Introduction
This introduction to degrowth briefly describes the aims, character, values and principles of degrowth along with some resources to check out to find out more about degrowth in theory, the degrowth movement and degrowth practices.
Degrowth as a Concept
Degrowth aims to reframe and recreate economies that respect Earth’s limits in order to achieve socio-political equity and ecological sustainability.
Degrowth advocates argue that we need to transform our everyday practices to respect and work with the fragile, limited, yet bountiful Earth on which we rely to exist.
The regenerative capacity of Earth needs to be restored and preserved. At the same time, everyone’s needs must be met, neither more nor less. In other words, we need enough, and enough is enough. So, degrowth is to growth as quality is to quantity.
Instead of monetary values and relations, central to growth, degrowth societies and economies would be oriented around ecological and social values.
Why ‘de’growth?
Degrowth evolved as a theoretical concept in the late twentieth century in the context of growth economies that have resulted in overproduction, overconsumption, and inappropriate production and consumption.
In the early twenty-first century, degrowth became an activist movement evolving from France, spreading through Europe, and then extending worldwide. Initially, activists targeted inappropriate developments such as airport construction and extensions, advertising, and promoted cycling.
Degrowth campaigns continue to share interests with numerous other movements struggling for social and ecological justice, for sustainability, for enhancing democracy, and for nonviolence.
But degrowth advocates have always pointed to ‘growth’ and ‘growth economies’ as the source of inequities and unsustainabilities. Degrowth is anti-systemic, anti-capitalist. As such, degrowth has become a holistic socio-ecological movement imagining a postcapitalism based on respecting our humanity and Earth. While certain personal changes can be made by individuals, degrowth requires collective transformation of all the institutions by which we live.
‘Degrowth’? A Defence
Many argue that the word ‘degrowth’ is off-putting, inclining people to think of austerity and poverty. Addressing such misunderstandings allows advocates to point out that such negative characteristics actually belong to growth economies, to capitalist cycles and dynamics.
Read the ‘de’ in degrowth similarly to its use in deconstruct, decolonise and demilitarise, rather than simply as decrease or diminish. Still, reducing inequity and ecological damage are degrowth aims.
Degrowth in Practice
Contributions to the degrowth movement take many forms, such as analyses and proposals for change, actions for change, critiques and refinements of the term and movement by sympathetic activist scholars, and advocating for change. Most degrowth activists and advocates make changes in their own practices to model or show degrowth in practice. These changes take personal and collective forms (Liegey and Nelson 2021: 49–85).
They chose to work as little as possible in and for the growth economy, putting most effort into living and creating degrowth economies. They aim to do ecologically and socially meaningful work, whether it is paid or unpaid (Andre Gorz (1999) has contributed to degrowth thinking).
They walk, ride bikes and take public transport such as renewable electric trains and trams rather than use socially and ecologically dangerous and wasteful transport such as fossil fuelled cars with necessarily tiny passenger loads.
They repair clothes, reuse materials, refashion, and give away, swap and pass on clothes. They renovate old buildings, preserving history and conserving nature. They self-build in collective ways using salvaged materials and simple tools that require the least non-human energy and little embodied energy. They self-provision in terms of food, and try to eat nutritious, locally organically grown food (Nelson and Edwards 2021). They pursue all these activities in as collective ways as possible.
Collective activities include developing and living in eco-collaborative housing such as ecologically-oriented joint households, cohousing, self-managed housing cooperatives or political squats. Productive organic community gardening and farming, community supported agriculture, and food cooperatives develop practitioners’ skills and enhance localised economies. They create maker labs and bike making, hiring and repairing collectives. Such activities are open to anyone wanting to try them and collectives are open to anyone who supports degrowth aims and wants to learn more. See for example, Cargonomia (Budapest) and Haus des Wandels (Germany).
Such collective activities often face challenges from governments in terms of mainstream regulations and competition from capitalist commerce and industry. For instance, cohousing communities, self-organised by their residents, are harder to establish because building and planning regulations cater for constructing housing as commodities for single, couple and family households. Collective ownership is considered suspect by banks, making borrowing difficult. As such, the degrowth movement and advocates develop campaigns and practical government policy proposals to permit and support such degrowth activities. See Nelson and Schneider (2018).
