Recent decades have brought positive progress around the globe in many areas of life but dramatic social and economic disparities and far reaching environmental degradation have also occurred. These are in many cases the consequence of the impacts of governmental policies, commercial activities and individual lifestyle choices. In order to be better able to reflect upon the local, national, and global consequences of their choices, individuals need training in how to define issues; gather, handle and apply relevant information; consult; plan courses of action; make choices; analyse and assess their actions. This is particularly true in their roles as consumers.

Consumption is action taken in cultural contexts, strongly influenced by marketing, media and social expectations. Analyzing interaction with the market requires gaining insight into the person’s or community’s background, present relationships and their reactions to advertising and media. In Europe, as in many other parts of the world, communities are conglomerations of people from highly diverse backgrounds and cultures. Thus, the work carried out by the members of the Consumer Citizenship Network is concerned not only with general features of consumption and citizenship but also with the various perspectives on consumption and citizenship springing from the heterogeneous quality of European society due to immigration and mobility. Consumer citizenship is a universal responsibility as Europeans of all origins must deal with a complex market-dominated society.

The Consumer Citizenship Network (CCN) was established in 2003 as an interdisciplinary network of educators, researchers and representatives of non-governmental organisations (as well as UNESCO, UNEP and Consumers International) who share a common concern about how the individual’s role can contribute constructively to sustainable development and mutual solidarity. Progress towards sustainable development and achievement of the Millennium Goals is slow for the European Community as well as the global community. The European Parliament and the European Council have "the achievement of balanced and sustainable development and the recognition of the interrelationship and interdependency between economic, social and environmental aspects of growth" as one of their underlying objectives. The CCN participants represent 113 institutions from 37 countries and have worked to develop interdisciplinary approaches to sustainable development and sustainable, responsible consumption. CCN members represent disciplines from business and economics, social sciences, natural sciences, political science and the humanities. The network facilitates communication, dialogue and debate online and face to face. It promotes mobility by stimulating staff and student exchange between institutions in many of the countries within Europe.

Central themes which the CCN deals with can be summarized as follows:

- How can the individual deal with the ethical challenges of prosperity?

- How can the media and ICT be constructive tools for the consumer citizen?

- What are the individual’s rights and responsibilities as regards food, transport, housing, energy use and personal finances?

- What contributions can the European consumer citizen make towards the eradication of poverty in the world?

- How can awareness and social involvement be stimulated in the individual?

- How can sustainable consumption be encouraged?

The Consumer Citizenship Network has tried to contribute to the process of preparing citizens for life in a complex, highly commercial, global society by increasing collaboration between research, higher education and civil society in order to better relate theoretical knowledge to practical everyday experience. Research, discourse and educational focus on sustainable development in general and sustainable consumption in particular involve examining, among other things, the interface between traditional habits and modern, commercially regulated lifestyles.

The CCN has held three international conferences and published books, proceedings and other material dealing with such topics as transparency, accountability, democratic participation, the family’s role in modern society, cultural understanding of morals and values, freedom and responsibility, food and nutrition, consumer rights, welfare systems, business ethics, CSR, debt prevention, environmental assessment, ecological footprints, accessibility and inclusiveness. Copies/ printouts of articles about the research on these and other topics can be acquired both online (www.hihm.no/concit) and/or by contacting the Consumer Citizenship Network Core Unit (ccn[at]hihm.no).

The CCN network creates a bridge between universities/colleges and the socio-economic organizations which are concerned with sustainable consumption and active citizenship. Thus CCN contributes to the reinforcement of links between teaching and civil society. Several of these civil society organizations concentrate on encouraging active citizenship in communities of immigrant groups. Others carry out in-service training for adults and youth from diverse backgrounds in which consumer citizenship is a central theme.

Although most religions, ethnic groups, commercial enterprises and governments have traditions concerning social responsibility, these vary extensively. Conflicts arising from differences in both definition and practice have fuelled antagonism in many parts of Europe in recent years. The Consumer Citizenship Network partners are concerned with the balance between material and non-material well-being and how one can translate ethical values into everyday practice through conscientious participation in the market. The CCN has approached the task of stimulating the individual’s awareness of the central role they play in forming society and assisting them in finding constructive ways of doing so by first acknowledging that "a consumer citizen is an individual who makes choices based on ethical, social, economic and ecological considerations. The consumer citizen actively contributes to the maintenance of just and sustainable development by caring and acting responsibly on family, national and global levels. "

By focusing on social responsibility on the part of business and consumers, the CCN addresses the growing international concern for implementation of norms and behaviour which support sustainable development and global solidarity. In the international arena, the CCN contributes to the UN Decade for education for sustainable development ( 2005-2014) as well as the International Standards Organisation’s efforts to create guidance standards for social responsibility to be used by public and private organisations. On a regional level, the CCN concentrates on the development of consumer citizenship education.

