Library

By: Miriam Lang, Mary Ann Manahan, Breno Bringel

The time for denial is over. Across the Global North, the question of how we should respond to the climate crisis has been answered: with a shift to renewables, electric cars, carbon trading and hydrogen. Green New Deals across Europe and North America promise to reduce emissions while creating new jobs. But beneath the sustainability branding, these climate 'solutions' are leading to new en...

By: Miriam Lang

Climate coloniality manifests in the violent appropriation of territories in the Global South, including the extraction of strategic minerals such as copper and molybdenum to service energy transition and green growth for the major world powers. Peasant communities in the Intag river valley in Ecuador have been resisting large-scale mining for decades and, thus, have built up a local solidary e...

By: Miriam Lang

Degrowth literature predominantly states that degrowth strategies are meant from and for the Global North.While economic mainstream discourse suggests that the Global South still has to grow in terms of achievingdevelopment, degrowth proponents expect a reduction of material and energy throughput in the GlobalNorth to make ecological and conceptual space for the Global South to find its own pat...

By: Gabriela Cabaña, Vandana

The idea of degrowth, while critiquing the dominant ideas of economic growth, also proposes an alternative paradigm to organize society and the economy while prioritizing nature and care. One of the major streams of thought that contributed to the emergence of degrowth is the criticism of development that originated in the 1970s and 1980s (Demaria et al., 2013). Despite this, engagi...

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: 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...

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: Franklin Obeng-Odoom

In the last two hundred years, the earth has increasingly become the private property of a few classes, races, transnational corporations, and nations. Repeated claims about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "crisis of capitalism" have done little to explain this concentration of land, encourage solution-building to solve resource depletion, or address our current socio-ecological crisis...

By: Tilman Hartley, Mark Perera, Ajda Pitotnik

Workshop The idea of the workshop Let’s Talk: Debt Meets Degrowth is to bring closer together two interlinked (international) communities, one working on debt and the other on degrowth, that share the same policy agenda, but had not had many opportunities to advance their common strategic debates. Many conferences and debates on debt or degrowth have taken place, but without sufficient commu...

By: Timothée Parrique, Gabriel Trettel Silva, Andre Cieplinski

Standard session (discussion following three presentations) Work time reduction in a degrowth context: for the North or for all? Currently, most of the calls for work time reduction in a degrowth context focus on the global North and disregard the global South. I argue that advocating for work time reduction as a shared interest between North and South socio-environmental movements could ...

By: Timmo Krüger

Presentation [part of the standard session "Regional Transformations"] Buen Vivir goes beyond criticism and rejection. It has an utopian surplus. European activists adopted it to make positive visions thinkable and expressible. The fluctuating relevance of Buen Vivir can be traced back to the course of political struggles both in the Andean countries and in Europe. Presenters: Timmo Krüge...

By: Brototi Roy, Giorgos Kallis, Sofia Avila, Ksenija Hanaček

Research by ecological economists on degrowth is a flourishing field. Existing research has focused on limits to (green) growth and on economic alternatives for prospering without growth. Future research, we argue here, should pay more attention to, and be written, from the “margins” – that is from the point of view of those marginalized in the growth economy. We conduct a comprehensive systema...

By: Julien-François Gerber

Abstract: Degrowth refers to a radical politico-economic reorganisation that leads to smaller and more equitable social metabolisms. Degrowth posits that such a transition is indispensable but also desirable. However, the conditions of its realisation require more research. This article argues that critical agrarian studies (CAS) and degrowth can enrich each other. The Agrarian Question and the...

By: Jamie Tyberg

In Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonization, Jamie Tyberg makes a timely intervention into the degrowth discussions, reorienting degrowth as a means to an end, that end being decolonization. Through the lens of the Green New Deal, and later the Red Deal, Tyberg ties together theory and real life examples highlighting how degrowth is, can, and must be, part of the post-COVID-19 response. Both...

By: Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos, Patrick Bond, Ivonne Yánez, Lucie Greyl, Serah Munguti, Godwin Uyi Ojo, Winfridus Overbeek

Both environmental justice (EJ) and degrowth movements warn against increasing the physical size of the economy. They both oppose extractivism and debt-fuelled economies, as well as the untrammelled profit motive which fails to incorporate full environmental and social costs. They both rely upon social movements that have led scholarship in its activities and achievements, in part through cha...

By: Neera M. Singh

Struggles for Environmental Justice, more widespread in the global South, are often framed as traditional societies defending “old ways of life”; while degrowth, a relatively new movement in the global North is seen as striving for a “new ways of life.” I argue that both assert or aspire for other ways of being and belonging to the world and open possibilities for post-capitalist futures. In th...

By: Padini Nirmal, Dianne Rocheleau

Abstract: A growing coalition of degrowth scholar-activist(s) seeks to transform degrowth into an interdisciplinary and international field bridging a rising network of social and environmental justice movements. We offer constructive decolonial and feminist critiques to foster their productive alliances with multiple feminisms, Indigenous, post-development and pluriversal thought and design (...

By: Neera M. Singh

Abstract: Struggles for Environmental Justice, more widespread in the global South, are often framed as traditional societies defending “old ways of life”; while degrowth, a relatively new movement in the global North is seen as striving for a “new ways of life.” I argue that both assert or aspire for other ways of being and belonging to the world and open possibilities for post-capitalist fut...

By: Corinna Dengler, Lisa Marie Seebacher

Abstract: Degrowth calls for a profound socio-ecological transformation towards a socially just and environmentally sound society. So far, the global dimensions of such a transformation in the Global North have arguably not received the required attention. This article critically reflects on the requirements of a degrowth approach that promotes global intragenerational justice without falling ...