Reflections on Sustainable Consumption in the Context of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has abruptly disrupted progress toward many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Accordingly, the UN has underscored the need to design short-term responses to halt and reverse the adverse effects of the current COVID-19 crisis. However, some researchers have scrutinized the feasibility and note the potential counterproductivity of particular SDGs in our post-pandemic world. This perspective paper holds a more hopeful outlook and contends that the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to prompt efforts to carry out the UN's 2030 Agenda. In this regard, this paper engages the theme of "sustainable consumption" in the context of COVD-19 by discussing two perspectives or bodies of work-supply chain sustainability and post-colonial theory. Supply chain sustainability is discussed as one such promising, though underutilized practice, that could potentially catalyze progress toward SDG 12. Likewise, post-colonial theory, a body of knowledge rarely drawn upon in sustainable consumption and SDG conversations, is presented to call attention to some of the gaps in the orthodoxy of sustainable consumption approaches, practices, and theoretical perspectives. This perspective paper's novelty lies in the fact that it calls attention to the promise of the SDGs and the limits of our current theoretical frameworks related to sustainable consumption. For these reasons, these bodies of work can provoke additional questions and avenues for future research.