Masters of Degrowth : Week 3

Key ideas from the week (changing the format as the content was massive)

1. Degrowth requires to scape from individual actions (footprint narrative) and focus on organization and community building towards human ways of living and delivering prosperity without with lower metabolism
2. Those bottom up innitiatives require at some point institutional suppport to scale and thrive likely conflicts with capitalism
3. The growth mandate from the current capitalist system is at the core of our environmental, social and economical crisis. 
4. Degrowth proposes potential pathways for transitions that have democracy and humans at the core, and not solely a critique of the current system flaws
5. Capitalism is not a democratic and free system, it is impossed unequally across the world, leading to a very distribution of the production benefits and its costs.
6. Degrowth do not claim for a planned recession, nor a monoculture of centralization a la State Comunism seen in some countries, it recognizes when big and small are beautfil and necessary
7. Current economic paradigm makes the North responsible for >90% of the emissions, while the South suffers 90% of the costs and almost 100% of deaths
8. The net appropiation of the North from the South is >30 times the amount of international aid, and sufficient to feed, provide energy and local industry for all the population of the South
9. Differences in prices globally are the result of power and not productivity or value added
10. Democratization of international institutions and fair terms of trade are required to allow the South to provision basic needs and achieve social and economic sovereignity
11. Discussions about debt repudiation and reparation should consider the unequal distribution of impacts, and the urgency to bring fairness in global exchange
12. A research agenda on degrowth should cover how and why it is hard to break with the hegemony of growth, and how can economic global democracy be expanded further and sufficienty fast
13. There are multiple conditions for economic stability without growth, but it needs a reformulation of capitalism and the priotization of multipolar and decentralized productivity efforts

                                                        

The Case for Degrowth (book Summary)

The book The Case for Degrowth [1], articulates Degrowth as a Diagnosis of the problems, sacrifices and costs of compound growth as a policy, and provide a Prognosis to scape growth concretely with actions that are generated bottom up (such local gardens and bike movements) and top down (as a green new deal without degrowth or the implementation of lower working hours).

Growth as a sacrifice (Diagnosis)

GDP is a poor measure of wellfare, yet its growth is problematic as it requires more energy, material, emissions... It exponential growth means an exponential impact on our life supporting systems. 

Growth is explained as inevitable and required to finance "green" and public services, limit unemployment and eliminate poverty. Different sides of mainstream politics disagree on everything, but not on the need to grow.

Degrowth advocates that growth is not green or can made sufficiently green, it exacerbates inequalities, does not solve poverty and pushes goverments and private entitities to engage in unsustainable debt. 

The current economic system has proven to be very unstable, needing growth to avoid recession, and public rescue of banks and the collapse of the public sectors. Economic crisis are a recurrent phenomena that have seen the public being sold (via cuts in health and education services) to save large private enterprise (mainly large banks and fossil fuel firms with excessive leverage).

In the defence of growth we have seen and continue to see expropiation of the commons, austerity programs for the poor and the public, high incomes tax reductions, opression against other narratives and economic violence on the vulnerable.

We are not only sacrificing human wellbeing, but also other species existence at rates never recorded, without unkown consequences to feasibility of future human existence too.

Growth and capitalism requires the existence of labor as a form of suvival (in contrast with subsistent peasant economies), scarcity (to push worker to accept poor conditions and compete), and individualism (to avoid unions and societal strikes against the abuses of capitalists). There is little natural, innocent in growth...it requires enforced labor, broken abudance and communities to create a mass of isolated,addicted and lonely consumers instead of united citizens to operate.

Growth is supported due to the planned dependency on labor wages and the race to the bottom make workers slave to produce, not what people need, but what leads to the highest return to capital.

Degrowth from the bottom (Prognosis part 1)

Degrowth and community building goes hand in hand. It is not so much what you do as an invidual, but rather how you engage into the organization of life which is consistent with stronger communities and lower social metabolism. It frees one from the deception or individual footprint to the creation of alternatives ways of living without social separation and individualism.

Exploring and building other forms of provisioning essential goods and services without the single pursue of monetization, and revaluing the activities related to care and the non monetized that improve wellbeing and social grunding is key. 

