1. Introduction
The sustainability of contemporary society is in danger of collapsing under the weight of a dual and interrelated crisis. While the social crisis dimension manifests itself in levels of inequality last seen in the 19th century (Piketty et al. 2023), the most discussed aspects of the ecological crisis are the climate (IPCC 2022) and biodiversity (IPBES 2022) emergencies. ‘Sufficiency’ has deservedly become a key term within sustainability science. While much sufficiency research has focused on the poor and how to provide corresponding social floors to satisfy basic human needs within planetary limits and behavioural change, there is a lack of interest in the ‘top’ of society: elite lifestyles and how these undermine the dissemination of sufficiency principles. However, on an ecologically constrained planet the provision of sufficiency for the many is linked to limitations of the few—here referred to as economic elites—that are leading ecologically ungeneralisable lifestyles (Gössling & Humpe 2023). The satisfaction of basic human needs for all and over time is only possible if coupled to the implementation of ecological ceilings that prevent wealthy individuals and groups from disproportionate production and consumption patterns and energy use (Khan et al. 2023).
This paper explores the extent to which research can help understand how the wealthiest in society exercise power to impede the dissemination and implementation of sufficiency principles. This can aid understanding of why many people are sceptical about eco-social measures involving ecological ceilings such as caps on income and wealth or living space limitations.1 However, research has so far focused on social inequality and patterns of elite reproduction and their legitimation (Savage & Hjellbrekke 2021) and largely sidelined the ecological crisis. Hence, it would benefit from an integration with sustainability science in general and sufficiency research in particular. To provide such an integration, this conceptual paper provides a critical review of the sufficiency debate and the state of research on elites. It proposes ways to combine elements from both as a precondition to launch empirical research into the understanding of economic elites in social–ecological transformations and as barriers to the dissemination of sufficiency principles.
The paper is structured as follows. By reviewing the existing literatures on sufficiency (in general and applied to energy consumption and urban spaces) and limitarianism, it first identifies the research gap that consists in an adequate consideration of economic elites in connection with the social–ecological crisis. The subsequent section introduces the state-of-the-art of elite research highlighting relevant patterns of economic and symbolic capital employment to occupy and legitimise privileged positions in society and disproportionate ecological footprints of the corresponding lifestyles. This is illustrated with reference to urban spaces as arenas that are increasingly structured to accommodate the lifestyles and preferences of economic elites. The discussion outlines the potential for mutual benefit of an integration of elite and sufficiency research and sketches a corresponding empirical research agenda.
2. (Energy) sufficiency and limitarianism
A recent systematic review of the sufficiency literature (Jungell-Michelsson & Heikkurinen 2022: 4) locates at the core of the concept the:
idea that reaching a state of ‘enough’ is desirable both from the perspective of ecosystems, as well as from the point of view of social and economic systems.
The authors point out that the ‘sufficiency’ concept is often applied when the necessity of ‘bringing production and consumption systems within natural limits […]’ (5) is emphasised. Darby & Fawcett (2018: 8) define sufficiency in similar terms—an ‘amount of something that is enough for a particular purpose’—and understand energy sufficiency as the:
state in which people’s basic needs for energy services are met equitably and ecological limits are respected.
As in the sustainable welfare literature, which focuses on the intersection of welfare and social policy and environmental sustainability issues (Koch et al. 2023), it is argued that the centrality of human needs within sufficiency research and as a distinct category from ‘wants’ necessitates the theorising and empirical identification of a line between the two. In a further homology to sustainable welfare, Darby & Fawcett (2018) apply Doyal & Gough’s (1991) theory of human need which identified two basic needs (physical and mental health as well as autonomy) and 11 ‘intermediate needs’, whereby needs satisfiers vary across cultures, localities and time. According to Gough (2017), minimum standards representing objective human needs can be collectively deliberated (Guillén-Royo 2016) and, in some instances, ‘translated’ into monetary minimum income standards (Davis et al. 2022). The latter is the equivalent to a basket of goods and services:
required by different types of households in order to meet these needs and to participate in society.
