Although these approaches may differ, all of them concur onthree essential points:

Instead of weighing the balance of pleasure and pain,individuals tend to think about a good life in terms of their life beingmeaningful to them

Often, environmental and social analysts focus on threats, dangers,and damage. They highlight negatives, in terms of limited or non-renewable resources, or the impacts of excessive emissions or effuents.But what if one took the opposite approach and focused on the posi-tives that we want to strive for? We – the authors – believe that everyhuman being, that is you and us and everybody close and far away,wants to be able to live a good life, a life that is worth living. Giventhat the Earth’s resources are limited and distributed highly unevenly,the core objective has to be how everybody can live well within limits.

It requiresa deep and profound orientation toward the good life. It requires usto ponder what the good life is, what conditions must be fulflled forindividuals to live it, and what it takes to create these conditions.

By tying the question of limits to human needsand requirements for their satisfaction, they neither demand asceti-cism or renunciation, nor pursue unspecifed moral suasion in termsof “we should consume less.” Rather, they highlight the necessity –diffcult to pursue but rich in participatory rewards – to jointly defnethe conditions necessary to live a good life, and the subsequent stepsnecessary to make such a good life possible for all individuals. By pro-viding freedom to pursue the good life in an ecologically and sociallyfrayed world, these limits offer the beneft of ensuring that all otherindividuals living now and into the future can do so as well.

Justice in the context of consumption corridorsmeans that every person deserves access to a defned minimum level ofecological and social resources necessary to be able to live a good life,solely because they are a human being (what scholars call a natural-law-based perspective on justice).

Embracing visions of a good life that go beyond those entailing high levels of material consumption is central to many pathways. Key drivers of the overexploitation of nature are the currently popular vision that a good life involves happiness generated through material consumption [leverage point 2] and the widely accepted notion that economic growth is the most important goal of society, with success based largely on income and demonstrated purchasing power (Brand & Wissen, 2012). However, as communities around the world show, a good quality of life can be achieved with significantly lower environmental impacts than is normal for many affluent social strata (Jackson, 2011; Røpke, 1999). Alternative relational conceptions of a good life with a lower material impact (i.e. those focusing on the quality and characteristics of human relationships, and harmonious relationships with non-human nature) might be promoted and sustained by political settings that provide the personal, material and social (interpersonal) conditions for a good life (such as infrastructure, access to health or anti-discrimination policies), while leaving to individuals the choice about their actual way of living (Jackson, 2011; Nussbaum, 2001, 2003). In particular, status or social recognition need not require high levels of consumption, even though in some societies, status is currently related to consumption (Røpke, 1999).

In this respect, relational notions of a good quality of life, such as ‘buen vivir’ from Latin America (D'Alisa, Demaria, & Kallis, 2014; Gudynas, 2011; Hopkins, 2008), may be key to achieving long-term sustainable outcomes