD and UNEP explicitly recommend the use of behavioral steering to complement traditional regulatory and market-based instruments in sustainability governance [1] (pp. 21–30) and [2] (pp. 17–25). This orientation has strongly shaped the research agenda. Within Sustainability, this paradigm is reflected in a large number of empirical studies that frame sustainable consumption primarily as a behavioral challenge and assess the effectiveness of specific steering mechanisms.

2.2. Reported Limitations and Mixed Outcomes

Alongside reported successes, the literature consistently documents a set of limitations that appear across intervention types and consumption domains. These limitations are generally presented not as decisive refutations of behavioral steering approaches, but as empirical challenges that complicate their long-term impact.

A first widely discussed limitation concerns the temporal stability of behavioral effects. Longitudinal studies in the energy domain show that reductions achieved through feedback or social comparison tend to decline over time, particularly once interventions are withdrawn or lose salience [6] (pp. 3011–3018) and [22,23,24]. Similar patterns are reported in studies on waste reduction and water conservation, where initial improvements are difficult to sustain without continuous reinforcement [8].

A second theme is context sensitivity and heterogeneity of outcomes. Behavioral interventions often produce uneven effects across socio-economic groups, regions, and institutional settings [25,26] and [27] (pp. 7–12). Comparative studies suggest that income, education, cultural norms, and existing infrastructures significantly mediate the effectiveness of nudges, defaults, and informational cues [2] (pp. 39–52). As a result, interventions that perform well in pilot settings may yield weaker or more variable outcomes when implemented at scale.

A third set of concerns relates to limited spillover and cross-domain effects. Numerous studies report that behavioral changes induced in one domain—such as household energy use—do not reliably generalize to other areas of consumption, including mobility, food, or leisure [10] (pp. 1361–1364) and [28] (pp. 128–132). In some cases, improvements in pro-environmental behavior may be offset by increased consumption elsewhere, a phenomenon widely discussed as rebound or offset effects [11] and [29] (p. 475). These findings raise questions about the extent to which behavior-specific interventions contribute to broader sustainability goals.

A natural question arises at this point: does the foregoing review overlook empirical evidence in which behavioral steering produces sustained effects, and on what grounds can the reported limitations be regarded as structurally significant rather than merely contingent? The characterization of durability problems, context sensitivity, and limited spillover as structural concerns rests on two considerations. First, a substantial body of well-regarded studies, spanning different consumption domains and intervention types, documents these challenges, making them difficult to dismiss as isolated anomalies. Notably, several influential scholars who otherwise advocate behavioral steering approaches explicitly acknowledge these limitations and treat them as substantive challenges rather than peripheral caveats [22,25,27]. Second, even studies that do not deny the sustained effectiveness of behavioral steering often emphasize that such effects depend on ongoing reinforcement and favorable contextual conditions [30,31] (pp. 7–9). Rather than weakening the diagnosis, these qualifications underscore the limits of behavioral steering. Accordingly, as a problem-oriented and non-exhaustive narrative review, this part does not seek to survey the full range of empirical findings on behavioral steering, but aims to render these challenges sufficiently clear and robust for diagnostic and normative analysis.

2.3. Calls for Integration and Conceptual Gaps

In response to these mixed outcomes, a growing strand of the literature calls for more integrated approaches to sustainable consumption (The existence of these contributions also confirms that the limitations of behavioral steering are structural and deserve serious attention.). Rather than rejecting behavioral steering, these contributions argue that behavioral interventions should be combined with broader structural, institutional, and cultural measures to address the complexity of consumption patterns [12,13,32].

One prominent line of argument emphasizes the importance of structural and infrastructural conditions. From this perspective, behavioral interventions are seen as limited when they are not supported by enabling infrastructures, such as public transport systems, energy-efficient housing, or accessible sustainable products [33,34].

A second line of research highlights the role of cultural norms and social practices. Drawing on contemporary sociology, these studies suggest that focusing on individual choices risks overlooking the routinized and socially embedded nature of consumption [13] (p. 2). From this view, sustainable consumption requires changes in shared meanings and conventions, rather than isolated adjustments in decision-making contexts.

A third strand of the literature points to the need for institutional coordination and shared responsibility. Scholars argue that consumer-focused interventions can place excessive responsibility on individuals while leaving production systems, markets, and governance structures largely unchanged [35,36].

Despite their differences, these integrative perspectives share a common conceptual limitation. While they broaden the analytical focus beyond isolated consumer choices by emphasizing structures, culture, and institutions, they rarely make explicit how consumers are understood as agents within these frameworks. In this paper, agency is defined as a practice-shaped and temporally extended capacity to sustain and guide action over time through the exercise of practical reason. It refers to the ability of consumers to form, maintain, and critically orient habits, commitments, and patterns of participation across contexts, rather than merely to respond to incentives or conform to established norms. In this sense, agency involves a dimension of autonomy, not as abstract independence from influence, but as the capacity for reflective and purposive engagement with one’s own practices. Agency is therefore distinguished from momentary choice and passive habituation.