(Darby & Fawcett 2018: 12; see also Padley & Hirsch 2017)
To achieve energy sufficiency, strategies are being discussed that have the potential of reducing energy demand. Bierwirth & Thomas (2019: 6) relate this to the areas of space, design and construction, equipment and use. To take the example of space, the sizes of buildings and their technical equipment continuously increased over the last decades. Despite technological progress leading to relative energy efficiency, additional floor space has required more energy for heating and cooling, ventilation, and lighting (Lorek & Sprangenberg 2019: 288). The overall result of such rebound effects is that energy efficiency gains have so far not led to an absolute reduction in final energy use in buildings (Bierwirth & Thomas 2019: 7; see also Rees 2009). The general trend towards increasing building and floor sizes in rich countries has taken an uneven form as increasingly less affordable space has been made available for social housing and poorer income groups, while correspondingly more room has been provided for luxury buildings both for private (under)use and transnational business operations (Nelson 2019; Burrows & Knowles 2019). While increasing amounts of housing units have become unaffordable for growing numbers of people, significant shares of the available housing stock is being unused. Schneider (2019: 21) estimates that there are ‘more than 10 million “empty houses” and 4 million homeless people Europe-wide’. Atkinson (2018) refers to the relationship between globally mobile super-rich groups and property development that generate large volumes of underused or ‘dead’ residential space as ‘necrotecture’ with adverse consequences for public life and livelihood. Especially larger cities have become spaces not merely of gentrification but increasingly of ‘supergentrification’ where already prosperous middle-class areas are ‘upgraded’ to exclusive areas as the most affluent groups ‘were able to impose their will and vision on neighbourhoods’ (Paulsen & Stuber 2022: 6; see also Burrows & Knowles 2019 who refer to these processes as beyond supergentrification). Housing is increasingly dominated by super-rich financiers who tend to view it as an investment rather than ‘a space to be fully occupied’ (Burrows & Knowles 2019: 7).2
There are attempts to interpret sufficiency more broadly than in terms of providing minimums at levels corresponding to basic human need satisfaction or what may count as ‘enough’. Spengler (2016: 936) suggests considering:
the adverse environmental (and other) impacts of the consumption patterns in wealthy countries, thus seeking to establish maximum levels of consumption.
Recent approaches to identify consumption (Fuchs et al. 2021) and production (Bärnthaler & Gough 2023) ‘corridors’ in line with ecological ceilings point in the same direction. Robeyns (2017) develops this idea further, from the perspective of a ‘problem-driven political philosophy’. She introduces the notion of ‘limitarianism’ and the view that no individual should have more than a maximum or an upper threshold of income and wealth. She advocates a relational approach, proposing that the subordinate situations in which the poor find themselves are causally linked to the relative privileged positions in social space of the rich.3 A problematisation of inequality and ecologically ungeneralisable social practices of the rich is considered necessary in a world where many people are ‘unable to flourish’ and where there are ‘major collective action problems’ including the biodiversity and climate crises. However:
large holdings of wealth allow their possessors to disproportionally influence politics and policy-making, to engage in forms of consumption that are highly polluting, and, in some countries, even to buy citizenship.
(251)
Robeyns defines her central concept of a ‘limitarian threshold’ as the (‘richness’) ‘line above which […] no one should be situated’ (253). She advocates:
redistribution that takes away the money above the limitarian threshold to reallocate it below the threshold or to use it for funding public goods
via policies including wage and wealth regulation and caps on the lifetime inheritance level. The participants in this study (Robeyns et al. 2021) drew the richness line or limitarian threshold between €1 million and €3 million annually.4 Limitarianism thus emphasises the aspect of redistribution which is missing in most sufficiency approaches. Though there is agreement with the mentioned sufficiency approaches that everyone should have their basic needs met, limitarianism provides an:
explicit focus on the bearers of the costs—those from whom the resources for redistribution will be taken or those who will have fewer resources (compared with the pre-limitarian situation) due to measures such as a maximum income legislation or a cap on inheritance.
Since extreme wealth and economic elites presently belong to the greatest obstacles towards generalising sufficiency principles on a constrained planet and preventing the redistributive policies Robeyns advocates, the next section discusses the contributions that specialists on this social group—elite researchers—provide to understand these obstacles in more detail.
