Abstract
The sharing economy has become a global phenomenon that increasingly transforms how we move, travel, work, and consume. Given that consumption practices such as swapping, gifting, reselling, co-using, lending or renting (summed up as peer-to-peer sharing) can facilitate an extended or more intensive use of products, sustainability was early linked to the idea of access instead of ownership. From an ecological perspective, a more equitable and sustainable distribution of resources is feasible, through reducing the costs of accessing products and services and save scarce resources. Apart from having positive environmental effects, peer-to-peer sharing is expected to foster new forms of collaboration, solidarity and social bonding among individuals and to lead the way towards a collaborative economy that is characterized by a greater sense of community, decentralization and solidarity. In recent years, however, the sharing economy has also increasingly provoked considerable criticisms. This paper provides an analysis of the sustainability potentials of peer-to-peer sharing in the domains of accommodation and mobility and contrasts these potentials with its actual impacts in Germany. We show that in order to put peer-to-peer sharing on a sustainable development path, particular changes of consumption habits, organizational innovations and political interventions are needed.
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Notes
The three-pillar model of sustainability is, however, to be questioned (Sachs 1993). On the one hand, the general concern revers to the imprecise and inaccurate formulations that make it difficult to derive concrete options for action from the model. On the other hand, a lack of prioritisation on the ecological dimension is noted. The three dimensions are not of equal importance, since an intact environment is the basis for human life. As a reaction to this criticism, for example, the concept of strong sustainability was developed (Ott and Döring 2011). Here the ecological resources are regarded as not interchangeable and should be preserved and, if possible, expanded.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of the research project PeerSharing (www.peer-sharing.de) funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. The authors thank their colleagues from the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) Berlin, the Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment (IZT) Berlin and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Heidelberg (IFEU).
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M. Gossen, J. Pentzien and J. Peuckert declare that they have no competing interests.
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Gossen, M., Pentzien, J. & Peuckert, J. What use is it really for sustainability? Potentials and impacts of peer-to-peer sharing in the domains of accommodation and mobility. NachhaltigkeitsManagementForum 27, 125–138 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00550-019-00488-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00550-019-00488-8