As a result, existing calls for integration often lack a clear account of what kinds of agents sustainability policies need to foster. Although these approaches acknowledge that consumption is socially embedded and institutionally structured, they offer limited guidance on how individuals develop the dispositions, skills, and forms of practical judgment required to navigate sustainability challenges over time. This conceptual gap concerning the role and formation of agency remains insufficiently addressed in current sustainable consumption research.

3. Why Behavioral Steering Falls Short in Practice

The limitations identified in the behavioral steering literature are well documented empirically. However, these challenges are rarely examined as interconnected outcomes of a shared underlying logic. Instead, they are often treated as isolated problems to be addressed through improved design or contextual adjustment. What remains insufficiently examined is how these shortcomings are rooted in a particular way of conceptualizing sustainable consumption.

This section advances a diagnosis. It argues that the limitations of behavioral steering are linked to an implicit view of consumers as primarily reactive decision-makers who respond to external cues and incentives. Within this paradigm, sustainable consumption is framed as the correction of discrete choices [37] (pp. 131–134), while little attention is paid to consumers as agents whose habits, dispositions, and practical capacities develop over time through participation in social practices.

As a result, behavioral steering may succeed in shaping specific decisions in narrow contexts, yet struggle to generate durable, scalable, and cross-domain changes in consumption. By neglecting how consumers acquire stable orientations and forms of agency that support sustained engagement with sustainability, behavioral steering remains dependent on continuous external guidance [33,38]. This helps explain why empirically effective interventions often fail to produce lasting transformations in consumption practices.

3.1. Short-Term Compliance Without Durable Transformation

A central practical limitation of behavioral steering lies in its tendency to produce short-term behavioral compliance rather than durable transformation. As reviewed in Section 2, many interventions succeed in modifying discrete choices—such as reducing household energy use—but these effects often attenuate once interventions lose salience or are withdrawn [6,8].

From a practice-oriented perspective, this pattern reflects a reliance on external prompts rather than internalized orientations. Behavioral steering mechanisms typically operate by altering choice architectures, informational environments, or incentive structures at the moment of decision. While effective in triggering immediate responses, such mechanisms do not necessarily contribute to the formation of stable dispositions, habits, or evaluative commitments that persist beyond the intervention context [39] (pp. 233–237).

This distinction between compliance and transformation is particularly important in sustainability contexts. Compliance refers to behavior that aligns with policy goals under specific conditions, whereas transformation involves changes in how individuals understand, prioritize, and integrate sustainability considerations into their everyday practical reasoning. Sustainable consumption, however, requires precisely this latter capacity: the ability to act consistently across time and situations, even when external prompts are absent or competing considerations arise [3] (p. 81).

Interventions that remain tied to specific choice settings thus struggle to support continuity across the shifting conditions characteristic of sustainability transitions. As a result, behavioral change remains contingent on sustained external support, rather than becoming embedded in everyday practices.

3.2. Fragmented Interventions and the Problem of Practice Spillover

A second shortcoming concerns the fragmentation of behavioral steering interventions across consumption domains. As empirical studies repeatedly show, behavioral changes induced in one area rarely generalize to others [10,11]. This lack of spillover is often treated as an empirical anomaly or attributed to rebound effects, but it can also be understood as a consequence of how behavioral interventions target isolated decisions rather than integrated practices.

Consumption activities such as eating, mobility, housing, and leisure are not independent choice domains but interconnected practices shaped by shared routines, material arrangements, and social meanings [13] (pp. 8–14). Behavioral steering, however, typically addresses these domains separately, deploying domain-specific nudges, labels, or incentives. This modular approach limits the capacity of interventions to influence how individuals understand and coordinate their overall patterns of living [40] (p. 1408).

As a result, individuals may comply with sustainability prompts in one context while compensating elsewhere. This is not necessarily done out of indifference, but because no coherent practical orientation and dispositions link these actions. From this perspective, rebound and offset effects are indicators of a deeper disconnect between targeted behavioral interventions and the holistic organization and orientation of everyday practices.

3.3. Context Dependence and the Limits of Transferability

The effectiveness of behavioral steering is also highly sensitive to socio-economic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Interventions that perform well in controlled trials or pilot programs often yield weaker or inconsistent outcomes when scaled up or transferred across regions [34] (pp. 13–16). While this context dependence is widely acknowledged, it is frequently framed as a challenge of fine-tuning or localization.

A practice-oriented analysis suggests a more fundamental issue. Behavioral steering presupposes relatively stable background conditions—such as access to viable alternatives, institutional trust, and shared normative expectations—that enable individuals to respond predictably to cues and incentives. When these conditions vary, identical interventions can generate divergent outcomes, even when implemented with comparable technical rigor.

From the perspective of agency, this sensitivity to context reveals a deeper limitation. Behavioral steering typically treats agency as a latent capacity that can be activated by appropriately designed choice architectures, rather than as a set of skills, dispositions, and forms of practical judgment that are developed through participation in social practices. As a result, interventions tend to assume that consumers already possess the competences and orientations required to interpret and act upon behavioral cues. Where such capacities are unevenly distributed or weakly developed, interventions are less likely to succeed, regardless of contextual adaptation [41].

