The Case for Degrowth

Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509535644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Politique économique

The relentless pursuit of economic growth is the defining characteristic of contemporarysocieties.Yet it benefits few anddemandsmonstroussocial and ecological sacrifice. Is there a viable alternative? How can we halt the endless quest to grow global production and consumption andinsteadsecure socio-ecological conditions that support lives worth living for all? In this compelling book, leading experts Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D'Alisa and Federico Demaria make the case for degrowth - living well with less, by living differently, prioritizing wellbeing, equity and sustainability. Drawing on emerging initiatives and enduring traditions around the world, they advance a radical degrowth vision and outline policies to shape work and care, income and investment that avoid exploitative and unsustainable practices. Degrowth, they argue, can be achieved throughtransformativestrategies that allow societies to slow down by design, not disaster. Essential reading for all concerned citizens, policy-makers, and students, this book will be an important contribution to one of the thorniest and most pressing debates of our era.

1
A Case for Degrowth

The case for degrowth is a case for stopping the pursuit of growth and for reorienting lives and societies toward wellbeing. This book impels moves to build good lives for all, and shows how existing resources can be shared and invested differently to secure good living with less money, less exploitation, and less environmental degradation. Readers will be familiar with the environmental damages and with the forms of inequality and exploitation presented in this book. What is different here is that we link these troubling phenomena to the imperative of modern economies to grow, and argue that overcoming them means moving away from the relentless drive for more.

Neither the exploitation of humans and natural resources, nor the generation of emissions and other waste, can continue to increase without exacerbating planetary crises. In Europe and North America, from where we write, sustaining growth is no longer economically sound: its social, ecological, and personal costs exceed its benefits. This condition is camouflaged by mechanisms that conceal social and ecological costs, externalizing them from accounting records, and that displace damages toward other places and people, including future generations.

There is no doubt about the evidence. Harmful environmental and social consequences of growth have been rigorously documented throughout the past half-century.¹ Yet, the quantity of matter and energy used by human economies continues to increase by the minute, while governments and businesses continue to promote what Greta Thunberg, in her speech at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, called “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

What is delaying a change of course? Certainly, privileged actors exercise sophisticated means to sustain growth systems in which they enjoy disproportionately large benefits and bear few burdens and risks. However, even if Elon Musk flew the wealthiest 1% off to Mars, a drive for growth would persist in many – although not all – places and persons, even some of those most exploited and degraded by growth economies. The capacity to change course is constrained by particular modes of knowing and being that have become intertwined with expanding colonial, capitalist, and fossil fuel economies.

Globalization of these modes has displaced cultural, biological, linguistic, technological, kinship, religious, and other forms of diversity that have been fundamental to adaptation and resilience throughout human history. As worldviews and social systems that evolved historically with growth are disseminated and empowered over others worldwide, diverse groups struggle to sustain or to forge different lifeways, while those at the core find it difficult to imagine alternatives.

Many committed people respond to today’s crises not by questioning growth, but by proposing to make it green and inclusive. Rather than slow down, conservatives and progressives alike have been pushing to grow the pie bigger in order to finance green technologies and social benefits. Politicians across the spectrum have been subsidizing growth in order to avoid recessions, nominally protecting those most vulnerable to economic downturns.

During the mid-twentieth century, growing pies did correspond with expanding middle classes and greater income equality in numerous countries. Starting in the 1980s, however, phenomenal growth in national and global pies has been tied to an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and income within and between countries.² Despite more than ten consecutive years of GDP growth in the US, the gap between the richest and poorest households is the largest it has been in fifty years.³ In the same period, environmental damage caused by growing pies disproportionately harmed people who were already poor or marginalized, including millions who have become climate refugees. Growth has also fostered generational inequities by colonizing the future with legacies of debt, damage, and instability.