Choosing to live simply, not for the fear or external limitation of planetary boundaries, but rather by the desire to free ouselves from the slavement that a life deep into consumption means. 

As bottom up movements evolve and grow, the likelihood of conflict with the expansion of capitalism becomes more likely. At this point is when bottom up degrowth should aim to ensure institutional support when in conflict. A case of that is the creation of Podem from the Indignados movement, or the En Comu Podem lead goverment in Barcelona, which started as a movement against the expulsion of people who cannot pay their mortgages or rent increases.

When institutionns acknowledge the social value of that movements, money is flow into their reproduction. More public housing, green spaces, gardening, childcare and other possibilities arise in a virtuous cycle.

In the future, degrowth does not foresee a new monoculture, claiming that only small is beatufil. Public infraestructure, public health and education will likely have some form of centralization or large scale provisioning, but other sectors such as food, culture, clothing will likely be more cooperative, decentralized and less industrial than today's.

Degrowth from the Top (Top down changes)

Those measures are discussed in other forums not necessary related to degrowth, which makes it more common and easy to grasp for communities outside degrowth.

1.  Green New Deal - Without Growth
• achieve net zero in a fair and just way
• create good high wage jobs in cleaner industries
• invest in the required infrastructure (public transport, renewable energy)
• ensure affordable housing, water, food and energy for all
• promote jutice and equity globally
2. Provide universal services (health, education, housing, transport) and universal and unconditional income (recognize unpaid work.free people from "shitty" jobs, avoid social stigma of aid) 
• Both could be funded with ~15% of GDP (3% services + 12% income) less than a third of most Public Sector Sizea relative to GDP
3. Reclaiming the commons : provide public and alternative options for housing, health, transport, natural parks... outside the profit motive
4. Reducing working hours: to reduce unemployment, provide sufficient time for care and the option to enagage socially and politically, This together with the likely increase of labor demand as energy slaves become more expensive will likely keep good levels of employment. 
5. Public Finance:  finance decide what gets produce and which jobs get created. A decentralized, responsible direction of the money towards locally desired activities will reduce the pressure for profit and make previously unatractive projects due to low profit viable. That should include the taxation and no subsidizes currently applied to fossil fuels and other undesirable indsutries. A redirection from taxes (from goods such as work to bads such as pollution) should be in place. 

Those normally apply to OECD countries, who should clean up the house before telling other countries how sustainable development look like : )

Strategies for mobilization

• Building alternatives in the cracks of the current system is critical
• Promising developments happen in cooperatives and comunal businesses
• Coevolutional strategies start from individual  efforts, expand via the community and last with the institutionalization
• Need to be ready for unpredictable events that favor or make change harder
• Need to dismantle GDP and growth based policy at the political and cultural sphere
• Need to achieve alliances between countries and social movements to cope with counterdegrowth measures
• A lot of non self defined degrowthers support degrowth cause, a join coallition is required to reach scale for those who care of social justice, workers rights, fair trade, environmentalists...
• a new framing that does not threaten / scare workers, enterprises and politicians is required
• degrowth is not another North to South policy, it embraces learnings from places in the South that managed to live well without growth
• degrowth requires to be exercised, legislated and mobilized every day

Structural adjustment and unequal exchange ( paper notes)

Key results:

• Rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources from the global South.
• Drain from the South is worth over $10 trillion per year, in Northern prices.
• The South’s losses outstrip their aid receipts by a factor of 30.
• Unequal exchange is a major driver of underdevelopment and global inequality.
• The impact of excess resource consumption in the North is offshored to the South.

Staggering number on unequal exchange, breaking with the ideology of development

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade.

in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over.

Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor.

Reinforced by the rhetoric, common among neoclassical economists, that free-trade globalization has created an “even playing field”.

The general structure of the colonial economy remains in place, with industrial growth in the global North continuing to rely on appropriation from the South well into the post-colonial era

Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Northern appropriation from the South comprises resources and labour embodied not only in primary commodities but also in manufactured goods

By net appropriation we mean that these resources are not compensated in equivalent terms through trade; they are effectively transferred gratis. And this appropriation is not insignificant in scale; on the contrary, it comprises a large share (on average about a quarter) of the North’s total consumption.

