Library

By: Vasilis Kostakis, Chris Giotitsas, Christina Priavolou, Katerina Troullaki, Nikiforos Tsiouris

An emerging commons-oriented mode of production that combines globally accessible knowledge with distributed manufacturing has recently been presented as a better fit for sustainable degrowth and localisation, compared to incumbent practices. To tentatively test this potential we select the case of 3D printers. The production of 3D printers varies within a spectrum from proprietary and industri...

By: Mariam Abazeri

Degrowth has become a major topic of interdisciplinary scholarship and practice that critiques the ideology of growth, reimagining social and economic relations and measures of well-being outside economic rationality. While the movement engages with gender politics peripherally in coalition with feminist schools of thought and activist groups, e.g., the feminisms and degrowth alliance, I argue ...

By: Milena Büchs, Lina Brand-Correa, Daniel W O’Neill, Anna Brook, Petra Meier, Yannish Naik

Despite substantial attention within the fields of public and planetary health on developing an economic system that benefits both people's health and the environment, heterodox economic schools of thought have received little attention within these fields. Ecological economics is a school of thought with particular relevance to public and planetary health. In this article, we discuss implicati...

By: Katharina Richter

This thesis presents an inter-epistemic dialogue between degrowth and Buen Vivir/sumak kawsay (BV/sk), a Latin American postdevelopment paradigm. It contributes to nascent, yet rapidly growing debates around decolonising degrowth. As field of study and social movement, degrowth responds to two pressing crises: one, the accelerated destruction of the natural world; two, inequality in resource ac...

By: Dorine E. van Norren

It is generally assumed that ‘development’ is a universal concept, understood the same way in every culture. In Africa, progress is understood differently; human relations – including ancestors and future generations tied to the land – take precedence over development. The African concept of well-being is Ubuntu (I am a person through other persons), implemented in South Africa though truth and...

By: Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan

We need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars. Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalitie...

By: Benjamin K. Sovacool, Alexander Dunlap

What radical tactics might those seeking transformational action on climate or environmental sustainability undertake? What options are capable of stopping actors and institutions who already realize their actions and behavior may harm millions, degrade the biosphere, and contaminate the climate, but continue to do so, despite the scientific or moral reasons not to? This paper explores efforts ...

By: Laurence L. Delina

Supercharged climate activism seems to be now justified in light of continuing government climate myopia and entrenched fossil fuel interests, despite cascading climate change-related disasters. Reviewing the tactics of the climate action movement is timely since the ecological mess we are witnessing is fast becoming intense and frequent, at the same time that emissions are rapidly increasing. ...

By: Amaia Pérez Orozco

The Feminist Subversion of the Economy shows the urgent need to radically and democratically discuss what we mean by a dignified life and how we can organize to sustain life collectively. In the face of unending economic crises and climate catastrophe, we must consider, what does a dignified life look like? Feminist intellectual and activist Amaia Pérez Orozco powerfully and provocatively outl...

By: Max Koch

Degrowth thought and strategies suffer from a tension between viewing the state as incapable of initiating transformational change and making a political appeal to it to do precisely this via targeted eco-social policies. While a small number of academic papers has theoretically addressed this tension, there is a lack in research on the strategic implications arising from conceptualizations of ...

By: Anitra Nelson

What would a world without money look like? This book is a lively thought experiment that deepens our understanding of how money is the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social inequality today, arguing that it has to be abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a postcapitalist future. Grounded in historical debates about money, Anitra Nelson draws on a spectrum of po...

By: Constanza Hepp, Joëlle Saey-Volckrick, Joe Herbert, Andro Rilović, Carol Bardi

From the book 'Degrowth & Strategy: How to bring about social-ecological transformation'. Our chapter discusses who can be considered degrowth actors, and the predominant strategies these actors have utilised so far. Critically analysing these strategies and their shortcomings, we argue the need for greater structures within the degrowth networks in order to avoid perpetuating typical hiera...

By: Jon D. Erickson

In The Progress Illusion, Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything. Drawing on his own experience as a young economist inoculated in the 1980s era of “greed is good,” Erickson shows how pseudoscience came to dominate economic thought. He pokes holes in the conventional wisdom of neo-classical economics, illustrating how flawed theories about financial decision-making and maximizing efficiency ignore human psychology and morality. Most importantly, he demonstrates how that thinking shaped our politics and determined the course of American public policy. The result has been a system that perpetually concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, while depleting the natural resources on which economies are based.

