Globally our practiced food systems are causing great harm to our environment including contributions to biodiversity loss, soil degradation, water pollution, and climate change, as well as to human health. Sustainable diets are crucial for solving those global diet-related problems because they are credited with a key role in the transformation of our currently practiced food systems into more sustainable ones. Increasing the practice of sustainable diets can be a starting point for initiating the needed change. People who are already trying to adopt sustainable diets are often confronted with the intention-behavior gap, caused by a range of barriers that influence their behavior. These barriers are internal (e.g. knowledge, skills) and external factors (e.g. dependence on other, food availability) that interfere with people’s behavioral control, when they want to translate their intentions into behavior. It becomes obvious, that people need support for closing the intention-behavior gap and be able to practice sustainable diets. The overall research aim of this doctoral research is to develop solutions for closing consumers intention-behavior gap and gain a better understanding of the barriers interfering. To understand people’s needs and what could support them during the processes of practicing a sustainable diet, it stands to reason that they can be directly involved in the development processes for ideas that solve the addressed problem. In search of an appropriate methodology, we examined the concept and especially the methods of open innovation, commonly applied in modern product and service development. We have worked out that a participative workshop for idea generation can be a suitable approach to involve people in the development process. On that account, we conducted six workshops in different German cities from September to December 2016 with 82 participants in total. We collected data by letting participants generate ideas to bridge the intention-behavior gap. Analyzing the result it could be shown that they don’t provide directly applicable ideas that will help people to overcome emerging barriers.
@phdthesis{doi:10.17170/kobra-202007061421, author ={Fink, Leonie Linda}, title ={Sustainable diets: Studies on German consumers’ intention-behavior gap}, keywords ={630 and Ernährung and Nachhaltigkeit and Lebensmittelversorgung and Verbraucherverhalten and Deutschland}, copyright ={https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/}, language ={en}, school={Kassel, Universität Kassel, Fachbereich Ökologische Agrarwissenschaften}, year ={2020-01} }