This reliance on favorable background conditions limits the robustness of behavioral steering as a governance strategy. It also raises concerns about equity and inclusion, as interventions may systematically favor groups with greater resources, flexibility, or prior engagement with sustainability issues [42]. In these cases, the problem is not merely that interventions fail to travel well across contexts, but that they fail to engage consumers as agents capable of learning, adapting, and sustaining environmentally responsible practices. Behavioral steering thus risks amplifying existing disparities rather than fostering broadly shared capacities and orientations for sustainable action [42,43].

3.4. Narrowing of Agency, and an Alternative Framing

Taken together, these practical shortcomings point toward a common structural feature of behavioral steering: its emphasis on externally guided choice adjustment rather than the cultivation of practical agency.

In most behavioral interventions, individuals are treated as targets of influence whose behavior can be shaped by adjusting contextual variables. Even when interventions are socially implemented—through institutions, infrastructures, or collective norms—the role of individuals remains largely reactive. Agency is operationalized as responsiveness to cues, incentives, or defaults, rather than as the capacity to deliberate, prioritize, and coordinate actions across contexts [44,45].

It should nevertheless be emphasized that behavioral steering comprises heterogeneous intervention types that engage agency in different ways. Default-based interventions largely bypass practical judgment by exploiting tendencies toward option acceptance under conditions of limited attention. Economic incentives, in turn, mobilize responsiveness to material rewards or costs, while remaining largely neutral with respect to the formation of environmental commitments or evaluative capacities. Informational feedback, social comparison, and norm-based interventions engage agency more directly by presupposing some degree of environmental concern and by supplying inputs for practical judgment. Yet even here, such commitments and capacities are typically treated as given rather than as dispositions that require cultivation and expansion through practice. For this reason, insufficient engagement with agency constitutes a shared limitation across different forms of behavioral steering, even if it manifests in different ways and to different degrees.

This narrowing of agency has tangible practical consequences. When sustainability-related actions depend primarily on external steering, individuals remain vulnerable to changes in policy design, market conditions, or informational environments [46] (pp. 383–386), and are less equipped to respond to novel or ambiguous situations where established cues are absent or conflicting, which is a common feature of sustainability transitions [47,48]. Moreover, such forms of engagement do not readily support initiative beyond externally prompted behavior, such as actively promoting sustainable practices or supporting collective efforts. Where commitment remains shallow, individuals may also fail to recognize the necessity of complementary measures—such as infrastructural or institutional investments—that are essential for enabling sustainable consumption but presuppose a deeper practical identification with sustainability goals.

Importantly, this diagnosis does not deny that behavioral steering operates within social and institutional frameworks, nor that some interventions may influence habits over time. Rather, it highlights a mismatch between the complexity of sustainability challenges and the limited conception of agency embedded in prevailing behavioral approaches.

The limitations of behavioral steering should therefore not be interpreted simply as evidence that nudges, defaults, or incentives are insufficiently refined. Instead, they invite a reconsideration of what sustainable consumption governance aims to achieve at the level of everyday practice. If sustainability requires not only compliant choices but also sustained practical orientation across domains and over time, then approaches focused primarily on steering discrete decisions face inherent limitations. The unresolved problem—concerning the formation and exercise of agency in consumption practices—provides the point of departure for the alternative framework developed in this paper.

3.5. Interim Summary

In brief, if the preceding sections documented limitations of behavioral steering at the empirical level, the present section has sought to interpret and diagnose these patterns. The analysis offered here is not a causal account that claims to identify the sole or decisive source of behavioral steering’s shortcomings. Rather, it advances an agency-based diagnosis that treats these empirically observed limitations as symptoms of a deeper conceptual orientation—one that prioritizes the correction of discrete choices while neglecting the formation and exercise of practical agency in everyday consumption practices.

A natural objection against this line of argument is that the documented limitations may admit multiple interpretations. They can plausibly be attributed to insufficient scale, political constraints, economic lock-ins, or institutional misalignment. These explanations are neither denied nor dismissed here. The claim advanced in this paper is not that an agency-based interpretation is the only, or even the most comprehensive, explanation available. Rather, it is that agency constitutes a distinct and underexamined dimension that is normatively and practically significant for understanding durable sustainability transitions. This emphasis is motivated by a simple but consequential consideration: the qualities that constitute agency—such as stable dispositions, practical judgment, and capacities for self-directed action—have been shown, across research in personality psychology, to support relatively consistent patterns of behavior across situations, including under adverse or changing conditions [49,50]. Moreover, the cultivation of such forms of agency has been empirically explored and practically tested in multiple domains, where it has been associated with spontaneous, sustained, and cross-contextual patterns of action rather than context-bound compliance alone [51] (p. 401). If sustainable consumption is expected to persist across domains and over time, rather than being confined to specific intervention settings, then the cultivation of such agential capacities represents a potential resource that governance strategies cannot overlook. From this perspective, agency-based explanation does not replace or overwhelm structural or political-economic explanations, but works along with them by illuminating what enables individuals to sustain environmentally responsible practices beyond the reach of continuous external steering.

4. From Behavioral Steering to Virtuous Practice: A Practice-Oriented Ethical Framework

The preceding sections argued that the limitations of behavioral steering are linked to a narrow conception of agency. While behavioral interventions focus on adjusting choice environments, they offer limited resources for explaining how individuals develop the capacities required for sustained, cross-domain engagement with sustainability challenges. This section introduces an alternative ethical framework centered on virtuous practice. Rather than treating sustainable consumption as a series of isolated choices, this framework emphasizes the formation of dispositions within socially embedded practices.

To clarify its contribution, this section first provides a brief and accessible overview of virtue ethics and the concept of practice, before explaining how this perspective reframes sustainable consumption and addresses the limitations identified above.

4.1. Understanding Virtue Ethics and “Practice”

Virtue ethics is an ethical approach that focuses on the character and practical dispositions of agents rather than solely on rules, duties, or outcome optimization [52] (introduction). Instead of asking only what action should be chosen in a given situation, it asks what kind of person one needs to become in order to act well across situations [53] (ch. 2). In this tradition, virtues are understood as stable, context-sensitive dispositions, informed by practical reason, to perceive, evaluate, and respond appropriately, developed over time through habituation, social learning, and participation in shared practices rather than isolated acts of compliance [14,52,53].

When applied to sustainability, virtue ethics shifts attention from isolated pro-environmental choices to the cultivation of dispositions such as responsibility, moderation, attentiveness, and care for shared goods [15,54] (ch. 1, 2). These dispositions support temporal consistency and cross-domain coherence, enabling responses to sustainability challenges even without explicit prompts or incentives.

Closely related to virtue ethics, the concept of practice plays a central role in this framework but requires clarification. Here, a practice refers not simply to repeated behavior, but to a socially established and normatively structured pattern of activity involving shared meanings, skills, material arrangements, and expectations [55] (p. 187) and [56] (pp. 249–252). They provide agents with a framework for understanding what counts as appropriate and virtuous action in a given domain.

This distinction clarifies that while nudged or default-guided behavior may occur within a practice, it does not necessarily amount to engagement with it as such. Selecting a green default may involve behavioral participation without fostering understanding, cross-domain integration, or practical judgment when conditions change [33]. Practices, in this stronger sense, are sites where agency is exercised and developed over time, shaping dispositions, skills, and forms of practical reasoning that are central to virtue-ethical accounts, rather than merely individual choices [37,56].

At this point, it is important to clarify why virtue ethics is introduced alongside practice theory, rather than relying solely on social practice theory or the capability approach. Social practice theory has played a central role in sustainability research by showing how consumption is shaped through routinized practices involving material arrangements, skills, and shared meanings. Its main analytical strength lies in explaining how consumption practices are stabilized and reproduced through routines, material arrangements, and shared meanings. However, this approach places comparatively less emphasis (especially compared with virtue ethics) on how agents develop practical judgment, evaluative orientation, or the capacity to reflect on and coordinate their actions within and across practices. Similarly, the capability approach offers a powerful normative framework for assessing whether individuals possess the substantive freedoms and opportunities required for sustainable ways of living, and has been widely used to address issues of justice and inequality. However, it typically emphasizes the availability of capabilities rather than the processes through which practical commitments, dispositions, and judgment are cultivated and sustained in everyday action.

Virtue ethics complements these perspectives by offering a normative account of agency formation within practice. It specifies how stable dispositions, habits, and forms of practical reason are cultivated through participation in socially embedded practices, and these precisely address the issues of persistence, cross-domain consistency, and context sensitivity mentioned earlier. In this sense, virtue ethics is not introduced as one normative option among others, but as a framework that directly engages the practical question of how individuals come to sustain environmentally responsible forms of action over time, rather than merely being enabled or guided to act sustainably in isolated situations.

4.2. From Steered Choice to Virtuous Practice in Sustainable Consumption

When applied specifically to sustainable consumption, the contrast between steered choice and virtuous practice becomes more concrete. Behavioral steering typically targets discrete consumption moments—choosing a product, adjusting thermostat settings, or selecting a transport mode—by modifying decision environments. While such interventions can shift outcomes in specific situations, they offer limited insight into how consumers organize their consumption patterns over time and across domains.

A virtue-oriented practice framework reframes sustainable consumption as an ongoing mode of living rather than a sequence of environmentally preferable choices. From this perspective, consumption is embedded in practices such as provisioning households, maintaining comfort, managing mobility, and participating in social life. These practices involve recurrent judgments about sufficiency, convenience, responsibility, and trade-offs among competing goods. What matters for sustainability, therefore, is not only which option is chosen in a given instance, but how individuals learn to navigate these practices in a way that reflects stable orientations toward environmental and social goods.

Virtue ethics contributes to this reframing by emphasizing dispositions that enable agents to respond appropriately across varying contexts. Dispositions such as moderation, practical wisdom, responsibility, and attentiveness to environmental consequences support forms of consumption that are resilient to changes in price signals, informational cues, or policy instruments. For example, a disposition toward moderation affects not only purchasing decisions but also routines of use, maintenance, and replacement, which are dimensions of consumption that are often overlooked in behavior-focused interventions.