By: Federico Savini

The theory – and practice – of establishing autonomy from the hegemony of growth is central to the imaginary of degrowth. Yet to envisage pathways towards a degrowth society, scholars need to explain how autonomy coalesces into autonomous institutions. This article addresses this institutional challenge of how to secure autonomy in the provision of collective, affordable and decommodified housi...

By: Rebecca Tunstall

This article builds on the concept of ‘degrowth’ to create an experimental, measurable definition of ‘housing degrowth’, which can be applied to the 99% of households in mainstream housing. Like ‘degrowth’, housing degrowth runs against housing policy which has assumed that more housing is good. The article explores whether measurement of housing degrowth is possible with existing data, and whe...

By: Susan Paulson, Eric Hirsch, Jonathan DeVore

During decades of ethnographic research in South America, we co-authors have observed men enacting care that extends be-yond humans to other animals, plants, earth, and water. We understand care to involve intimate actions that nurture, protect, and regenerate humans and other beings. Acts of interspecies care described below reveal expressions of masculine love involving tenderness and interconnection. After reflecting on methods for learning about care in ethno-graphic research, we share glimpses of Peruvian men planting and singing gratitude to the earth, and Brazilian men nurturing agroforests and expressing affection and concern for trees. Subsequent discussion explores broader political and economic struggles that either support these acts of care, or serve to instrumentalize social relations in pursuit of exploitation, extraction, and profit. A gender analysis illuminates conditions that may foster caring expressions of manliness, even amid forces encouraging violent models of masculinity. The article ends by inviting readers to draw inspiration from the cases described below to pursue caring paths and political struggles for healthier gender roles and human-environment relations.

By: Susan Paulson

This piece is part of the series “Reimagining economics for a carbon-constrained world”. It argues that economic growth measured in terms of GDP already contributes to environmental degradation and societal harm, and makes a case for the degrowth movement.

By: Federico Savini, António Ferreira, Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld

This book draws on a wide range of conceptual and empirical materials to identify and examine planning and policy approaches that move beyond the imperative of perpetual economic growth. It sketches out a path towards planning theories and practices that can break the cyclical process of urban expansion, crises, and recovery that negatively affect ecosystems and human lives.

By: Christopher Kennedy

The circular flow diagram, whether in its limited form in macroeconomics, or broader form in ecological economics, depicts a duality of flows – physical resources in one direction with financial transactions in the opposite. Biophysical models of the economy can be constructed based on the physical flows and their associated stocks. In previous work, I demonstrated how the accumulation of wealth – measured by the capital stock – can be established using a biophysical model. With capital, energy use, and the distribution of labour determined by biophysical economics, here I investigate the range of potential distributions of wealth – profits versus wages – that follow in the political economy. The analysis is conducted using a four-sector model of Great Britain's economy from 1760 to 1913, including agriculture, coal mining, construction & materials, and production of goods and services. Energy price is a key variable in the model, influencing the distribution of income between different sectors. Taking the price of coal at historically observed values, the distribution of total factor income per worker is plotted as a trade-off between annual wages and profits per worker for example years of 1761, 1817, and 1871. The plots reveal how possible alternative distributions of income might be achieved under different political-economic regimes, subject to the same biophysical constraints. Conclusions are framed in the context of the grand challenges faced by ecological economists of developing environmentally sustainable economies with a just and equitable sharing of resources.

By: Andrew Fanning, Jason Hickel, Dan O´Neill, Nicolas Roux

Previous research has shown that no country currently meets the basic needs of its residents at a level of resource use that could be sustainably extended to all people globally. Using the doughnut-shaped ‘safe and just space’ framework, we analyse the historical dynamics of 11 social indicators and 6 biophysical indicators across more than 140 countries from 1992 to 2015. We find that countries tend to transgress biophysical boundaries faster than they achieve social thresholds. The number of countries overshooting biophysical boundaries increased over the period from 32–55% to 50–66%, depending on the indicator. At the same time, the number of countries achieving social thresholds increased for five social indicators (in particular life expectancy and educational enrolment), decreased for two indicators (social support and equality) and showed little change for the remaining four indicators. We also calculate ‘business-as-usual’ projections to 2050, which suggest deep transformations are needed to safeguard human and planetary health. Current trends will only deepen the ecological crisis while failing to eliminate social shortfalls.