This net appropriation, has significant consequences for the global South, in terms of lost use-value. This quantity of Southern raw materials, land, energy and labour could be used to provision for human needs and develop sovereign industrial capacity in the South, but instead it is mobilized around servicing consumption in the global North.

For instance, 21 exajoules of energy would be enough to cover the annual energy requirements of building out necessary infrastructure to ensure that all 6.5 billion people in the global South have access to decent housing, public transport, healthcare, education, sanitation, communication, etc. 

Eight hundred and twenty-two million hectares of land, which is twice the size of India, would in theory be enough to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on land productivity and diet composition (Poore and Nemecek, 2018).

Net flows of material resources from South to North mean that much of the impact of material consumption in the North (43% of it, net of trade) is suffered in the South. The damage is offshored.

Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.

In consumption-based terms, the North is responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary.

While the consequences harm the South disproportionately, inflicting dramatic social and economic costs (Kikstra et al., 2021b, Srinivasan et al., 2008). The South suffers 82–92% of the costs of climate change, and 98–99% of the deaths associated with climate change.

While prices by definition do not reflect value, they do allow us to compare the scale of drain to prevailing monetary representations of production and income in the world economy.

Because the North’s windfall is represented in Northern prices, it is suitable for comparison to Northern GDP. The table above shows that, over the 1990–2015 period, resources appropriated from the South have been worth on average roughly a quarter of Northern GDP.

One of the main strategies of international development is to call for overseas development assistance, and to encourage the governments of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to meet their commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid. Aid flows create the powerful impression that rich countries give benevolently to poorer countries.

But the data on drain through unequal exchange raises significant questions about this narrative.Our results show that net appropriation by DAC countries through unequal exchange from 1990 to 2015 outstripped their aid disbursements over the same period by a factor of almost 80.

During the period we analyse in this paper (1990–2015), the South has contributed the majority of the world’s industrial production, including high-technology production such as computers and cars. And yet price inequalities remain entrenched.

Are there significant qualitative differences between the labour performed in the North versus the South, within global commodity chains, that might explain wage inequalities? This seems unlikely. Southern production within global commodity chains involves labour ranging from manual work to managerial, engineering, logistics, and IT roles, with technology provided by international capital, while the end-of-chain steps performed in the global North (including design, advertising, retail and delivery) involve a similar range of labour. And yet wage disparities are nonetheless so extreme that highly skilled labour performed in the South may even receive lower pay than “unskilled” labour performed in the North. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that real productivity differences between workers are minimal, and cannot explain wage inequalities (Hunter et al., 1990).

The gap between unit labour costs in Northern and Southern economies demonstrates that the difference in wages is greater than the difference in productivity. In other words, wage inequalities exist not because Southern workers are less productive but because they are more intensively exploited, and often subject to rigid systems of labour control and discipline designed to maximize extraction (Suwandi et al., 2019). Indeed, this is a major reason why Northern firms offshore production to the South in the first place: because labour is cheaper per unit of physical output (Goldman, 2012).

In previous research, Dorninger et al. (2021) found that the main predictor of high export prices (and therefore the capacity for net appropriation) was economic power, as measured by GDP. This finding supports longstanding claims by political economists that, all else being equal, price inequalities are an artefact of power. 

Unequal exchange is also enabled by geopolitical power imbalances in the world economy. For instance, high-income nations exercise monopoly power in the institutions of international economic governance (Chang, 2008). In the World Bank and the IMF, Northern states hold a majority of votes (and the US holds a veto), thus giving them control over key economic policy decisions. In the World Trade Organization (which controls tariffs, subsidies, and patents), bargaining power is determined by market size, enabling high-income nations to set trade rules in their own interests.

Our findings on net resource appropriation support contemporary demands for reparations for ecological debt, as articulated by environmental justice movements

Reparations could also be paid according to the monetary value of appropriated resources, which could be used by the South to claim back resources from the North equivalent to what was drained, thus meeting Southern needs while reducing excess Northern consumption. Ultimately, however, the scale of ecological debt, like the value of resources themselves, cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Ecology is the basis of life itself and money cannot compensate for its loss. True repair requires permanently ending the unequal distribution of environmental goods and burdens between the global North and global South, restoring damaged ecosystems, and shifting to a regenerative economic system.