Importantly, this framework does not deny the relevance of social and institutional conditions. Rather, it highlights how sustainable consumption emerges from the interaction between supportive structures and agents capable of exercising judgment within practices. Behavioral tools may initiate change, but without contributing to the development of such dispositions, they remain limited in their capacity to foster coherent and enduring consumption patterns.

4.3. Virtue Ethics, Environmental Dispositions, and the Agency Gap in Sustainable Consumption

The relevance of virtue ethics to sustainability is not merely theoretical. A growing body of work in environmental virtue ethics explicitly examines the character traits and dispositions required for environmentally responsible living. Scholars in this tradition argue that virtues such as environmental responsibility, care for ecological systems, humility regarding human dominance over nature, and a sense of stewardship play a crucial role in shaping environmentally sustainable forms of agency [14,15,54].

These contributions are particularly instructive for sustainable consumption research because they emphasize the cultivation of stable tendencies rather than episodic compliance. Environmental virtues are understood as capacities that orient agents toward recognizing environmental considerations as practically salient, even when these considerations are not institutionally foregrounded [14] (p. 155). This helps explain why some individuals sustain environmentally responsible consumption patterns across domains—food, mobility, energy, and leisure—while others respond only intermittently to external prompts [15] (pp. 64–78).

Importantly, virtue-oriented approaches have demonstrated practical relevance in several applied domains beyond environmental ethics. In professional ethics, virtue-based frameworks are widely used to explain how practitioners develop reliable judgment, integrity, and responsibility in complex and uncertain environments where rules and incentives are insufficient [57,58] and [59] (p. 42). In medical ethics, virtue ethics has informed approaches to clinical judgment, emphasizing habituation, moral perception, and context-sensitive decision-making as foundations of good practice [60]. Similar arguments have been made in business ethics and education, where virtue-based models are used to account for long-term orientation, trustworthiness, and ethical competence that cannot be secured through compliance mechanisms alone [61] (pp. 115–125).

Beyond analogical arguments from professional or institutional contexts, an additional line of support for the relevance of virtue cultivation to sustainable consumption comes from empirical research in contemporary personality psychology. A substantial body of work shows that individuals who possess stable character traits or virtues tend to exhibit corresponding patterns of behavior across a wide range of trait-relevant situations, rather than only in response to situational cues. This research also provides grounds for expecting that agents who have developed environmental virtues—such as responsibility, care, or temperance—are more likely to sustain environmentally appropriate forms of consumption across domains and over time.

Importantly, this literature also offers established methods for assessing whether such dispositions are present, without reducing them to momentary preferences or isolated behaviors. Two approaches are particularly well validated [62,63]: first, self-assessments triangulated with reports from close others or informed observers; and second, multi-item behavioral scales that measure recurrent patterns of perception, motivation, and action associated with specific traits, again corroborated by third-party evaluations. Empirical studies indicate that individuals identified as possessing particular virtues through these methods tend to act in ways that express those virtues across diverse contexts.

Taken together, the foregoing considerations provide qualified support for the feasibility of virtue cultivation in the domain of sustainable consumption. The argument is neither speculative nor methodologically ungrounded: it draws on well-established applications of virtue-oriented frameworks in adjacent fields, as well as on empirical research demonstrating the cross-contextual stability and measurability of character dispositions. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that important differences exist between domains, and that direct empirical evidence concerning the extent to which approaches to virtue cultivation can be straightforwardly extended to consumption—particularly sustainable consumption—remains limited. This constitutes a genuine epistemic constraint. Nevertheless, the availability of established measurement tools makes it possible to specify what it means to possess an environmental virtue in empirically tractable terms, and to investigate how such dispositions may support sustained and cross-contextual engagement with sustainable consumption practices over time.

These discussions strengthen the case that virtue ethics is not merely an aspirational moral theory, but a framework that offers concrete insights into how agents acquire stable capacities for responsible action over time. Applied to sustainable consumption, this perspective clarifies the agency gap identified in earlier sections. A virtue-oriented framework treats agency as something that can be cultivated through participation in practices supported by institutions, norms, and material arrangements.

Reframing sustainable consumption in terms of virtuous practice invites a shift in research focus. Rather than asking only whether specific interventions change behavior, it encourages scholars to examine how interventions interact with practices, how they contribute to learning and habituation, and how they shape agents’ understanding of sustainability over time. These implications will be further explored in the following section, which translates this ethical framework into concrete policy and design considerations.

5. Policy and Design Implications: Cultivating Virtuous Practices in Sustainable Consumption

If the shortcomings of behavioral steering stem from its limited conception of agency, and if a virtue-oriented practice framework offers a more adequate account of sustainable consumption, then the implications for policy and design also extend. An important challenge is how to design governance arrangements that support the development of durable orientations, competences, and forms of practical judgment within everyday consumption practices.

This section elaborates these implications in detail. It argues that virtue-oriented policy design does not assume that virtues emerge automatically once appropriate policies are in place. Rather, it emphasizes the causal pathways through which institutional arrangements, learning environments, and participatory processes can contribute to the cultivation of sustainable dispositions over time.