Yannis Varoufakis argues for qualitatively different growth: “we must end,” he writes, “the growth of ‘stuff’ that is destroying the planet and people’s life prospects (diesel cars, toxic farming, forestleveling cattle farms, toxic finance) and promote the growth of the ‘stuff’ that humanity needs (green energy, care giving, education, sustainable housing).”⁴ Surely we must do this. However, this book raises doubts about whether growth could be sustained by producing only good stuff, and whether such a shift would actually reduce environmental damage. Making good stuff still relies on making some bad stuff. Manufacture of solar panels, for example, requires extraction of rare minerals, destroying mountains and contaminating rivers; transportation of materials and panels by ships and trucks, generating emissions; construction of roads, ports, and factories, destroying landscapes. At current rates of 3 percent annual growth, the global economy will become eleven times larger by the end of this century, so even significant shifts toward cleaner production would still result in manifold increases in environmental impacts.

Degrowth makes the case that we have to produce and consume differently, and also less. That we have to share more and distribute more fairly, while the pie shrinks. To do so in ways that support pleasurable and meaningful lives in resilient societies and environments requires values and institutions that produce different kinds of persons and relations.

Purpose

The purpose of this book is to motivate and empower citizens, policy-makers, and activists to reorient livelihoods and politics around equitable wellbeing. We aim to stimulate thoughts and actions toward building such worlds not only by theorizing new understandings and imagining other pathways, but also by developing viable strategies to move forward now.

People are working in multiple ways to foster such moves, from experimenting with daily practices and community life to engineering alternative food and monetary systems. This book foregrounds opportunities for synergy among ongoing changes in institutions, technologies, relations, (re)production of lifeworlds, and other spheres.

Coevolutionary change emerges via dynamism within and influences among spheres. At a given time, certain features may appear invariable, interlocked with others in an immutable system. But transformative potential can be unleashed through disruptive, often unpredictable, events as well as positive recognition of already existing diversity, together with adaptation, innovation, and unintentional mutations. This means paying attention to, and supporting interaction among, dominant and non-dominant practices and visions, institutionalized and grassroots processes, long-enduring traditions and new experiments.

The world is on the verge of radical transformations as great as those experienced by early modern Europe with the forging of industrial capitalism, and as deep as those undergone by diverse actors and lifeways reinvented as the “third world” during the twentieth century. Degradation of ecosystems and earth systems is already provoking disasters for many people. Diseases and pandemics are disrupting economies and everyday life. Compounding impacts will doubtlessly lead to more serious disruption for more people in more places, further destabilizing economies. Political responses to these challenges are taking various forms: neo-extractivism (expanding extractive industries while limiting expatriation of profits in order to finance social programs), authoritarian nationalism (growth at all costs with social programs for native-born citizens, but excluding immigrants), neoliberal austerity (cuts to the many to sustain the wealth of the few), or authoritarian austerity (cuts to the many to fund armaments and policing to handle unrest). The Case for Degrowth calls on readers to respond differently to this looming historic shift, with policies and actions that work together to support modest living, enjoyed in solidarity, amid shared abundance.

The rest of this chapter introduces ideas key to our case. Chapter 2 examines rising costs of growth, and Chapter 3 shows how people are already living lives and (re)producing relationships and institutions not driven toward growth futures. Chapters 4 and 5 outline political strategies through which governments and civil societies can create the conditions that support and strengthen initiatives on various scales and in multiple spheres, thus encouraging synergistic coevolution away from growth.

Material and Economic Growth

This book distinguishes increases in market activity and in materials used by human economies from other kinds of growth. “Material growth” refers to the increase in the quantity of matter and energy transformed by human societies (e.g. trees cut down, coal burned, plants and animals eaten). Researchers measure transformed materials with methods including material flows analysis and ecological footprints, and link the recent acceleration of material growth to climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, diminishing fresh water, and other crises.⁵

Planetary scientists agree that curbing material growth is necessary to mitigate these undesired impacts.⁶ Experts are joined by millions of others who resist expansions that they perceive as undermining t...