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By: Susan Paulson

While the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals direct all countries to reduce environmental impacts, governments and businesses continue to promise and prioritize economic growth. Degrowth theory draws on the science of thermodynamics to illuminate systemic impacts of this growth: societal metabolisms transform material and energy into goods and services in processes that convert low entropy stocks of resources into high entropy waste. As accelerating metabolisms lead to more and more anthropogenic entropy, with outcomes ranging from imbalanced nutrient and hydrological cycles to climate break-down, a growing network of scholars and activists work toward degrowth objectives: to reduce global energy and resource use, curb obsessions with growth, and reorient societies around equitable wellbeing and resilience.

By: Susan Paulson

In varied contexts around the world, groups and communities forging different kinds of futures are challenging the universal desirability of development toward ever-greater production, consumption, and ecological footprints. This article is about learning from some of those pathways in order to broaden horizons for conversations about degrowth beyond Europe where they first gained traction. It reviews empirical research on wide-ranging phenomena, and documents processes of mutual learning among researchers from varied cultural, linguistic, and national backgrounds. Affirmative political ecology is appraised as a framework for analyzing relations among differently shaped phenomena operating in different contexts and on various scales, and for supporting life-affirming efforts to co-construct worlds that might be healthier and happier for more people and other nature. Pluriverse is explored as an epistemological stance and a dialogic method to enhance appreciation of multiple ways of knowing and being in the world, and to foster enquiry that decenters models of science and development that have been portrayed as universally true and good. After conceptualizing key ideas and reflecting on learning processes and challenges among a network of 40 collaborators, the text turns to some movements that I have engaged in Latin America in search of insights to support ongoing development of thought and practice with degrowth.

By: Susan Paulson

This article describes four initiatives in which degrowth and feminist activists mobilize collaborative analysis and communication in efforts to influence paths through and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. The efforts work together to identify and advance actions that help our societies to address and emerge from this global disaster in more humane, just, and sustainable ways. We join other social movements in asking: How can we seize opportunities to build healthier values, social arrangements, and policies? To slow down the rush toward future disasters? Highlight is on caring and commoning as features of desired worlds ahead, and as means and methods in our own organization and activism

By: Alexander Dunlap, Hannah Kass

This article explores the Defend the Atlanta Forest struggle and discusses how this fight relates to degrowth.

By: Susan Paulson

Pauslon explores her own engagement with the topic of strategy, and how her reflections on the topic changed through various engagements over the last years. In this open and honest sharing, Paulson acknowledges her blindspots but also illuminates new insights for fellow degrowthers.

By: The degrowth.info international editorial team

As the world around us changes, so do the ambitions of degrowth.info. In this post, we share some reflections on the past year of our collective and set out new directions for 2023.

By: Julian Willming

In 2022, art collectives and curators of documenta15 restructured the practice of producing and presenting art: away from classicism and economical individualism towards a culture of commoning knowledge, sufficiency and embodied community. Is documenta15 thus a degrowth art event? Yes, to some extent. The way it failed demonstrates an important lesson for the degrowth movement.

By: Dario Berrio-Gil, Manpreet Rajput

The contested construction of a new port raises significant ecological and social concerns on the Pacific coast of Colombia.

By: Riina Bhatia

Redefining happiness and wellbeing to ensure a sustainable future.

By: Jamie Tyberg

In the April 2022 issue of Monthly Review, degrowth scholars laid out a vision for an ecosocialist degrowth. They reasoned that, fundamentally, degrowth “requires the social appropriation of the main means of (re)production and a democratic, participatory, ecological planning.”(1) That, only when “people, at various scales, exercise direct power democratically,” can we determine “what is to be produced, how, and how much; how to remunerate different kinds of productive and reproductive activities that sustain us and the planet.”(2) In other words, self-government is a necessity to realize the idea of degrowth.

By: The EmboDegrowth Lab

The language of a ‘degrowth transition’ is useful for mobilizing people and their collectives around policy objectives, but it retains an image of expert political actors who will ‘transition’ us from one state to another. We offer an alternative theory of change that aims for a ‘degrowth transformation’, or deeper shifts in ideology and daily practices. It will not be enough to solely focus on changing policies and institutions; it is essential to embody the transition and its deeper meanings in a personal way as well.

By: Clare Hollins

Time, as we know it, is largely a social construct. With so much of our autonomy taken away by the pandemic—particularly our freedom of movement and, for many of us, ability to earn an income— we’ve had to do what humans always do and make do with what we have, get creative, and focus our time and energy on the reciprocal networks of care that are so essential for our survival.

By: Corinna Dengler, Giacomo D'Alisa

The third annual Global Degrowth Day on the theme of care will take place on 5th June 2021. Here, Corinna Dengler and Giacomo D'Alisa expand on the centrality of care to degrowth. Degrowth is an activist and political claim supported by academic research that aims at creating global human well-being within planetary boundaries. Degrowth problematizes interlinking systems of domination ...

By: Tom Smith

In November 2021, more than 4.5 million people voluntarily left their jobs in the US, the highest number since records began. Popularly known as the ‘Great Resignation’, the ongoing rejection of work-as-we-knew-it may not be a social movement in the normal sense of the term, but it is certainly a sign of rolling social upheaval. The increasing bargaining power of labour in the Covid economy, an...

By: Barbara Magalhães Teixeira

What is the potential role of degrowth and buen vivir in addressing underdevelopment and conflict in the Global South? Underdevelopment and conflict are often portrayed as the most important challenges for countries in the Global South. Not only are they important, but they are also related....

By: Javier Lloveras, Adam Marshall

What is the role of ‘sense of place’ discourses in anti-fracking struggles and can the degrowth movement learn anything from them? To understand the role of place in socio-ecological struggles it is important to move beyond the conventional view whereby places are reduced to physical locations. Instead, space becomes a place when actors ascribe physical locations with specific meanings, experiences, memories, emotions, and symbolic value. Human geographers refer to these socially constructed aspects of place as sense of place, which form the basis of collective (political) identities, cultures and practices.

By: Sofia Getzin

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is the educational stream of the sustainability discourse. One rather critical component of ESD has a lot in common with the degrowth discourse. Nevertheless, ESD has blind spots that prevent it from effectively contributing to socio-ecological transformations. Key points from the degrowth discourse could help making a degrowth-informed ESD an active part of positive socio-ecological transformations.

By: Robert J. Gordon

Subtitle: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War The publisher: In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectanc...

By: Christoph Sanders

Aus dem Text: Darüber hinaus sind aber auch kulturelle und psycho-soziale Faktoren für die Trägheit unserer Lebenswelt verantwortlich. Damit sind tief verinnerlichte Vorstellungen von einem guten Leben und Haltungen gemeint, die unser Handeln auf Wachstum und Steigerung ausrichten, der Sozialpsychologe Harald Welzer bezeichnet sie als „mentale Infrastrukturen des Wachstums“. (1) W...

By: Al Bartlett

Professor Bartlett has given his celebrated one-hour lecture, "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101" over 1,742 times times to audiences with an average attendance of 80 in the United States and world-wide. His audiences have ranged from junior high school and college students to corporate executives and scientists, and to congressional staffs. He first gave the talk in Septemb...