5.1. Reconfiguring Behavioral Interventions: From Signals to Learning Devices

Behavioral interventions such as informational feedback, defaults, and nudges need not be abandoned within a virtue-oriented framework. However, their function must be reinterpreted. Instead of operating merely as signals that steer behavior toward predefined outcomes, such interventions can be designed as learning devices that foster reflection, understanding, and skill acquisition.

Consider informational feedback in energy consumption. Standard feedback mechanisms often provide aggregate metrics—such as kilowatt-hours saved or cost reductions—that indicate whether behavior aligns with policy goals. While effective in the short term, such feedback rarely explains why certain practices are more sustainable or how individuals can adapt their routines under changing conditions [6]. By contrast, feedback systems that disaggregate consumption by activity (heating, cooking, appliances), provide contextual explanations, and evolve over time can support learning about the structure of one’s own practices.

Empirical studies of advanced and interactive energy feedback systems suggest that such designs are more likely to promote durable changes by helping households develop a practical understanding of energy use rather than merely responding to comparative signals [64,65,66]. These findings align with research showing that interventions supporting competence and autonomy are more likely to generate sustained engagement than those relying solely on external prompts [39] (p. 248).

A similar distinction applies to default options. Defaults are often criticized for encouraging passive compliance [44,45]. However, this effect is not intrinsic to defaults as such, but depends on their design. Defaults that are accompanied by transparent justification, opportunities for exploration, and periodic reconsideration can encourage active engagement rather than inertia [5] (pp. 12–18) and [41]. Studies of renewable energy defaults indicate that when consumers are invited to reflect on and periodically review their choices, default effects are more likely to be retained even after active choice is restored [16] (pp. 65–70) and [17].

From a virtue-oriented perspective, the key question is whether behavioral interventions contribute to agents’ capacity to act well across situations, rather than merely shaping isolated decisions. When designed as learning-oriented tools, behavioral measures can support the gradual formation of dispositions such as attentiveness, responsibility, and moderation.

5.2. Institutional Design and the Conditions for Virtue Cultivation

A second set of implications concerns the design of institutions and infrastructures that structure everyday consumption practices. Policies that expand public transport, support repair and reuse systems, or facilitate low-carbon housing retrofits are often justified in terms of efficiency or emissions reduction. A virtue-oriented framework highlights an additional dimension: how such arrangements shape the conditions under which practical dispositions can be exercised and developed.

Crucially, the provision of infrastructure does not automatically generate virtues. Rather, infrastructures function as enabling conditions that make certain forms of action intelligible, repeatable, and socially recognized [56]. For example, accessible and reliable public transport systems do more than increase modal choice. They enable routines of mobility that reduce dependence on private cars, normalize shared use of resources, and support dispositions of restraint and consideration for collective goods [67].

Empirical studies of mobility transitions show that sustained shifts away from car use are strongly associated with changes in daily routines, skills, and social norms rather than with isolated incentives alone [68,69]. Over time, repeated participation in such practices can stabilize orientations that persist even when individuals encounter alternative options.

Similarly, policies supporting repair cafes, product longevity, and reuse networks contribute to sustainable consumption not simply by extending product lifespans, but by fostering competences and attitudes related to care, maintenance, and sufficiency. Qualitative studies of repair initiatives report that participants often develop stronger emotional attachment to objects, heightened awareness of material impacts, and a sense of responsibility for consumption decisions [42,70].

In housing and energy use, low-carbon retrofit programs that combine technical upgrades with user engagement and learning components have been shown to produce more durable changes than purely technical interventions [71,72]. From a virtue perspective, such programs succeed not because they enforce compliance, but because they support the exercise of practical judgment within everyday routines of comfort, convenience, and care.

5.3. Learning, Habituation, and the Temporal Dimension of Sustainable Consumption

Virtue ethics places particular emphasis on learning and habituation as processes through which stable dispositions are formed [52] (pp. 30–45) and [53] (pp. 20–35). This insight has direct relevance for sustainable consumption policy, where one-off interventions often fail to generate lasting change.

Policies that support learning over time—such as community-based initiatives, participatory programs, and adaptive feedback mechanisms—acknowledge that sustainable consumption is a developmental process. Community energy projects, for instance, have been shown to foster stronger senses of ownership, competence, and responsibility than externally imposed measures, leading to more persistent engagement [73].

Comparable dynamics can be observed in other domains. In public health, programs that emphasize skill-building and habit formation—rather than isolated informational campaigns—are more effective in supporting sustained lifestyle changes. In professional ethics, apprenticeship-based models illustrate how judgment and responsibility are cultivated through guided practice rather than rule compliance alone [61] (pp. 115–125).

Applied to sustainable consumption, these examples underscore the importance of temporal continuity. Virtue-oriented policies recognize that dispositions emerge gradually through repeated engagement, reflection, and adjustment. Success should therefore be assessed not only by immediate outcomes, but by whether policies create conditions for ongoing learning and competence development.

