By Chris Ward
Despite attending the conference, not everyone will fully understand what ‘Degrowth’ is, or the multitude of related terms that will be mentioned during the conference. Thankfully the first session on the schedule, offered by Federico Demaria and Giacomo D´Alisa was ideally suited for getting your knowledge up to scratch.
Judging by audience responses to the question “What is Degrowth?” there isn’t a concrete definition yet, but one is needed to make the term more understandable to the wider world. Currently ‘Degrowth’ is more of an intersection of several concepts, we need to be clearer with our vocabulary to emphasise ‘different’, not ‘less’.
‘Degrowth’ was first mentioned as a term by Gorz and later by Roegen and Grinevald in the 1970s
Degrowth lost some interest in 80s and 90s due to the prevailing neo-liberal thoughts of the era. It re-entered the public’s interest in the 00s especially around Europe and Latin America in some of the more traditionally activist countries and those worst hit by the Global Financial crisis.
Leipzig is 4th international conference on Degrowth, and now the term is being mentioned in mainstream media, academic courses and articles.
Let’s break apart the vocabulary apart a little…
The Limits of Growth
Previous global ‘efforts’ to tackle climate breakdown have failed dramatically, because they have been based on a fundamentally flawed economic paradigm: growth. The concept of growth is an altar at which economists, politicians and businesspeople across the political spectrum have worshipped for decades. Unfortunately, where the planet’s long-term habitability is concerned, it is this obsessi...
Against the background of a looming ecological collapse and extreme socio-economic inequality, growth-critical scholars and activists debate various eco-social policies that can facilitate transitions towards genuinely environmentally sustainable and socially equitable societies. Such policies include work sharing, time-banks, job guarantees, complementary currencies and minimum income schemes....
Without trying to give definitions of growth or degrowth everybody knows anyway, I would like to emphasize that these phenomena were always subject to discussions. Even a non-economist knows that it is impossible to talk about growth without mentioning ideas like increases in production factors, industrialization or economic development. Any increase has to come to a [...]