Library

By: Brototi Roy, Anke Schaffartzik

Coal is on the rise in India: despite the devasting impacts of the climate crisis, the awareness for land and forest rights, and political talk of a coal phase-out. In this article, we demonstrate that despite the renewables-led rhetoric, India is in the midst of a transition to (not away from) greater use of coal in its fossil energy system and in the electricity system in particular. We inv...

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.

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: Konstantin Stadler, Daniel Horen Greenford, Timothy Crownshaw, Corey Lesk, Damon Matthews

The tertiary (or 'service') sector is commonly identified as a relatively clean part of the economy. Accordingly, sustainable development policy routinely invokes 'tertiarization'—a shift from primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary sector—as a means of decoupling economic growth from environmental damages. However, this argument does not account for environmental impacts related to t...

By: Katharina Zimmermann, Paolo Graziano

Attention towards topics such as environmental pollution, climate change, or biodiversity has strongly increased in the last years. The struggles to balance market powers and ecological sustainability somehow evoke memories of the early days of European welfare states, when social protection emerged as a means to prevent industrial capitalism from disruptive social tensions due to excessive soc...