Our findings also have significant implications for international development theory and practice. It is clear that official development assistance is not a meaningful solution to global poverty and inequality; nor is the claim that global South countries need more economic liberalisation and export-oriented market integration. The core problem is that low- and middle-income countries are integrated into the global economy on fundamentally unequal terms. Rectifying this problem is critical to ensuring that global South countries have the financial, physical and human resources they need to improve social outcomes.

There are a number of steps that could be taken toward this end. One would be to democratize the institutions of global economic governance, such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, so that global South countries have more control over trade and finance policy. Another would be to end the North’s use of unfair subsidies for agricultural exports, and remove structural adjustment conditions on international finance, which would help mitigate downward pressure on wages and resource prices in the South while at the same time enabling Southern countries to build sovereign industrial capacity. 

Such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above, however, as they would run against the interests of geopolitical factions that benefit prodigiously from the present structure of the global economy. Structural transformation will only be achieved through political struggle from below, including by the anti-colonial and environmental justice movements that continue to fight against imperialism today (WPCCC, 2010, Scheidel et al., 2020, Nation, 2021). It will also require Southern states to use industrial and fiscal policy to pursue economic sovereignty, food and energy self-sufficiency, progressive import substitution, and regional solidarities (Amin, 1990, Kaboub, 2008, Ajl, 2021).

Green Sacrifice Zones ( paper notes)

 A Green New Deal could put severe pressure on lands held by Indigenous and marginalized communities and reshape their ecologies into ‘‘green sacrifice zones.’’ Such cost shifting risks reproducing a form of climate colonialism in the name of just transition.

Green New Deal (GND) proposals are among the boldest initiatives for a large-scale, equality-oriented systemic transformation of Global North economies in order to address the climate crisis. The GND is used here as an umbrella term for a package of measures meant to deliver such transformation. Several versions of a GND have emerged in the last 2 years, and despite their differences, all versions explicitly include “just transition” as an essential goal

Just transition highlights the need for the shift to low-carbon societies to be as equitable as possible by ensuring decent work, social inclusion, and poverty eradication together with environmental sustainability as that shift’s central goals.

It involves pursuing two key priorities: first, a transition of energy systems away from fossil fuels by emphasizing clean energy and massive expansion of renewable power resources; second, the impulse to avoid transferring the costs of transition to workers (e.g., those losing their jobs from the closure of carbon-intensive industries) and their communities or to communities that are vulnerable and at “the frontline” of climate change impacts.

Specifically, increased pressure on Indigenous and marginalized lands, livelihoods, and sovereignties in the effort to supply material resources for just low-carbon transitions could generate what we here call “green sacrifice zones” (GSZs), that is, ecologies and spaces where “the possibility that the political economy of green energy contains its own sacrifice zones” physically manifests itself.

Green sacrifice zones: places and populations that will be affected by the sourcing, transportation, installation, and operation of solutions for powering low-carbon transitions, as well as end-of-life treatment of related material waste.

The 100% renewable supply of energy implies that the risk of cost shifts increases with such dramatic increases in demand. Consider that nearly 50% of cobalt reserves are located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the cobalt mining region is one of the ten most polluted areas in the world. Cobalt extraction in the DRC involves extremely dangerous and precarious working conditions, including extensive child labor.

Similarly, more than half of the world’s lithium reserves are located in the salt flats of the Lithium Triangle, which lies among Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, one of the driest places on the planet, where lithium extraction has put significant stress on limited water resources. Currently, i.e., in the absence of a major GND in large economies such as the US, industry analysts expect South American lithium production to increase by 199% by 2025 to meet demand.

At the same time, mining companies already justify the adverse effects of their operations upon local communities (such as endangering vital ecosystems and water supplies) by claiming that their “products are essential to the transition to a low-carbon economy.”