5.4. Worked Example: Household Energy

To illustrate this further, consider the example of household energy. In standard behavioral approaches, the policy problem is typically framed as inefficient or excessive energy use, and interventions are designed to correct discrete choices through informational feedback, social comparison, or default options. Success is often assessed by short-term reductions in energy consumption or cost savings following the intervention. While these measures can be effective in the immediate term, they remain highly dependent on the continuous salience of the intervention and offer limited insight into whether households have developed the capacity to manage energy use under changing conditions, such as price fluctuations or shifts in household circumstances.

A virtue ethics and practice-oriented framing redefines the problem. It focuses on how households engage in socially embedded practices—heating, cooling, cooking, and appliance use—through which energy is consumed. The policy objective is not only to reduce kilowatt-hours, but to support the development of practical judgment and attentiveness that enable households to coordinate these practices sustainably across time and contexts.

This reframing leads to a different understanding of intervention design. Behavioral tools such as feedback or smart meters are not abandoned, but reinterpreted as learning devices rather than mere signals. Effective interventions disaggregate energy use by activity, provide explanations that connect consumption to everyday routines, and invite experimentation and reflection. Beyond informational design, a virtue-oriented approach also emphasizes participatory and relational methods of learning.

One such method involves learning from and interacting with exemplary practitioners such as households or individuals who sustain low-energy practices across changing circumstances and, in some cases, actively promote or creatively develop sustainable solutions. Making such exemplars visible through community programs, peer-to-peer exchanges, or narrative-based communication provides concrete reference points for practical reasoning, illustrating not only what to do, but how to deliberate and adapt in non-ideal conditions. A second method emphasizes reflective engagement with one’s own practical reasoning. Interventions may encourage households to articulate and reflect upon the considerations guiding their energy-related decisions—such as comfort, cost, environmental impact, and social responsibility—through diaries, facilitated discussions, or digital platforms. Such reflective practices, long emphasized in virtue ethics, aim to sharpen practical judgment rather than enforce compliance, enabling agents to act competently even when external guidance is absent. Moreover, programs may also combine technical measures (such as smart meters or retrofits) with participatory elements—workshops, household audits, or peer exchange—that help residents interpret information, develop skills, and reflect on trade-offs between comfort, cost, and environmental impact.

Importantly, a virtue-oriented framework also implies expanded evaluation criteria. In addition to conventional outcome measures, success is assessed by indicators of durable transformation, including: (a) the stability and adaptability of energy-related routines over time; (b) the development of environmental virtues such as responsibility, moderation, or attentiveness, assessed through mixed qualitative and quantitative methods; and (c) evidence of proactive and self-initiated sustainable actions, particularly in domains or situations where no explicit behavioral steering is in place.

Finally, the household energy example helps clarify that this paper does not posit a strict opposition between behavioral steering and structural or virtue-oriented approaches. Behavioral tools need not be rejected: their capacity to generate rapid behavioral change makes them valuable as transitional instruments and as entry points into more sustainable practices. The central claim is not that steering is ineffective, but that its effects remain fragile when it is treated as a stand-alone solution. From a virtue-oriented practice perspective, behavioral interventions are most effective when they are embedded within broader institutional and learning-oriented strategies, where they can function as external prompts that orient agents toward practices in which durable dispositions and practical judgment can develop. The contrast, therefore, is not a binary choice between steering and structural change, but a question of how behavioral tools are configured and situated within a strategy that takes the formation of agency seriously.

5.5. Coordinating Responsibility Without Moralizing Consumption: Addressing Key Critiques

Ethical approaches to sustainable consumption frequently attract concerns that they risk moralizing individual behavior, imposing normative pressure, or diverting attention from structural determinants of unsustainability. Because virtue ethics foregrounds character and disposition, these concerns are especially salient. A virtue-oriented practice framework therefore requires explicit reflection on its limits and potential risks.

A first concern is that appeals to virtue may exert normative pressure on individuals, implicitly shifting responsibility onto consumers and exposing them to moral judgment for failing to live up to ethical ideals. The framework advanced here seeks to avoid this pitfall by rejecting a person-centered virtue ethics. Virtues are not treated as obligations that consumers are exhorted to fulfill through willpower alone. Rather, virtues are understood as socially cultivated capacities that emerge—or fail to emerge—within specific institutional, material, and cultural contexts. From this perspective, the absence of environmentally responsible dispositions is not a moral failure of individuals but an indicator of inadequate practice environments, learning conditions, or policy design. Responsibility is therefore distributed across institutions, infrastructures, and governance arrangements that shape what agents can reasonably learn, sustain, and enact in everyday life. In short, this paper fully acknowledges that the cultivation of virtue largely depends on appropriate institutions and political arrangements.