Toulouse et al. (2019: 333) list some of the most significant barriers to (energy) sufficiency dissemination. These include the relative invisibility and intangibility of energy use in daily social practices, presumed welfare and wellbeing losses in the event of a policy turn towards sufficiency as well as dominating values and norms oriented at individual upward mobility and expansion in material terms. These authors also identify future research priorities including the theoretical understanding and empirical analysis of the cultural, social and psychological factors that can facilitate or complicate the implementation of sufficiency principles and policies. Though they generally encourage studies into ‘power dynamics and better identifying who might benefit or lose from sufficiency’ (334), they stop short of suggesting relevant or responsible actors or at least candidates in this regard that corresponding research should address. Recent contributions on the ‘polluter elite’ (Kenner 2019; IPCC 2022) go a step further: the provision of sufficiency for the many is here understood as being undermined by the social practices of privileged minorities who lead ecologically ungeneralisable lifestyles. Remaining carbon budgets are being depleted faster as a corollary (Gössling & Humpe 2023).
3. Research on elites
One of ‘key ideologies’ of capitalist societies holds that:
economic rewards are distributed according to merit, where those who work hard or whose skills are in high demand get ahead.
This contrasts, however, with the observed intergenerational persistence of wealth inequality (Barone & Moretti 2020) which makes it:
difficult even for high-income earners to counter the historical weight of past wealth accumulation for those born into wealthy families.
(Lierse et al. 2022; see also Chancel & Piketty 2021)
In a context of increasing inequalities, elite research, just as sufficiency research, has enjoyed a recent upsurge (Cousin et al. 2018; Savage & Hjelbrekke 2021; Denord et al. 2020; Korsnes et al. 2017; Engelstad et al. 2019; Vogel et al. 2019). New concepts such as ‘plutocrats’ (Freeland 2012), ‘the super-rich’ or ‘rich oligarchs’ (Schimpfössl 2018) attempt to cover patterns of wealth accumulation and have started to point to the detrimental effects corresponding elite lifestyles have for the planet (Otto et al. 2019; Kenner 2019; Wiedmann et al. 2020). Scholarly understandings of how elites uphold their status as practices of differentiation include ‘boundary-work’ (Lamont 1992) and ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984). These are complemented by theories of ‘imitation’ (Veblen 1899) to capture practices of elite lifestyle emulation. Concepts such as ‘status signalling’ (upgrading and adapting exclusive cultural habits), ‘hyperopia’ (denial and neglect of consequences of wealth and inequalities) and ‘omnivorousness’ (cultural appropriation of lower social groups) further help us understand social practices that normalise and sometimes naturalise elite lifestyles (Kuusela 2020).
There are at least three ways in which elite research may enrich the sufficiency debate in general and help one to understand the barriers to the dissemination of sufficiency principles in particular: first, elite research focuses on processes and struggles at the ‘top’ of society; second, it qualifies the debate on wants and needs by adding the category of ‘having’; and third, it illuminates how processes and practices that are ecologically ungeneralisable are nevertheless socially legitimised.
3.1 Understanding elites and the field of power in the social–ecological transformation
Limitarianism research suggests regulating wealth, economic elites and their resources beyond certain thresholds. Though the case for redistribution from the rich to the poor is certainly strong, it is complicated by the fact that, due to different existing definitions, elites can hardly be regarded as a homogeneous group. For example, a range of novel concepts attempts to unpack wealth levels and their different connections to unsustainable lifestyles. Terms such as 1%, 0.1% or ‘ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ (Atkinson et al. 2017) all capture those at the top, but apply different boundaries. Such categorical distinctions are reflected by different perceptions among the population of who may count as rich and extremely rich.
Elite research can contribute some clarification here. Following Khan (2012: 361), elites may be defined as actors who ‘have vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource’ and thus can exercise societal influence. As long as the income distribution continues to be extremely skewed and the concentration of wealth continues to increase, this definition may be applied to the ‘super-rich’ or ‘super-wealthy’ population without much problem. Hence, populations that are empirically identified in these terms or as ‘economic elite’ most likely overlap. However, the term ‘elite’ presupposes at least a certain degree of power and authority tied to elite positions (Scott 2008). Some people with extreme wealth lack such formal authority associated with corporate powers, while those in command posts are not necessarily extremely rich. To understand elite practices and impacts comprehensively, it does not suffice to analyse their relations vis-à-vis lower classes and groups—how elites manage to keep subordinate classes and groups in their places and maintain their positions on top. The struggles within the dominant class itself must also be considered.