Educators and researchers around the globe recognize the dilemmas of commercial persuasion, health and safety, ethical consumption, rights and responsibilities and sustainable development, but few systematic pedagogical approaches to these interrelated problems have been put into use. The CCN network participants have worked to develop consumer citizenship education as a relevant, interdisciplinary theme in universities and colleges. Consumer citizenship education deals with "empowering students to develop and evaluate alternative visions of a sustainable future" and motivating them to turn these visions into reality. The Consumer Citizenship Network has brought together expertise in the fields of citizenship-, environmental- and consumer education and provides channels for dialogue and cooperation in research and development work related to consumer citizenship education. The Network works to develop good practice for teaching and accessing consumer citizenship education.

Consumer Citizenship Education can be defined as:

- being based upon the concept of world citizenship which claims to provide a global ethic for sustainable development

-addressing both the supply and demand sides of sustainable consumption in light of intra-generational equity

-analyzing the prerequisites for and the implications of sustainable consumption

-reflecting upon development in personal, local, national and international contexts

-facilitating the locating and understanding of relevant scientific information

In addition to the publication of The Consumer Citizenship Education Guidelines, the CCN has prepared and published numerous articles dealing with consumer citizenship education. These deal with aspects such as: identification of special needs, knowledge clusters, world citizenship, the internationalization of education, active learning, core life skills, experience-oriented education, problem-based learning, change management, cross cultural understanding, and moral education. A number of these articles take into consideration the perspectives arising from immigration and mobility within Europe. They analyze the changes in European society due to the effects of the single market, globalization and social mobility.

Value-based social competences are steadily losing ground in Europe to instrumental competences whose goal is competitive advantage. The Consumer Citizenship Network has also recognized the need for curricula reform and integration of alternative teaching methods in order to further the development of competences which improve the individual’s ability to function creatively and cooperatively in modern society.

An effect of immigration is that indigenous knowledge often moves to new localities or disappears completely. Modernization of communities is another cause of the disappearance of important, useful information and habits. The CCN project, Looking for likely alternatives (LOLA), launched in 2005, is a pedagogical tool for teachers and students which assists them in the process of identifying, evaluating and documenting cases of social innovation towards sustainable lifestyles. The LOLA pilot project aims to adapt to the needs of higher education the process of case collection initiated in the EMUDE European research project and contribute to the "catalogue of cases of sustainable daily life solutions" on the SEP web platform. This project not only brings forth new examples of sustainable lifestyles but also aids in reminding communities of the viable lifestyles which may exist but be in danger of disappearing.

The LOLA project allows teachers and their class to discover, approach and give visibility to sustainable lifestyles in their surroundings. It provides an opportunity to progress beyond the common pedagogical use of case studies and project work which tends to be limited to the immediate classroom context. The process brings the students into direct face-to-face contact with groups of people (the "creative communities") already implementing sustainable solutions in their daily life and thereby increases the learning potential of working with cases. It connects the work of teachers at several schools in a collective search for examples of universal value, thereby putting into action the goals of the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development. This consists in a process of integrating initiatives dealing with "learning to learn" and "learning for a sustainable future" with initiatives concerned with learning to be a critical, aware, consumer citizen. The documentation and evaluation of this process is useful for other teacher trainers and schools -- increasing their knowledge of what is actually happening in society in terms of initiatives for responsible lifestyles and sustainable development. The LOLA pilot project has been developing a "teacher training toolkit" and a "students’ reporter book" to support the collection of cases of sustainable lifestyles by the students and the organizing of the activity by the teachers. These are now available in seven languages. A European catalogue of cases of sustainable lifestyles is progressively completed on the Sustainable Everyday Project web platform. Reports and mobile exhibitions are other available outputs.

Issues affecting individuals in the modern consumer-oriented society change rapidly. Events occur such as pandemic diseases, food safety crises, climate changes etc, which challenge attitudes and habits of both new and established communities. Constant and close dialogue between researchers, teachers and civil society is necessary in order to provide individuals, from whatever cultural background they come, with updated, relevant information. The Consumer Citizenship Network has associated partners from Africa, India, Asia and the Americas. Their involvement provides opportunities for sharing expertise from Europe and gaining better insight into examples of solutions available elsewhere thereby helping consumers in Europe learn from the attitudes and behaviour of people in and from other parts of the globe.