Yet another and more universal form of collective politicking by the degrowth movement involves decolonising our growth imaginaries, and sharing degrowth visions, imaginaries and transformational strategies to achieve them. Degrowth manifestos and proposals of platforms for degrowth are developed collectively.
Characterising Degrowth
Degrowth is distinctive within sustainability and justice movements due to a unique emphasis on growth as a driver of unsustainabilities and inequities. Degrowth is a very open movement in critical but engaged dialogue with many movements (Burkhart et al, 2020). Degrowth critiques and incorporates aspects of doughnut economics and circular economies — see the ‘degrowth doughnut’ (IPE, 2024) and ‘circular degrowth’ Savini, (2023f) — and Kohei Saito (2022) identifies ‘degrowth communism’ within Marx’s writing, developed in contemporary ways.
Degrowth is highly critical of green growth and green new deals in as much as transforming to renewable energies within growth economies implies massive environmental exploitation.
Degrowth argues for a radical reduction in production and consumption, greater citizen participation in politics, and more diversity, especially within ecological systems and landscapes, along with a flourishing of creativity, care, and commoning — using renewable energy and materials.
Degrowth ways of thinking about how we might live better imply distinctive concepts highlighting degrowth values. The degrowth vocabulary includes familiar words like ‘equity’ and ‘solidarity’, as well as more curious terms such as ‘frugal abundance’, ‘convivial technology’, ‘commoning’, ‘collective sufficiency’, ‘autonomy’ ‘glocalism’, and ‘decolonisation of the imaginary’. Here we discuss some such terms characterising degrowth approaches.
Degrowth Approaches
Autonomy
Within degrowth ‘autonomy’ refers to maximising the political rights, authority and agency of people to make decisions and act on them along principles of subsidiarity and direct power, with full regard to social and ecological values and limits. In theoretical and ideal senses, this concept draws from the works by thinkers such as Cornelius Castoriadis’ The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987 [1975 in French]), John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (2002) and Murray Bookchin’s Toward an Ecological Society (1980).
In practical ways, it means co-governing using horizontal and sociocratic techniques, emphasising power with and power to (rather than power over). Living examples are forms developed by de facto autonomous regions of Zapatista communities centred on Chiapas (Mexico) (Rebril 2020) and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) or Rojava — see North and East Syria Solidarity (NESS) site. Activists and practitioners apply the principle of autonomy to maximise agency in everyday life, for instance in local (municipal) politicking. See Savini (2023m) for a discussion and practical, housing, case study.
Caring and Care Economies
Caring — empathising with, nurturing, supporting, servicing and loving — is a central approach to all activities and relations within degrowth.
Here the concept of care is not confined to ‘care work’ or the ‘care sector’ but characterises all activities and relations in an holistic care economy, such as self-provisioning by growing and harvesting, making things and educating people, effectively applying Tronto’s (1993) ‘caring about’, ‘care-giving’, ‘care-receiving’, ‘taking care of’ and ‘caring with’ (Pungas 2021). See too, Dengler and Lang (2022).
Commoning
Commoning is a central institution in a degrowth economy combining shared use and benefit, responsibility for, and co-governance of shared activities. Collective governance, care, and use of land and other means of life, is in stark contrast to private ownership, markets and state governance.
Co-governance emphasises participatory power-with and power-to, following principles of equality and justice, transparency and accountability, and rotating responsibilities. See Dengler and Lang (2022), and Savini (2023m) for commoning in practice in a case study.
Conviviality, Convivial tools and Convivial Technology
The degrowth movement has a ‘convivial’ approach to relation(ship)s and activities. This approach extends popular understandings of the word, derived from the Latin convivere (literally living together), as mutually friendly relations and simple, slow and enjoyable activities of everyday life, such as long slow communal meals.
The concept of ‘convivial tools’ was developed by philosopher priest and social critic Ivan Illich in his Tools for Conviviality (1973), and ‘convivial technology’ by the German degrowth activist scholar Andrea Vetter (2018). Here convivial is applied to mean user-friendly devices and techniques that are easy to make, easy to understand in terms of how they work, and easily repaired.