The Bourdieusean tradition has focused on the ‘power struggles among the holders of different forms of power’ (Bourdieu 1996: 265); economic and cultural capital in particular. The struggles within this upper region of social space are understood in analogy to a ‘gaming space’ in which those agents and institutions:
possessing enough specific capital […] to be able to occupy the dominant positions within their respective fields confront each other using strategies aimed at preserving or transforming these relations of power.
(265)
Extending from the economic field to the field of cultural reproduction, the division of labour within the field of power is itself subject to historical and social transformations, with corresponding varying roles for:
spiritual or cultural power holders—warriors and priests, bellatores and oratores, businessmen and intellectuals.
(266)
The Marxian tradition has stressed additional divisions among the economic pole of the dominant class, between transnationally and domestically oriented factions (Sklair 2001; Robinson 2004).
In summary, the research on economic and other elites has provided definitions for the sorts of people who may count as ‘elites’. It addressed material and symbolic reproduction strategies in operation within national fields of power to preserve and improve elite positions in social space. It has raised critical questions including what kinds and amounts of capital were at play in particular periods of time and countries and how these were transmitted. New research projects could explore how national fields of power are affected by the ecological crisis, governmental and popular responses to it and how this impacts on elite reproduction strategies.
A first attempt is now evident to contextualise economic elites within processes of social–ecological transformation. Complementing previous contributions towards a critical understanding of environmental justice (e.g. Faber 2008; Pellow 2017), Kenner (2019) stresses the interrelated ways in which the ‘polluter elite’ significantly worsens the climate performance of advanced capitalist countries such as the US. On top of the luxurious carbon-intense lifestyles and consumption patterns, polluter elites influence sustainability outcomes through ‘investment emissions’ due to their control of shares of large corporations. Furthermore, these elites lobby for continued government subsidies for oil and gas and fund campaigns with the result, if not the goal, of delaying investments in renewable energy development or electric vehicles. The concept, however, has a US bias and focuses on owners of the fossil-fuel industry. Hence, it could be asked whether certain corporate leaders within the ‘green energy’ sector should also be classified as being part of the ‘polluter elite’. Alternatively, they could be regarded as merely ‘super-rich’. Hence, if there is a new division within the field of power between fossil and green factions similar to that between domestic and transnational factions, a corresponding research area would be whether those elite groups that have invested in renewables could be exempted from the redistributive measures from the rich to the poor that limitarians suggest.
3.2 To need, to want and to ‘have’
The concepts of needs and wants are at the core of debates on sufficiency and limitarianism, with social–ecological transformations requiring a political focus on and limitation of the latter. Supporting this claim, Chancel & Piketty (2015) calculated that, in 2015, the top 10% of emitters accounted for 45% of global CO2-equivalent emissions and the bottom 50% for 13%. In 2019, the top 0.01% of wealthy individuals collectively emitted more than 2300 tons of CO2e per capita compared with 6 tons per capita for the global average (Gössling & Humpe 2023). In other words, meeting the wants of the rich has a much higher carbon footprint than fulfilling the needs of the poorer parts of the population. This situation is aggravated by increasing wealth inequality and growing numbers of millionaires and billionaires (Credit Suisse 2021).
In a study of wealthy elites in London, a distinction was made between ‘those who have’ and ‘those who have yachts’ (Burrows & Knowles 2019) to shed light on the socio-spatial struggles between the ‘merely wealthy’ individuals (i.e. the ‘haves’) and the ‘transnational über-wealthy’ individuals (i.e. the ‘have yachts’). This distinction also reflects the fact that it is not only the working-class strata that is being affected by displacement but also parts of wealthier strata. The distinction thus sheds light on the extreme differences in the wealthy strata and how the ‘have yachts’ are taking over neighbourhoods through their excessive home reconstructions and consumption of décor, but also through their detached, individualistic and sometimes hidden lifestyles (cf. the concept of oysterisation below). It is not, however, only the extreme consumption and reconstruction patterns—including the increasing number of excavations under houses with up to two- and even three-storey basements for swimming pools, spas, cinemas, staff accommodation, etc.—that is highly problematic from an environmental perspective. From a social perspective it means that surrounding neighbours, i.e. mostly the ‘haves’, need to put up with protracted, tiresome, noisy and polluting construction works together with the fact that the ‘have yachts’ share neither a common nor an emotional interest in the neighborhood, but merely a financial interest, contributing to a ‘sense of displacement and the feeling of being out of place’ among the ‘haves’ (Burrows & Knowles 2019: 83).
