Degrowth-related items

Context

G. Kallis:

"The terms degrowth and post-growth are used here as synonyms, as used also in the five reviews themselves. Post-growth can be seen as an umbrella term that includes various approaches such as steady-state economics, wellbeing economics, doughnut economics and degrowth (Kallis et al. 2025). Where all these fields converge is on the need to study how economies can prosper without growth and achieve wellbeing without growth and within planetary boundaries. Degrowth is the more radical subset of post-growth studies, concerned with planning drastic reductions of resource use and moving beyond capitalist organization of economies. In terms of research questions, models and policy proposals, however, degrowth and other post-growth fields largely overlap.

A-growth, i.e. ignoring growth, is a third, normative option—i.e. a nation may opt for pursuing desirable environmental and social policies independent of their effect on GDP growth (Van den Bergh and Kallis 2012). No matter, however, whether GDP growth is ignored or not, there can only be two outcomes—either the social and environmental goals are met and GDP grows, in which case we have green growth, or GDP doesn’t grow, and then we have something akin to degrowth."

(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-026-01901-0#Sec5)

Resources

Key Articles

• The Matrix of Convivial Technology – Assessing technologies for degrowth. By Andrea Vetter. Journal of Cleaner Production. Volume 197, Part 2, 1 October 2018, Pages 1778-1786 [1]

• A critique of Degrowth by Wim Naude [2]

• The State of Degrowth Research. G. Kallis.

Key Books

• The Case for Degrowth. George Kallis et al. Polity Press, 2020 [3] : "a vision of wellbeing within planetary limits, and articulate the politics that can get us there, based on the defense and development of the commons".

• LESS IS MORE. How Degrowth Will Save the World. By Jason Hickel. LONDON: PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 2020 [4]

• Slow Down. The Degrowth Manifesto. Kohei Saito. Astra, [5]

Quotes

"Returning to climate change, it is in fact absolutely imperative that some categories of economic activity should now grow massively—those associated with the production and distribution of clean energy. Concurrently, the global fossil-fuel industry needs to contract massively—that is, to ‘de-grow’ relentlessly over the next forty or fifty years until it has virtually shut down. In my view, addressing these matters in terms of their specifics is more constructive in addressing climate change than presenting broad generalities about the nature of economic growth, positive or negative."

- Robert Pollin [6]

Degrowth vs Ecomodernism

"There have been two polarized responses to this crisis. One has been to argue that as the driving force of this crisis has been a form of endless economic growth – and as endless growth on a finite planet is clearly impossible–we have no choice but to put an end to this form of growth. As exponentially increasing carbon emissions have been driven by exponentially increasing material consumption and production, it’s only by putting an end to the latter that we can solve the former. Therefore, we have to bring the economy back in line with natural limits, and this requires a form of degrowth–a planned contraction of the economy so that it operates safely within planetary boundaries. That, in turn, will require vastly revised notions of prosperity and human flourishing.

The other has been the ecomodernist approach, arguing that technological innovation will allow us to decouple economic growth from an endlessly expanding material footprint–in particular, from continually increasing carbon emissions. Economic growth will, therefore, be able to continue while reducing environmental degradation. The key to doing so is by using technology to accelerate the efficiency of resource use, which will allow us to reduce the ecological and material impacts of human consumption and production. Therefore, the solution is to continue economic growth and intensify technological innovation. Doing so will largely permit industrial civilization to continue expanding on its current trajectory while reducing material intensity and solving ecological problems.

Both these perspectives offer some useful insights into the challenges ahead, and how we might overcome them. But both are also severely limited."

- Nafeez Ahmed [7]