Library

By: Denis de Bernardy

By: Alf Hornborg

By: Karl Krähmer

By: Anitra Nelson

By: Jorge Garcia-Arias, Julia Schöneberg

By: Wendy Harcourt

As we look back on 2020 we see how Covid-19 has made it starkly clear to all of us that globally something is deeply, systemically wrong. As Arundhati Roy stated a portal has opened that demands we change our lives. Those of us cocooned at home working on zoomland, or those of us struggling with

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: Hubert Buch-Hansen, Iana Nesterova

Degrowth scholarship has enjoyed considerable momentum in recent times, resulting in a growing, diverse and vibrant field of research. Against this background, it becomes pertinent to reflect on the nature of degrowth science and on the philosophical assumptions underpinning it. Advocates of the degrowth perspective have so far largely abstained from engaging in such reflections and have yet to...

By: Max Koch, Jayeon Lindellee, Johanna Alkan Olsson

Are there indications for the neoliberal hegemony in economy and society to come to an end? Are people already imagining a future within environmental limits and beyond the growth imperative? Theoretically, building upon Marx and Bourdieu, we reconstruct the ideological impact that capitalism, in general, and neoliberalism, in particular, has on the ways we think, feel and make sense of our env...

By: Matthew Burke, Kaitlin Kish, Sophia R. Sanniti, Dave Mallery, Gabriel Yahya Haage, Rigo Melgar-Melgar, Christopher Orr, Nina L. Smolyar, Jolyon Larson

Ecological economics and systems theory have a long-standing history. As a foregrounding metatheoretical framework, systems thinking deepens socio-ecological acuity through comprehensive models of complex relationships between social and biophysical systems. However, critical and soft systems are often overlooked, necessitating a framework for “critical pluralism,” similar to that used by syste...

By: Emille Boulot, Joshua Sterlin

Environmental law remains grounded in a ‘one-world world’ paradigm. This ontological structure asserts that, regardless of variation in world-construing, all beings occupy one ‘real’ world of discrete entities. The resulting legal system is viewed as an independent set of norms and procedures regulating the ‘human’ use of the ‘environment’ by specifying allowable harm rather than adjudicating o...

By: Katharina Richter

This thesis presents an inter-epistemic dialogue between degrowth and Buen Vivir/sumak kawsay (BV/sk), a Latin American postdevelopment paradigm. It contributes to nascent, yet rapidly growing debates around decolonising degrowth. As field of study and social movement, degrowth responds to two pressing crises: one, the accelerated destruction of the natural world; two, inequality in resource ac...

By: Sarah Koller

This article explores the existential conditions for a transition towards socioeconomic degrowth through an analysis of a paradigm shift between two extreme polarities of socio-ecological positioning: the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) and the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP). It is suggested that the transition from one to the other – understood as the first collective step towards degrowth – re...

By: Clive L. Spash, Frédéric Hache

The Dasgupta Review is the latest attempt at justifying financialisation of Nature, but also much more. It represents a high point in applying concepts of capital and wealth accumulation comprehensively to all aspects of human and non-human existence. Unravelling the flaws in the arguments, contradictions and underlying motives requires both understand of and cutting through the specialist lang...

By: Jason Hickel, Huzaifa Zoomkawala, Dylan Sullivan

This paper quantifies drain from the global South through unequal exchange since 1960. According to our primary method, which relies on exchange-rate differentials, we find that in the most recent year of data the global North (‘advanced economies’) appropriated from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion in Northern prices — enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over. Over the whole period...

By: Clive L. Spash

The problematic conceptualisation of Nature has led confusion and failure to relate to reality. Some merge Nature into society creating a hybrid concept that denies the existence of anything but that which is human controlled or influenced, a position popular amongst Promethians of the Anthropocene. Strong social constructionism also dissolves Nature into the human as evident in some stands of ...

By: Sam Butler-Sloss, Marc Beckmann

The planetary emergency is an intellectual and humanitarian challenge that urgently warrants a significant amount of research attention from the economics profession. Is this happening? To answer this question, we assess the number of articles in the top 300 economics journals that are about either (a) climate change and/or (b) natural capital, ecosystem services or biodiversity (NEB). We find ...

By: Lynda Collins

This book sets out the necessary components of any constitution that could be considered "ecological" in nature. In particular, it argues that an ecological constitution is one that codifies the following key principles, at a minimum: the principle of sustainability; intergenerational equity and the public trust doctrine; environmental human rights; rights of nature; the precautionary principle...

By: Jason Hickel

Degrowth calls for rich nations to scale down throughput to sustainable levels, reducing aggregate energy use to enable a sufficiently rapid transition to renewables, and reducing aggregate resource use to reverse ecological breakdown. This demand is not just about ecology; rather, it is rooted in anti-colonial principles. Degrowth scholars and activists explicitly recognize the reality of ecol...