Connected to the discussions about excessive home reconstructions, which are highly energy-demanding in themselves, are the discussions about available space, appliance acquisition and energy-intensive practices (Sahakian 2018). Large available space comes with a ‘multiplying of appliances and powered devices’ and thus with an overall increase in energy consumption. In relation to the super-rich’s basement excavations, but also in relation to having second or third homes, Sahakian (2018: 66) states that:
it is not just a multiplying of appliances but a multiplying of all living space with the associated energy consumption for heating and cooling these homes.
It seems as though these wealthy individuals are not too bothered by these kinds of consumption practices, which might be due to them comparing themselves with others who consume even more. Legitimisation and normalisation processes are also connected to social norms, such as tidiness, cleanliness and comfort (Sahakian 2018). Owning extreme luxury items such as private yachts or jets may in this sense be regarded as necessary prerequisites for elite status and expressions of the culture and norms associated with being super-rich (Featherstone 2013).
Processes of extreme wealth accumulation and supergentrification (Atkinson et al. 2017; Paulsen & Stuber 2022) enfold in parallel. As a result of the ‘heavily urbanised’ super-rich population being concentrated in ‘command centers of the global economy’, Atkinson et al. (2017) discuss the emergence of ‘plutocratic’ cities as spaces that are ‘“bought” by and for the rich, by, with and for their capital’ (12). In such exclusive habitats, the extremely rich make use of personal drivers and discrete vehicles,
shops with manned doorways, fortress homes, gated communities and well-staffed private leisure and consumption spaces that symbolically or physically block access to those who do not belong.
Given multiple systems of protection, what exactly the rich ‘have’ is hard to identify, never mind regulate, with ‘oysterisation’ functioning as a conscious or unconscious closure strategy (Atkinson 2016) for economic elites to continue living ecologically ungeneralisable lifestyles. ‘Having’ stands in this sense in opposition not only to ‘being’ (Fromm 2013) but also to the needs and wants of lower classes, making this category a significant structuration principle of contemporary capitalist society.
Persisting and increasing wealth inequalities can be traced to historical processes of widening power asymmetries between capital and labour (including traditionally aligned political parties). So-called ‘third way’ socialist or social-democratic governments either disposed of inheritance and/or wealth taxation or did not re-introduce these if other parties abolished such policy instruments previously. A further development that increased the structural power of, especially, mobile and financial capital, which found its expression in declining tax rates, were openings and ‘liberalisations’ of previously protected domestic markets. Even labour-oriented parties have pursued:
a social investment approach that emphasizes skill development and labour market activation at the expense of redistribution.
An important, albeit paradoxical, result from these developments is that being wealthy in general and wealth inequality in particular are not necessarily perceived as a problem. Hecht et al. (2022: 18) indicate that the more unequal societies become, the greater the share of the people who interpret richness—including ‘having’—as a necessary, legitimate and, hence, morally justified means of ‘being “safe” and “secure”’. They observe that when social protection systems weaken, as in the British context:
efforts to advocate for more effective and strongly progressive taxation, especially inheritance, property or wealth taxes which would contribute to a more equal society […], often seem to meet with popular hostility.
(18–19)
This vicious circle between deregulating the welfare state, increasing inequality and raising its legitimacy among the electorate constitutes an enormous structural barrier to the generalisation of sufficiency principles of which policymakers should be aware.
3.3 Legitimation of the ungeneralizable: from rule-takers to rule-makers
The empirical trend of increasing concentrations of income and wealth at the top has given rise to new political proposals for taxing capital and wealth (Piketty et al. 2023) at both national and global levels (Kapeller et al. 2023). Yet these political initiatives appear to be somewhat at odds with central results of elite research. The latter indicates a role reversal between policymakers and economic elites, suggesting that those in economic command posts increasingly act as (political legislative) ‘rule-makers’ rather than ‘rule-takers’ (Mills 1956/2000; Streeck & Thelen 2005). Corresponding empirical investigations find economic elites to be difficult to hold to account, tax-dodging, and mobile between places and country borders.
They move in different worlds along privileged pathways. They are off land in their super yachts […] their assets are offshore, and if they are not at sea, they are in their private jets or luxury penthouses.
