![]() Therefore, in this article, we investigate this tension by studying policies relating to sustainable public procurement of the built environment in the EU. In Europe, public procurement is increasingly used as a tool to reach sustainability, a fact that actualizes an inherent tension between politically charged objectives on the one hand, and technological processes and market logics on the other. Despite this ambiguity, they continue to hold a central position as apolitical concepts in much of social science and policy making. Sustainability and sustainable development are political and essentially contested social phenomena. Drawing on these findings, the article proposes practical implications for urban policymakers and avenues for further research. The analysis, moreover, provides insights into what notions of citizens (or Gothenburgians), justice, responsibility, and nature–human relations the Programme is underpinned by. A critical policy analysis of the City of Gothenburg’s new Environment and Climate Programme reveals that, apart from a focus on efficiency, the Programme also includes a politics of sufficiency and decreased consumption, thus potentially taking a first step within Swedish public sector towards an outspoken post-growth paradigm. Given this backdrop, as well as cities key role in responding to sustainability challenges, this article adopts a posthumanist intersectionality-perspective to explore the transformative potential of a municipal policy in which CE has been adopted as a key strategy for achieving change. However, mainstream CE discourses have been critiqued for being ecomodernist and for focusing too much on managerial issues, at the expense of justice and social aspects, and thereby risking not leading to the systemic changes so direly needed. Transitions to a circular economy (CE) have, in recent years, emerged as a popular approach to deal with the challenges related to the systemic crises of the Anthropocene. At the same time, this kind of eco-governmentality might lead to individualized self-governed climate subjects with outlooks that are too limited to foster change of dominant everyday practices. We argue that a consumption perspective is necessary in order to fully address environmental problems and to highlight issues of justice and responsibility. The other features are the existence of civil servants as drivers and the use of calculations from legitimate “fact builders.” We conclude that a consumption perspective strengthens the environmental justice discourse (as it claims to be a more just way of calculating global and local environmental effects) while possibly also increasing an individualized environmental discourse (as many municipal strategies aim to inform and influence the public to make lifestyle changes on their own). One is the existence of long-term environmental goals that facilitate this perspective. Applying actor–network theory, we found three common features of importance for Sweden, and the City of Gothenburg, supporting the consumption perspective to gain ground. ![]() The purpose of this paper is to examine how a consumption perspective on GHG emissions has gained ground in Sweden, specifically in the new Strategic Climate Program of the City of Gothenburg, discussing what municipal strategies and environmental discourses this perspective enhances. Swedish researchers and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency propose that the production perspective should be complemented with a consumption perspective to describe more fairly who is responsible for what emissions. This provides new outlooks on sustainability, from this perspective Swedish emissions have increased rather than decreased in the last decades. If instead a consumption perspective is applied then all emissions attributable to the inhabitants consumption patterns, no matter where they occur, are included, e.g. ![]() ![]() When nations and urban districts publicize their low GHG emissions, these emissions are often based on a production perspective including only emissions occurring within their geographical boundary. ![]() Sweden has been praised for its sustainability efforts and decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. ![]()
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