Knowing rebound effect. Could it lead to changes in the repertoire of ecologically oriented actions?

The debate about the relevance and the causes of the rebound effect deriving from efficiency gains is still unsolved and it is characterized by a hard contrast among scholars. However, discourses on rebound effect are being translated and summarized in less complex ways, trespassing the borders of expert spheres. The aim of this study was to investigate what are the resulting shapes of such a transformation activity, to what extent environmentally concerned people agree with “backfire theories”, and what are the most likely changes in the repertoire of ecological actions that could derive from their acceptance. The first part of the research activity was dedicated to the content analysis of discussions and explanations about rebound effect that could be found in non-specialized texts (mainly on the web, in Italian). The second part was based on 12 semi-structured interviews with environmentally concerned young adults in Turin, where the accorded plausibility to the various mechanisms that are likely to lead to rebound effects were investigated. For what refers to micro level rebounds, price-induced mechanisms (the most commonly used) were arduously accepted as valid explanations, while the confrontation with macro level rebounds and backfire gave birth to processes of blaming of a quite varied set of actors and institutions ranging from producers to the financial sector and the “growth society”. Differing from some of the “backfire theories”, neither efficiency improvements in itself nor pervasive technologies are easily recognized as causes of resource use increase. A propensity for individual actions based on sufficiency emerged clearly as a possible solution for counteracting rebound effect.