Library

By: Anitra Nelson, Ferne Edwards

This collection breaks new ground by investigating applications of degrowth in a range of geographic, practical and theoretical contexts along the food chain. Degrowth challenges growth and advocates for everyday practices that limit socio-metabolic energy and material flows within planetary constraints. As such, the editors intend to map possibilities for food for degrowth to become establishe...

By: Rasa Pranskünienė, Dalia Perkumienė

This chapter discusses the topic of freedom of movement from the point of view of tourism and degrowth. The study analyses different scientific and legal sources to give precise answers to three questions that will make it possible to rethink the meaning of freedom of movement in tourism: (a) how are degrowth and freedom of movement interpreted in modern tourism?; (b) how is freedom of movement...

By: Brendan Canavan

This chapter identifies several negative social, cultural and environmental impacts brought about by degrowth of tourism on the Isle of Man, UK. It is pointed out that although the local economy has successfully transitioned to new industries, mainly offering financial services to the international wealthy and global business, the vernacular architecture, community facilities and natural landsc...

By: Pascal Mayer

This chapter presents the results of in-depth observations and interviews of locals and tourists in the Greek island of Gavdos during 2018 and 2019 in an attempt to advance the study on antinomian travellers. The study analysed the way that tourists, the majority being regulars, used to live nude under cedar trees scattered on the beaches, the so-called kavatzas. The study remarks that the prof...

By: Miriam Lang, Corinna Dengler

This paper addresses the question of how to organize care in degrowth societies that call for social and ecological sustainability, as well as gender and environmental justice, without prioritizing one over the other. By building on degrowth scholarship, feminist economics, the commons, and decolonial feminisms, we rebut the strategy of shifting yet more unpaid care work to the monetized econom...

By: Susan Paulson

Rather than glorify or condemn types of technology, this commentary pursues questions about sociocultural systems that co-evolve with technology and that shape its purposes and impacts. I highlight attention among degrowth advocates to political economies that generate techno-environmental phenomena, noting participant efforts to respond to ecosocial problems by changing their own societies with attention to power and justice. In contrast, ecomodernist reliance on an authoritative voice unmarked by race/class/gender/nationality to promote global technical plans leads me to interrogate the role that unacknowledged identities may play in motivating the deployment of techno-fixes rather than sociopolitical transformation. Conclusions raise questions about a third way, ecosocialism, that brings modernist faith in largescale industrial technology together with degrowth commitment to systemic change toward more equitable and resilient worlds. Keywords: Degrowth, Ecomodernism, Decolonial, Gender, Racialization

By: Gareth Dale, Josh Moos

By: Gareth Dale, Josh Moos

By: Barbara Magalhães Teixeira

A condition of underdevelopment has marked the nations of the Global South since the Second World War. The search for development and for economic growth has made countries in the Global South dependent on global markets and international investment, and have made their environment and nature hostage to capitalist exploration. The process of development and of economic growth, coupled with the history of colonization and dependency present violent processes and structures that are source to conflict and instability all over the Global South. This article critically assesses the relationsh ip between underdevelopment and the exploitation of the environment in the Global South and the violent outcomes that it reproduces. It finds that conflict and violence are inherent to the capitalist model of development, instead of anomalies to the system. Building from the field of critical development and decolonial studies, this article proposes ways to overcome dependency to extractivism by looking at the alternatives ofanti-extractivism, degrowth and buen vivirto free both people and the planet.

By: Isabelle Brockman, Vincent Liegey

Déterminer s’il est encore possible et souhaitable d’appuyer sur l’accélérateur de l’économie mondiale est aujourd’hui une question majeure. Concilier la préservation de la planète et la course à la croissance avec le développement durable ne relève pas de l’évidence, et dire de la décroissance qu’elle ne peut que mener à la récession, à l’anarchie et à la fin de toute innovation est au contraire trop simpliste. Pour démêler le vrai du faux, le chercheur expert sur la décroissance Vincent Liegey résume les vrais ordres de grandeur et explique les notions clés pour permettre à chacun de se saisir de ce sujet clivant et d’en débattre, dans toute sa complexité.

By: Erica Jung, Jamie Tyberg

By: Norbert Nicoll

Die „Grenzen des Wachstums“ wurden 1972 zu dem Umweltbuch des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wo stehen wir heute? Norbert Nicoll liefert eine reichhaltige, kritische Darstellung der kapitalistischen Wachstumsidee. Er macht anschaulich, wie diese historisch entstanden ist, wie sie einen kleinen Teil Privilegierter reich gemacht hat und uns nun in eine Klima-, Energie- und Ressourcenkrise führt. In einer Tour de Force bringt er uns Fakten aus Ökologie, Ökonomie, Soziologie, Geologie, Geschichts- und Politikwissenschaft nahe. Er gewinnt daraus zugleich Ansätze für eine nachhaltige und menschenfreundliche Metamorphose der Wachstumsidee und macht plausibel: Wachstum und Wohlstand können und müssen entkoppelt werden, um unseren Planeten zukunftsfähig zu machen.

By: Lina Isacs

By: Max Koch

Growth-dependent welfare states contribute to climate emergency. The ecological economics, degrowth, and sustainable welfare literatures demonstrate that to re-embed Western production and consumption patterns in environmental limits, an encompassing social-ecological transformation would need to be initiated very soon. This article focuses on the potential roles of the welfare state and social policy in this transformation, applying the concepts of ‘sustainable welfare’ and ‘safe-operating space’. Based on two Swedish studies, it also provides an empirical analysis of the popularity of selected eco-social policies designed to steer the economy and society towards this space: maximum and basic incomes, taxes on wealth and meat, as well as working time reductions. In analogy to the historical role of the state in reconstituting the welfare-work nexus in the post-WWII era and its present engagement in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, it is argued that a more interventionist state is required to grapple with climate emergency.

By: Beigewum, Attac, Armutskonferenz

By: Erica Jung, Jamie Tyberg

By: Gareth Dale

By: Gareth Dale

By: Giorgos Kallis, Tilman Hartley

Under what circumstances are interest-bearing loans compatible with an economy without much growth? The question is becoming increasingly important given a tendency towards declining growth in industrialised economies and increasing evidence that continued growth is incompatible with environmental sustainability. Previous theoretical work suggests that when interest-bearing loans compound, this results in exponentially growing debts that are impossible to repay in the absence of economic growth. We here examine ten historical cases to assess support for this finding. We find that interest-bearing loans have typically resulted in unpayable debts in these non- and slow-growing economies. We further identify four broad category of measures to prevent or alleviate the problem of unpayable debts, and show how they have been employed in the past. Our Appendix compiles sources of debt regulation from across the world over five millennia.

By: Jennifer Wilkins, Bill Murphy