On top of their direct and very material impact on investment decisions and policymaking via their control of extensive economic resources and formal leadership positions, economic elites dispose of huge amounts of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984, 1996). Sociological elite theories portray elites as sources of inspiration and producers of legitimate norms of what is considered a worthy and good lifestyle. Since acquiring as much wealth as possible has long counted, and still counts, as a sign of social success, elites can act as role models for others, including policymakers. They are producers of status and meaning through their cultural products, habits and modes of cultural consumption (Veblen 1899). The result of the interaction between elite tastemakers and lower-class competitors is a complex status game in which elites seek to maintain exclusivity and limitless lifestyles. Through emulation and imitation, large parts of the middle classes try to climb social ladders and become more like those at the top (Friedman & Reeves 2020). At the same time, elites have sought to protect their privileged positions through even more exclusive cultural practices, including luxury (Khan 2012) and conspicuous (Veblen 1899) consumption. It is the trickle-down effect of what used to be luxury goods to the lower classes that leads to the consumption of ever more exclusive cultural practices and tastes on the part of elites (Bellezza 2022). Many of these practices are ecologically unaffordable if the climate crisis were taken seriously. A good example is air travel, which used to function as a status signal for the privileged few. Its economic and social devaluation due to cheaper ticket prices forced elites to use private jets instead of ordinary business class to maintain status differences.
Patterns of material and symbolic distinction of the extreme wealthy vis-à-vis lower classes are blurred and upheld by subtle practices through which the former downplay social differences. The emphasis on their own hard work—not the appropriated work of others—and individual achievements as underlying and main sources of their wealth (de Vries & Reeves 2022; Jarness & Friedman 2017) is an almost classical example (Koch 2018). Accordingly, elites present themselves as deserving achievers (Friedman et al. 2021) who have gained their position due to merit rather than privilege (Sherman 2018; O’Brien & Ianni 2023). The degree to which the climate crisis and sustainability discourses cause modifications of such legitimation strategies is presently unclear and in need of empirical investigation. Elites may seek to disclose and misrecognise the climate effects of their practices, e.g. through off-setting strategies. A typical example is climate philanthropy: wealthy individuals exchange their economic resources for the legitimacy of supporting worthy and desirable causes such as climate change mitigation or adaption (Maclean et al. 2021; Krauz-Lahav & Kemp 2020). The Giving Pledge is another interesting case where some of the world’s wealthiest people commit to give most of their wealth to pressing problems to ‘set a new standard of generosity among the ultra-wealthy’. It started in the US and continues to spread around the world. Being associated with donations and philanthropic activities not only signals that elites have a sense of, and responsibility for, the community, but also provides a means of normalising and legitimising their wealth and status as morally acceptable despite increasing social inequalities (Krauz-Lahav & Kemp 2020; Maclean et al. 2021; Sherman 2018). However, the social and political pressure to take the climate crisis seriously is likely to push elites into new areas of symbolic capital investment which should be explored further. Corresponding exchanges of economic resources for the legitimacy that comes with being associated with climate philanthropy generally serve the goal of maintaining positions at the top in times of planetary crisis; such voluntary initiatives are also a useful means to avoid state regulation such as compulsory wealth taxation.
4. Towards a new research agenda
The academic engagement with the ecological crisis, sufficiency and limitarianism, on the one hand, and social inequality and elite studies, on the other, suggests the development of a research agenda that considers and unifies the knowledge from both scholarly traditions. The point of departure for such an agenda is closing the dual gap that currently divides sufficiency research and elite research. Sustainability and sufficiency research points to an academic void in elite research, which has focused almost exclusively on social inequality and the patterns of its reproduction (Johansson & Uhlin 2020; Savage & Hjellbrekke 2021), but has generally shown little interest in the roles of elites in causing, aggravating and (perhaps) mitigating climate change and other environmental threats. Conversely, social-science sustainability, including sufficiency, scholars have mostly studied socio-economically disadvantaged groups and how these are affected by climate change and the ecological crisis, often stressing North/South divides (Walker 2012). Much less explored is wealth concentration as an eco-social problem, its spatial expression especially in cities, and the underlying social, political and symbolic power of economic elites. This is unfortunate since such research could constitute a sociological complementation to the existing mostly economic notion of a ‘polluter elite’. By focusing on those in power, in both their network of relations vis-à-vis the subaltern and their mutual relations within the field of power, elite research has a great deal to say about why sufficiency principles have not generalised so far—an insight that may be considered indispensable in building the kind of counter-hegemony that sufficiency-oriented movements intend to achieve.
