Library

By: Giorgos Kallis, Tilman Hartley

By: Erica Jung, Jamie Tyberg

By: Federico Savini

Abstract: Over the last decade, degrowth has offered a concrete alternative to eco-modernization, projecting a society emancipated from the environmentally destructive imperative of competition and consumption. Urban development is the motor of economic growth; cities are therefore prime sites of intervention for degrowth activists. Nevertheless, the planning processes that drive urban develop...

By: Giorgos Kallis, Riccardo Mastini, Jason Hickel

The IPCC warns that in order to keep global warming under 1.5°, global emissions must be cut to zero by 2050. Policymakers and scholars debate how best to decarbonise the energy system, and what socio-economic changes might be necessary. Here we review the strengths, weaknesses, and synergies of two prominent climate change mitigation narratives: the Green New Deal and degrowth. Green New Dea...

By: Lukas Hardt, Peter G. Taylor, Timothy J. Foxon, John Barret

In order to avoid environmental catastrophe we need to move to a post-growth economy that can deliver rapid reductions in environmental impacts and improve well-being, independent of GDP growth. Such a move will entail considerable structural change in the economy, implying different goals and strategies for different economic sectors. So far there are no systematic approaches for identif...

By: Sonja Hennen

As the current default indicator for economic and social ‘progress’, GDP is the most broadly established measure of a country’s economic performance relative to that of other countries. Conceived as a tool to measure economic quantity, GDP is widely used to assess economic quality, although it ignores a range of vital economic activities, most notably care work. On top of that, the race for GDP growth has dire consequences for the social fabric of societies and increases pressure on the earth’s ecosystems. Is it adequate then to argue that GDP-centeredness perpetuates interdependent systems of disadvantages and injustices?

By: Yurii Mielkov

The article is dedicated to analyzing the philosophical and educational grounds for the sustainable development of humankind. The growth of human civilization is already recognized to have its strict natural limits, and that has resulted in the formulation of the concept of sustainable development as a strategy for the future of humankind. However, there is some discrepancy noted in the concept...

By: Jens Mayer

Was haben systematische Steuervermeidung durch sämtliche DAX-Konzerne, Josef Ackermanns Geburtstagsfeier im Kanzlerinnenamt oder die Legalität von Hochfrequenzhandel und Schattenbanken mit „sozialer Marktwirtschaft“ noch zu tun? Jens Mayer legt zunächst in der Analyse den Finger in die Wunde der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft, die nur noch zum Teil als Realität existiert, danach skizziert er konkrete...

By: Marie-Jo Ouimet, Pier-Luc Turcotte, Louis-Charles Rainville, Yves-Marie Abraham, David Kaiser, Icoquih Badillo-Amberg

The climate crisis represents the biggest public health threat of our time. It interacts with the rising inequalities, chronic diseases and mental illness widely associated with our dominant economic system. Though degrowth and public health approaches differ, both share common values. The former proposes a new paradigm intended to halt the destruction of life-supporting systems by infinite eco...

By: Beth Stratford

Ecological economists aim to transform our economic institutions so that society can flourish within planetary boundaries. The central message of this article is that private rent extraction forms a key barrier to the realisation of that goal. I define rent as an economic reward which is sustained through control of assets that cannot be quickly and widely replicated, and which exceeds propo...

By: Franklin Obeng-Odoom

In the last two hundred years, the earth has increasingly become the private property of a few classes, races, transnational corporations, and nations. Repeated claims about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "crisis of capitalism" have done little to explain this concentration of land, encourage solution-building to solve resource depletion, or address our current socio-ecological crisis...

By: Lucy Ford, Gabriela Kuetting

The Global Environmental Politics literature tends to focus on institutional and governance frameworks as the solution to global environmental problems rather than on the systemic constraints that limit the potential effectiveness of governance efforts. Part of the problem with institutional frameworks to reform global environmental governance is insufficient attention paid to deeper structural...

By: Luigi Pellizzoni

Prefigurative mobilizations replace protest with direct action, means and ends becoming ideally one and the same. Analytically this entails a two-step movement: first, subtraction (withdrawal) from some arrangement; second, affirmation of an alternative. Both positive and critical assessments focus on the strength or lack of affirmativeness. However, as Foucault and governmentality studies have...

By: Dorothea Elena Schoppek

Capitalism is often modernised and stabilised by its very critics. Gramsci called this paradox a ‘passive revolution’. What are the pitfalls through which critique becomes absorbed? This question is taken up using a Cultural Political Economy approach for analysing the resistant potential of ‘degrowth discourses’ against the neoliberal hegemony. Degrowth advocates an economy without growth in o...

By: Silvia Federici

By: Vincent Liegey, Anitra Nelson

A sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism, and the degrowth movement is bursting into the mainstream. As climate catastrophe looms closer, people are eager to learn what degrowth is about, and whether we can save the planet by changing how we live. This book is an introduction to the movement. As politicians and corporations obsess over growth objectives, the degrowth movement dema...

By: Joëlle Saey-Volckrick

The phenomenon of the rebound effect has been known for decades now, yet it is very much absent from resource efficiency policies. One of the reasons is that there is a plethora of different estimates for the rebound effect, depending not only on the country and the sector studied but also on the level and type of rebound effect addressed. This chapter aims, in a first step, at enhancing the th...

By: Philipp K. Wegerer, Monica Nadegger

Resistance against tourism development has become a key analytical domain among tourism researchers. Yet, little attention has been paid to understanding online resistance against tourism development as a discursive phenomenon. This inquiry provides a discourse analytical study regarding an online petition against a large-scale infrastructure project in the Austrian Alps. Employing an analytica...