Technological pipe dreams and the fixation on perpetual growth have prevented effective climate policies for decades "Happiness does not pay pensions", said the Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. The statement aimed to criticize the idea of a “post-growth” or “degrowth” society, which has received increasing attention in light of the climate crisis....
Growth-critical authors and advocates of a post-growth society are often criticized on the grounds that some of their arguments appear open to appropriation by authoritarian nationalist and nativist racist forces. As such objections are often made in a polemical and overly generalised manner, often ultimately aiming to delegitimize growth-critical ideas as a whole, those being criticised often ...
The debates around post-growth transitions to just socio-ecological futures - while undoubtedly variegated - all emphasize that such a transition will involve a fundamental change in the way we organize economic relations and processes. At a first glance, this implies both a nominal and a structural, change with corresponding shifts in production, labor and consumption patterns. Whereas nominal...