Hence, there is a need for a further exploration of the potentials for mutual cross-fertilisation between the sufficiency and elite research fields. At least five avenues seem to follow from the present discussion. First, though existing research has demonstrated that extreme wealth comes with disproportionate ecological footprints, there is a lack of knowledge as to how exactly wealthy individuals and economic elites execute their power resources in relation to climate change and social–ecological transformations. This knowledge gap suggests further studies of corresponding elite discourses, identities and representations, strategies of influence and legitimation, as well as elite perceptions and experiences of climate crisis and associated pressures towards social–ecological transformation. How do elites respond to the ecological crisis, what are their ideas as to how to solve it, and what are the discrepancies between the views of elites and the public? Such research topics are especially relevant given the tendency of exoticising elites and their lifestyles in public, media and scholarly discourse (Forrest et al. 2017).5 While it is certainly true that elites lead different lives than the vast majority of citizens, not much is known about how exactly elites navigate the increasingly fragile balance of wealth accumulation and consolidation of legitimacy during the climate crisis. Corresponding studies could explore how economic elites present themselves and are presented in connection with climate change and social–ecological transformations in and beyond the media, and what legitimation and justification strategies and ‘generosity’ initiatives they use (considering different types of economic elites, their relationships to the state and policymakers).
Second, a comparative perspective is likely to increase the scholarly yield of this line of research. While national fields of power in advanced societies share some commonalities such as the division of labour between economic and material, and cultural and symbolic capital, countries nonetheless differ regarding institutional set-up, the historical legacy of wealth concentration as well as political and public support for redistributive policies. At the same time, climate change and social–ecological transformations will affect all societies and their elites. This context may turn out to be ‘the perfect storm’ capable of changing traditional elite compositions and paving the way either for implementing effective wealth and income regulations or voluntary changes towards more sustainable behaviour patterns among wealthy individuals, or a combination of the two. Cross-country research could address elite preferences and strategies in relation to either line of change. Comparisons of countries (and of different factions of national economic elites) is furthermore likely to produce insights into how factors such as national institutional regime types and elite cultures influence elite responses to social–ecological transformations, and how these vary across elite factions and political, business and public domains.
Third, the combined research agenda suggests methodological pluralism and triangulations of literature and media analyses to capture representations of and by elites concerning climate change and environmental crisis, semi-structured qualitative interviews with elite representatives themselves, (vignette) surveys to measure public support of political regulation measures as well as citizen forums to generate corresponding eco-social policy ideas collectively. Such variegated empirical insights will allow for deeper understandings of the barriers to and opportunities for sufficiency principles to occur. It is indeed ‘unrealistic’ (Dubuisson-Quellier 2022: 44) that the dissemination of sufficiency can exclusively ‘rest on the shoulders of consumers’ or the behavioural change of individuals at large. The social sciences can provide the required ‘systemic vision’ on processes of social–ecological transformation and shed light on the links between consumption and production norms as well as the interests and power asymmetries among the actors involved, and particularly the role of elites in causing the social–ecological crisis and responding to it.
Fourth, a series of questions arise concerning the type(s) of policy reforms the public finds acceptable, both generally in relation to the 2015 United Nations’ Paris Agreement on climate change and specifically regarding the rich, and how such support differs across social groups and experts. Explorations of how the public views elites, their practices and privileges are central to understand these support rates. However, information and appeals to voluntary behavioural changes are very unlikely to result in the amount of reduction in energy consumption necessary to seriously address the environmental crises. Yet stronger regulation of wealth and the rich is complicated by the somewhat paradoxical ways in which inequality is currently being perceived: although benefitting elites, the public concern about inequality has decreased with citizens in comparatively more unequal societies being less worried than those in more egalitarian societies (Hecht et al. 2022: 2). Though excess energy consumption and the general aggravation of the social–ecological crisis suggests increasingly radical policy measures capable of initiating structural change to grapple with inequality and ecological crisis at the same time, the public appears to embrace this in parts at best (Cass et al. 2023: 9). In this situation, the expansion of the general knowledge of the detrimental effects elite lifestyles have for the climate and the wellbeing of future generations appears to be the necessary precondition for increasing public support for critical eco-social political measures, such the implementation of caps on income and wealth (François et al. 2023).
