Library

By: Viviana Asara, Emanuele Leonardi, Luigi Pellizzoni

This timely Handbook offers a comprehensive outlook on global environmental politics, providing readers with an up-to-date view of a field of ever-increasing academic and public significance. Its critical perspective interrogates what is taken for granted in current institutions and social and power relations, highlighting the issues preventing meaningful change in the relationship between huma...

By: Giorgos Kallis, Daniel W. O’Neill, Aljoša Slameršak

Achieving the Paris Agreement will require massive deployment of low-carbon energy. However, constructing, operating, and maintaining a low-carbon energy system will itself require energy, with much of it derived from fossil fuels. This raises the concern that the transition may consume much of the energy available to society, and be a source of considerable emissions. Here we calculate the ene...

By: Miklós Antal, Bence Lukács

Working time reduction (WTR) is a promising policy to enhance well-being in rich countries and an important topic in discourses on a new social vision. Numerous small-scale WTR trials are either underway or planned in various contexts. Properly measuring changes in working time is necessary to evaluate these trials, but challenges abound. Traditional definitions and measurement methods may not ...

Building on the growing body of work that repositions love, care and solidarity relations as central to social reproduction and fundamentally constitutive of society, our first conference explored the interdependent and entangled nature of contemporary political struggles, linking ecological, anti-capitalist, feminist and indigenous politics intersectionally, and extending our understanding of ...

By: Max Koch, Martin Fritz, Håkan Johansson, Jamil Khan, Roger Hildingsson, Kajsa Emilsson

In this article, we investigate public support for eco-social policies combining goals of social justice and ecological sustainability. Eco-social policies contribute both to providing a social floor or redistributing resources to where they are needed and to respecting an ecological ceiling by keeping human activities within ecological limits. We discuss five such policies and highlight argume...

By: Nadine Arnold

Standards drive waste accumulation, which is particularly evident in the case of food. This article illuminates how food that is discarded due to failed standardized expectations is valued in consumer markets. Theoretically oriented by insights from the sociology of standards and valuation studies, it examines three Swiss organizational initiatives that successfully value food waste. Based on r...

By: Vasilis Kostakis, Chris Giotitsas, Christina Priavolou, Katerina Troullaki, Nikiforos Tsiouris

An emerging commons-oriented mode of production that combines globally accessible knowledge with distributed manufacturing has recently been presented as a better fit for sustainable degrowth and localisation, compared to incumbent practices. To tentatively test this potential we select the case of 3D printers. The production of 3D printers varies within a spectrum from proprietary and industri...

By: Mariam Abazeri

Degrowth has become a major topic of interdisciplinary scholarship and practice that critiques the ideology of growth, reimagining social and economic relations and measures of well-being outside economic rationality. While the movement engages with gender politics peripherally in coalition with feminist schools of thought and activist groups, e.g., the feminisms and degrowth alliance, I argue ...

By: Milena Büchs, Lina Brand-Correa, Daniel W O’Neill, Anna Brook, Petra Meier, Yannish Naik

Despite substantial attention within the fields of public and planetary health on developing an economic system that benefits both people's health and the environment, heterodox economic schools of thought have received little attention within these fields. Ecological economics is a school of thought with particular relevance to public and planetary health. In this article, we discuss implicati...

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: Dorine E. van Norren

It is generally assumed that ‘development’ is a universal concept, understood the same way in every culture. In Africa, progress is understood differently; human relations – including ancestors and future generations tied to the land – take precedence over development. The African concept of well-being is Ubuntu (I am a person through other persons), implemented in South Africa though truth and...

By: Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan

We need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars. Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalitie...

By: Benjamin K. Sovacool, Alexander Dunlap

What radical tactics might those seeking transformational action on climate or environmental sustainability undertake? What options are capable of stopping actors and institutions who already realize their actions and behavior may harm millions, degrade the biosphere, and contaminate the climate, but continue to do so, despite the scientific or moral reasons not to? This paper explores efforts ...

By: Laurence L. Delina

Supercharged climate activism seems to be now justified in light of continuing government climate myopia and entrenched fossil fuel interests, despite cascading climate change-related disasters. Reviewing the tactics of the climate action movement is timely since the ecological mess we are witnessing is fast becoming intense and frequent, at the same time that emissions are rapidly increasing. ...

By: Amaia Pérez Orozco

The Feminist Subversion of the Economy shows the urgent need to radically and democratically discuss what we mean by a dignified life and how we can organize to sustain life collectively. In the face of unending economic crises and climate catastrophe, we must consider, what does a dignified life look like? Feminist intellectual and activist Amaia Pérez Orozco powerfully and provocatively outl...

By: Max Koch

Degrowth thought and strategies suffer from a tension between viewing the state as incapable of initiating transformational change and making a political appeal to it to do precisely this via targeted eco-social policies. While a small number of academic papers has theoretically addressed this tension, there is a lack in research on the strategic implications arising from conceptualizations of ...

By: Anitra Nelson

What would a world without money look like? This book is a lively thought experiment that deepens our understanding of how money is the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social inequality today, arguing that it has to be abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a postcapitalist future. Grounded in historical debates about money, Anitra Nelson draws on a spectrum of po...

By: Constanza Hepp, Joëlle Saey-Volckrick, Joe Herbert, Andro Rilović, Carol Bardi

From the book 'Degrowth & Strategy: How to bring about social-ecological transformation'. Our chapter discusses who can be considered degrowth actors, and the predominant strategies these actors have utilised so far. Critically analysing these strategies and their shortcomings, we argue the need for greater structures within the degrowth networks in order to avoid perpetuating typical hiera...

By: Jon D. Erickson

In The Progress Illusion, Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything. Drawing on his own experience as a young economist inoculated in the 1980s era of “greed is good,” Erickson shows how pseudoscience came to dominate economic thought. He pokes holes in the conventional wisdom of neo-classical economics, illustrating how flawed theories about financial decision-making and maximizing efficiency ignore human psychology and morality. Most importantly, he demonstrates how that thinking shaped our politics and determined the course of American public policy. The result has been a system that perpetually concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, while depleting the natural resources on which economies are based.

By: Federico Savini

The theory – and practice – of establishing autonomy from the hegemony of growth is central to the imaginary of degrowth. Yet to envisage pathways towards a degrowth society, scholars need to explain how autonomy coalesces into autonomous institutions. This article addresses this institutional challenge of how to secure autonomy in the provision of collective, affordable and decommodified housi...