SCP Policy Design for the Post COVID-19 Society: Envisioning-based Policy Making (EnBPM)

This science-policy brief was published as a background science policy brief for United Nations 7th Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals held on May 5-6, 2022.

Since 2015, the international policy community has started to agree on international agreements with ambitious middle-term and long-term goals, highly relevant to sustainable consumption and production (SCP) such as those seen in the Paris Agreement, SDGs, and the plastic-related agreements at the G7 and G20 processes. There has been growing attention given to socio-technical system change or “transition”. As for infrastructure and products, there will be an increasing shift toward emphasizing functional value, decentralization, circulation, societal well-being. The influence of COVID-19 is strengthening that tendency. This change in the SCP domain calls for a new approach which can be called envisioning-based policy making (EnBPM).