Fifth, scholars can help increase public support for such eco-social policies by organising and facilitating policy forums and applying what Gough (2017) refers to as the ‘dual strategy’ of policy formation. This method combines the expert knowledge of researchers with the practical knowledge of citizens and local stakeholders to identify the goods and services necessary for needs satisfaction within a particular social and cultural context and environmental limits. While such deliberative forums are locally and temporally specific, their outcomes have in different societal contexts helped to critically review policy goals, behaviours, satisfiers and infrastructures, and led to adaptations in long-term policy planning, which were, in some cases, upscaled to the national level. Guillén-Royo (2016) provides examples for this from Spain, Peru and Norway (for Sweden, see Lee et al. 2023).
5. Conclusions
The dissemination and implementation of sufficiency principles is impossible without limiting the ecologically ungeneralisable lifestyles of the rich. The point of departure for this article was that existing sufficiency research has not systematically considered the impact of economic elites on society, environment and the potentials for social–ecological transformations. The article has outlined how an integration with elite research may help sufficiency research to fill this gap, and demonstrated that the roles that economic elites play in society in general and social–ecological transformations in particular may be divided into direct and indirect impacts. Their direct impact via investment decisions and luxury lifestyles is now being reflected by the IPCC (2022: 529), which has started to refer to the extreme rich, following Kenner (2019), as the ‘polluter elite’. The indirect, mostly symbolic, role that elites play as tastemakers and role models remains, however, largely underexplored within sufficiency circles. While philosophical limitarianism criticises elite lifestyles as being ungeneralisable within planetary boundaries, social and political mobilisations in connection with the current economic downturn, debates on ‘flight shame’ and Fridays for Future protests push for redistributive reforms that reduce extreme wealth and provide a more just distribution of the burdens of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Since wealth requires a minimal degree of social acceptance to still be considered legitimate, economic elites are under constant pressure to adapt and find ways to re-legitimise their lifestyles. Despite growing recognition of the detrimental effects of excessive wealth for nature and society, there is a lack of empirical studies that explore how economic elites themselves respond to the social–ecological crisis, their interpretations of this crisis and ideas as to how to solve it, as well as potential discrepancies between the views of elites and the public.
This article has indicated the general direction such research should take and suggested empirical studies that investigate how economic elites craft their role in connection to climate change, sufficiency and limits, and how this is perceived by the public. Of special importance is the exploration of structural barriers to the dissemination of sufficiency principles here operationalised as the symbolic power that elites have over the public in times of ecological crisis and the structural potentials for political resistance from lower social classes to make current economic elites respect planetary limits in the future.
Notes
[1] In Scandinavia, less than 10% of the Swedish population supports the policy suggestion of limiting the living space per person. Just 27% are in favour of imposing a cap on wealth and incomes (Lee et al. 2023: 837).
[2] Policy ideas to alter these developments stretch from facilitations of co- or shared housing (including intergenerational) to reduce the average amount of square metreage used by individuals via transformations of home ownership to social housing, caps on average dwellings floors and requisitions to ideas of ‘simpler living’ (Trainer 2019) to reduce the energy amounts used in individual dwellings (Toulouse et al. 2019).
[3] To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht’s poem Alfabet (1934) (in English Alphabet; Brecht/Willet & Manheim 1934/1976: ‘R’, 241): the poor would not be poor if the rich were not rich.
[4] Rather than simply asking people where to draw such a line, which may well prove ‘too difficult’ (Robeyns et al. 2021: 118), vignettes were used. Response and support rates for such a riches line seem to increase if embedded in concrete descriptions of scenarios (vignettes), including how the extra revenue would be spent.
Funding
This research was funded by FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (grant number 2023-01771), project ‘Economic Elites in the Climate Change Transformation: Practices, Justifications and Regulations of Unsustainable Lifestyles in Sweden’. The article benefited from additional funding from FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (grant number 2023-00473), project ‘Regulating the Polluter Elite: Exploring policy measures limiting carbon footprints of the rich’.
Competing interests
The authors declare they have no competing interests.