A second critique concerns the risk of cultural or contextual bias in defining virtues. Environmental virtues may appear to reflect particular social norms, class positions, or culturally specific ideals of the “good life.” This framework addresses the concern by distinguishing between the formal role of virtues and their substantive content. The analysis focuses on general capacities—such as practical judgment, attentiveness to consequences, and orientation toward shared goods—that must be specified within concrete practices and social settings. What counts as moderation, responsibility, or care varies across domains of consumption and depends on available infrastructures, economic constraints, and collective arrangements. Virtue ethics here functions as a framework for analyzing how such capacities are formed and exercised, rather than as a culturally prescriptive doctrine that ranks lifestyles or consumption patterns according to a single normative template. Moreover, this strategy resonates with a substantial body of work in contemporary virtue ethics that explicitly addresses the challenge of cultural pluralism. Many virtue ethicists have argued that virtues should be understood neither as expressions of a single substantive ideal of the good life nor as culturally invariant behavioral norms, but as context-sensitive forms of practical excellence whose content is shaped through social practices, historical conditions, and shared forms of life [52] (ch. 3) and [53] (pp. 88–90).

A third and more fundamental concern is that virtue-oriented approaches may depoliticize sustainability by shifting attention away from structural drivers such as market dynamics, institutional lock-ins, or political-economic power relations. This risk is real if virtue ethics is interpreted individualistically. However, the practice-oriented framework developed in this paper explicitly rejects such an interpretation. Virtues are not conceived as substitutes for structural change, but as capacities that depend upon, and are shaped by, institutional design. Infrastructures, regulations, and market arrangements are constitutive of the practices through which agency develops. Therefore, this perspective foregrounds the political question of how institutions configure the conditions under which practical judgment, responsibility, and learning become possible or impossible. It therefore complements structural analyses by highlighting how governance choices affect not only incentives and outcomes, but also the formation of agents capable of sustaining collective transitions over time.

Taken together, these clarifications position virtue ethics not as a moralizing alternative to behavioral or structural approaches, but as a framework for coordinating responsibility across levels of governance. Admittedly, in concrete policy practice, virtue-oriented approaches may still be implemented in ways that reproduce normative pressure, cultural bias, or depoliticization. However, the preceding clarifications are offered precisely to show that such outcomes are not inherent to a virtue-based framework. When conceptually specified and institutionally embedded with sufficient care, a practice-oriented virtue approach can avoid reducing sustainability to individual moral effort while preserving a meaningful role for learning, judgment, and practical orientation.

6. Conclusions

This paper set out to examine why behavioral steering, despite its empirical successes, has struggled to generate durable, scalable, and cross-domain transformations in sustainable consumption. Drawing on a problem-oriented review of the literature, this paper argues that those shortcomings are linked to a narrow and largely implicit conception of consumer agency that frames individuals primarily as reactive decision-makers responding to external cues.

Against this background, the paper developed a practice-oriented ethics framework inspired by virtue ethics. This framework reframes sustainable consumption not as a sequence of isolated choices, but as an ongoing mode of participation in socially embedded practices through which dispositions, skills, and forms of practical judgment are cultivated over time. By foregrounding habits, moral learning, and agency formation, the framework provides a normative diagnosis of why dominant behavioral approaches fall short, and clarifies what is required for more resilient forms of sustainable consumption.

An important implication of this analysis is that the contribution of a virtue-oriented perspective does not lie in proposing entirely new policy instruments. Indeed, many initiatives discussed in this paper—such as learning-oriented feedback, participatory programs, repair and reuse systems, or practice-enabling infrastructures—already exist within contemporary sustainability governance. However, these measures typically appear as fragmented, context-specific responses, introduced as pragmatic supplements to behavioral steering rather than as elements of a coherent model of agency. What has been largely missing is an explicit normative framework that explains why such measures matter, how they are connected, and what they aim to cultivate in the long term.

By articulating a virtue-oriented account of agency, this paper shows that these seemingly disparate initiatives can be understood as sharing a common theoretical logic: they contribute to the formation of stable orientations, competences, and forms of practical judgment that enable individuals to engage with sustainability challenges across domains and over time. In this sense, the paper offers a way of reinterpreting and strengthening ongoing policy efforts by situating them within a unified ethical framework.

This shift has practical consequences for sustainability governance. It suggests that policy success should be assessed not only by immediate behavioral effects, but by whether interventions support learning, habituation, and the development of agency within everyday practices. More broadly, the analysis indicates that advancing sustainable consumption requires a shift toward a richer understanding of consumption as virtuous practice. By making this shift explicit, the paper aims to contribute to a more reflective, integrated, and ethically grounded approach to sustainable consumption research and policy that also takes the formation of agency seriously.

At the same time, the framework advanced in this paper has clear limits that merit explicit acknowledgment. While it offers a normative diagnosis and a conceptual reorientation of sustainable consumption governance, further work is needed to specify how a virtue-oriented practice framework can be empirically tested, compared, and refined. This includes developing systematic criteria for evaluating agency formation and virtue cultivation in policy contexts, clarifying appropriate indicators and time horizons, and examining how different methods of virtue cultivation operate under varying institutional and cultural conditions. Moreover, additional research is required to assess how the framework can be implemented without reproducing forms of moralization, exclusion, or depoliticization. These limitations do not undermine the framework’s relevance; rather, they delineate a research agenda for future empirical and theoretical work aimed at strengthening the connection between ethical analysis and sustainability governance.