ORIGINAL PAPER A Map Is Not a Territory—Making Research More Helpful for Sustainable Consumption Policy Eva Heiskanen & Oksana Mont & Kate Power Received: 13 June 2013 /Accepted: 4 November 2013 / Published online: 21 November 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract The need to make consumption patterns more sustainable is widely acknowledged, yet effective policies for sustainable consumption are lacking. This article examines Nordic policy makers' views on why sustainable consumption research is difficult to apply in policy practice. We draw on the knowledge brokering literature to outline how the challenges of knowledge utilization in policy are connected to knowledge communication practices and to the types and scales of policy problems. Our empirical material is based on in-depth interviews with Nordic civil servants working with sustainable consumption issues. Our findings identify problems in sustainable consumption policy that are well documented in other fields, such as policy makers' lack of time and the inconclusiveness of research findings. However, we also identify more fundamental problems, which relate to administrative fragmentation and to the status of social science in policy making, as well as to the linear model of knowledge use in policy making in which administrators are forced to serve as knowledge brokers between researchers and policy makers. Our research suggests that better forms of knowledge dissem- ination are not sufficient to overcome these problems. New forms of knowledge co-production are needed, in which researchers, administrators, politicians, and other stakeholders work together to solve real-life problems and build up a shared knowledge community. We conclude by highlighting the implications for researchers aiming to promote change toward more sustainable consumption patterns. Keywords Sustainable consumption . Policy . Research . Knowledge brokering Changes in consumption patterns and levels offer a huge potential to influence global resource use and environmental impacts, and hence solve or ameliorate some of the “wicked problems” J Consum Policy (2014) 37:27–44 DOI 10.1007/s10603-013-9247-8 E. Heiskanen (*) National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: Eva.Heiskanen@ncrc.fi O. Mont International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden K. Power Copenhagen Resource Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark