Households play an essential role in Swedish environmental policy. Consequent upon the ever increasing focus on individual responsibility for environmental problems as internationally adopted through Agenda 21, Swedish environmental policy has an explicit objective to increase and maintain active, individual responsibility for the environment. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency financed SHARP (Sustainable Households: Attitudes, Resources and Policy), a research program in the social science, with a view to studying: how environmental policy impinges on the everyday lives of households; the controlling factors behind households’ environmental choices; and which implications can be derived for designing future policy instruments. The SHARP program received additional funding from the Swedish Research Council Formas. The final report was written by SHARP researchers and edited by the program coordinator, Professor Patrik Söderholm (Luleå University of Technology). The researchers are solely responsible for the contents of the report, which does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.The present report builds on a translation of the original Swedish report. The translation has been conducted by Proper English.

Stockholm, November 2011 Swedish Environmental Protection Agency