Convivial tools and technologies are ecologically efficient in terms of their creation and use, and appropriate in their natural and cultural environments. All affected people — rather than experts, those with money, or technocrats — decide which tools, technologies and techniques to adopt or adapt for whatever purpose applying social and ecological perspectives and values.
Decolonisation of the Imaginary
The process of deconstructing and freeing oneself from the capitalist concept of ‘growth’ as economies destructive of human and more than human nature producing ever-expanding numbers of commodities on the pattern of money-making-more-money and profits. Growth economies colonise not just in material ways but also in emotional, philosophical, cultural, social and psychological ways. We must go beyond growth to realise degrowth. See Castoriadis (2005), Liegey (2012) and Liegey and Nelson (2021: 20–48, 164–167, 169)
Frugal Abundance
Frugal abundance is counterposed to the simultaneous over-abundance and underconsumption typical of capitalist growth and inequities. Drawing on concepts such as Marshall Sahlins’ ‘original affluent society’ the degrowth movement advocates for enjoying the cultural, emotional and spiritual richness of a simple life fulfilling one’s necessities through collective sufficiency respecting Earth’s limits. See Nelson and Liegey (undated).
Glocalism
Applying universal, global, principles in locales.
Horizontalism
Refers to horizontalist relations and organisation, i.e. mutually respectful, non-hierarchical relations; sharing power as in power-with and power-to; based in enabling sharing of skills and knowledge; using processes such as assemblies, networks and self-organising working groups with accountability and transparency in all their activities and relations.
Sufficiency: Collective Sufficiency
Sufficiency relates to provisioning basic needs, essentials for life. Degrowth encourages self-provisioning performed collectively, co-governing, working together or as delegated, and sharing the output on the basis of satisfying everyone’s basic or essential needs — a caring commons economy. German feminists pioneered work in the area of subsistence economies (Mies 1999).
Debates in Degrowth
Even if degrowth activists, advocates and scholars are anti-capitalist, they debate how, and how far, the current system needs to change to achieve equitable and ecologically sustainable practices enabling us to live within Earth’s limits.
Key Strategies
Similar to other social and ecological movements, degrowth radicals tend to emphasise grassroots politicking while reformists suggest ‘top-down’ policies. Many support ‘shooting in all directions’, allowing for different activists to advocate diverse strategies especially in this time of transformation. Others take a more direct approach arguing that our challenges are too great and require such a swift response to avoid ecological and social collapse that we must target changes to our end-goal vision of degrowth.
Grassroots activities and activists frame degrowth in terms of achieving collective sufficiency locally. They argue that the most ecologically and socially efficient ways of meeting our essential needs demand self-organising communities working with Earth as in commoning and producing as close as possible to our collective product’s end-use.
Top-down policies assume that capitalist states and markets are simply vehicles for, or institutions amenable to, transformation. Such strategic questions and debates riddle Leftist politics more generally.
Majority and Minority World Perspectives
A popular misunderstanding of Global North–South dynamics supported by mainstream economists, liberal and conservative analysts is that poverty is only alleviated by economic growth. Yet, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Olivier De Schutter has pointed towards degrowth as the solution to poverty. In The Guardian 20 March 2023, he states that ‘the increase of GDP (or total economic output measured in monetary value) per capita, is not the panacea it is made out to be. It is quite conceivable that as monetary wealth increases in low-income countries, the situation of specific groups within them will actually get worse.’ Moreover:
For people in poverty, a world in which a large range of things required for a decent life must be paid for, and can be bought by the highest bidder, is much worse than a world in which such things are treated as “commons”, democratically governed and allocated on the basis of need, or provided by the state as part of its duty to guarantee the welfare of its population. – Olivier De Schutter
Nevertheless, tensions between Global North and South perspectives on degrowth centre on the structural fact that unjust and exploitative ecological impacts and socio-political inequities of capitalist dynamics are greater in the Global South than in the Global North. While degrowth has a clear role in countries where over-consumption is common — where average standards of living and incomes are higher than in Global South countries — degrowth messages are not as broadly applicable in the South. Moreover, in the latter, degrowth requires framing within struggles such as (de)colonisation and environmental (in)justice movements (Richter 2023). For instance, everyday practices of Indigenous and other community-based movements within Latin America continue resistances that prefigure degrowth ideas and practices (Barkin 2022).
