SEC-Transform

Achieving the global climate targets of the Paris Agreement and the core objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs) requires a profound structural transformation of existing production and consumption systems. However, this transformation unfolds under unequal social, economic, and ecological conditions – and is closely linked to differences in people's scope for action, consumption patterns, and opportunities for participation. It is crucial to understand people’s lived reality, which is shaped by the interaction of ecological and social factors: The interaction of these conditions is decisive for the scope and limits of individual and collective agency, but is often insufficiently considered in research. Against this backdrop, the SEC-Transform project team aims to develop an integrative research strategy for the field of "Consumer and Citizen Responsibility in Sustainability Transformation". This work is carried out in close cooperation with the Institute for Consumer Sciences at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. 

Methodologically, the project is based on a systematic review of international research on material and carbon footprints – as well as their links to neuroeconomic methods. An in-depth thematic focus is placed on repair practices: Drawing on a qualitative study conducted through focus group discussions, the project conceptualises repair awareness and develops an indicator to measure repair literacy, which is broken down into repair awareness, repair competence and repair opportunity. 

The resulting insights provide an empirically grounded and transferable basis for hypothesis generation and for the development of a quantitative survey instrument for repair literacy. At the same time, they create the foundation for further strategy development in the field of "Consumer and Citizen Responsibility in Sustainability Transformations" and support the design of research frameworks for modelling social-ecological contexts, as well as their integration into the development of scenarios for differentiating and evaluating the transformation of social-ecological contexts.