Global South activists, whose histories are replete with rich philosophical and cultural traditions, tend to criticise the much more recent term ‘degrowth’ as Western, European and Eurocentric (Richter 2023). Meanwhile Global North degrowth activists tend to embrace concepts such as buen vivir, Sumak Kawsay or buenos convivires (‘the good life’ or ‘living well together’) in short ‘persons living in harmony with themselves, with other people in the community, harmony within the community and between humans and nature’ (Taibo 2015).
A range of similar yet distinctive terms can be found on different continents in various languages, for instance see Kothari (2017) on ecoswaraj and Barker (2022) on comunalidad. Those in the Global South express concern that absorption of such ideas into the degrowth literature risks the integrity and significance of their traditions and contemporary forms of resistance being misunderstood and subsumed — even made obsolete — in the process.
Certain authors, such as Kothari (2017), Dengler and Seebacher (2019), Adloff et al. (2021) and Richter (2023) pay constructive attention to such tensions. In analysing and responding to socio-political, economic and ecological injustices generated at a global scale, Ulrich Brand and Marcus Wissen (2021) coin the concept ‘imperial mode of living’ to refer to standards of living in the Global North that arise from and regenerate poor social and ecological conditions in the Global South.
Brand and Wissen argue that Global North standards of living and deleterious terms of trade result from complex institutional and structural factors not from individual decision-making. Their concept was developed to raise consciousness of and to facilitate agency to address international inequity, exclusion, and unsustainability expressed in complicated contemporary crises — from climate heating to absolute poverty and failed democracies.
Brand and Missen encapsulate many of the alternative futures pursued by degrowth activists and scholars (including holistic feminist visions of a commoning care economy) within the term ‘solidarity mode of living’, where activities and strategies promise global alliances for addressing economic, political and ecological crises (Brand and Wissen, 2021).
Democracy and Planning
Representative democracy based on electoral majorities as in current capitalist states is broadly critiqued by those in the degrowth movement as too narrow, corrupt, and market-oriented to be genuinely representative. Moreover inequities and marginalisation entrench exclusion of the disadvantaged, especially those on low incomes. Even advocates and activists who propose top-down degrowth policies predicated on states and markets demand progressive forms of participatory and deliberative democracy.
Moreover, from grassroots perspectives, degrowth aims to deliver quality of life, to heal and regenerate Earth, with collaborative and enabling power-sharing, emphasising power-to and power-with — rather than power-over as is characteristic of capitalist states and markets.
This translates to direct, and highly participatory forms of, democracy following the principle of subsidiarity. For example, anarchist streams focus on municipalist politics and a postmonetary stream see democratic rights implying production on demand rather than for trade (Nelson, 2022). (For the latter, demand is collectively designed and planned, collectively produced and monitored and then distributed on the basis of pre-planned orders.)
Feminist Perspectives
Feminist perspectives within degrowth emphasise women’s concerns and have developed particular approaches to degrowth, such as economies of care and commoning (Dengler and Lang 2022). The Feminism(s) and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA, 2016–) promotes dialogue and argues for an acknowledgement of ‘the gendered nature of injustices as well as the role gender plays in every aspect of our lives because of its embedment in the family, the workplace, communities, the state, as well as in sexuality, language, and culture’ (FaDA 2020). See Twitter handle to connect, follow and join elists and so on — @fem_degrowth
Summary
Given current ecological, economic and socio-political crises, degrowth advocates, activists and practitioners highlight socio-political and ecological values, relations and principles, rather than monetary ones central to growth driven economies.
Working within the limits of Earth and people, and celebrating the potential of both, they envisage a substantive democracy, direct action by people, with power distributed on the basis of subsidiarity and exercised in ways highly respectful of Earth, the source of human being.