Some governments also facilitate cost shifts. Morocco is building the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant, the Noor Power Station, expected to cover an area as large as the country’s capital, Rabat. Noor involved the acquisition of 3,000 ha of communally owned land by characterizing land that was used for pasture as “marginal” and “underutilized,” a possible case of “green grabbing” according to the Environmental Justice Atlas. Beyond covering energy needs in Morocco, the project is expected to export green energy northward to Europe and eastward to other regional states.

A key colonial logic that can both encourage and justify the production of such sacrifice zones. 

GNDs reflect a rhetoric of salvation by newness for responding to grand challenges. 

Exposing and seeking to address the highly unequal effects of past policies and climate change are fundamental. Yet, frontline and vulnerable communities are not only communities in an arrested state of development but also climate pioneers with numerous just-transition initiatives already happening under their leadership. 

Concerns about cost shifts and salvation logics in the GND discourse mark the conditions of aporia of just transition. Similarly to historical colonial projects, a pattern of shifting costs and a rhetoric of salvation currently lend the GND momentum and political power. Shifting the costs of green transitions permits the sourcing of certain materials (minerals) that are indispensable for those transitions. Assuming a salvation by development discourse permits deploying the powerful ideals of improvement and universality for achieving a GND.

Interdisciplinary environmental research should explore the pathways of cost shifting in just transitions within at least four domains.

• Spatial-quantitative analysis should seek to establish what land-use policies would be necessary for avoiding or minimizing the generation of cost shifts and GSZs
• Visualize asymmetries of sacrifice, establish a base for exploring fairer cost distributions
• We must explore what would be economically feasible for a GND-based just transition that avoids generating GSZs and stripping land from Indigenous and marginalized peoples.
• What green governance mechanisms are mobilized in the course of just transitions at diverse levels of decision making, ranging from the global to the personal? Who mobilizes these, to what ends, and who are the winners and losers from the mobilization of those mechanisms? 
• Qualitative and ethnographic research should examine climate initiatives led by frontline and vulnerable communities that mobilize logics alternative to salvation and coloniality to establish how they deal with cost shifting, land control and the GSZ effect, and the challenges they face. 

Informed by such research, policy emerging from any GND might yet be built on a solid decolonial foundation rooted in rigorous empirical efforts to address the tendency for development to proliferate sacrifice zones, shift costs, and hide these effects beneath a rhetoric of salvation.

Research on Degrowth ( Research notes)

The degrowth hypothesis is that it is possible to organize a transition and live well under a different political-economic system that has a radically smaller resource throughput.

The ideological and political construction of growth and its ecological and social limits are foundational elements of the degrowth agenda, which asks how we can manage without growth in the case that growth is not desirable or sustainable

HISTORY: ORIGINS OF THE GROWTH PARADIGM

 The apparent natural status of the national economy as a distinct institution is of relatively recent origin, with consequences including the separation and mystification of the economy as a domain of professional experts, unknowable to common people.

During the 1930s and 1940s, what we now identify as “the economy” was established as a self-contained structure or totality of relations of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services within a given geographical space.

Economic growth as a policy goal appeared in the 1950s (see collection of essays in 20), together with the development of accounting techniques and statistical tools designed to represent and measure it. Processes of state-sponsored economic statistics, particularly national income accounting, worked to mark the national economy as a well-defined object.

It rose to prominence between the 1930s and 1950s, linked to Keynesian efforts to counter the Great Depression and to plan expenditures for the Second World War and postwar reconstruction

What is less known is that the early founders of GDP were aware of these limitations, extremely cautious regarding universal applications, and wary of the statistic’s ability to measure welfare.

The institutionalization of national accounts was not driven by scientific consensus, but rather the political usefulness of market-oriented data for countercyclical policies, war planning, and the distribution of development aid that turned GDP into a universal yardstick

GDP numbers were increasingly politicized as growth became a pivotal policy goal of governments in the context of Cold War competition, the pursuit of modern development, and pacification of class struggles.

In parallel processes, growth targeting became a driver of five-year socialist plans and of social-democracy programs. Overambitious growth targets of the Soviet Union scared the West, and helped US and European progressives to overcome resistance by liberals to economic plans and targets that gave a stronger role to government.

Today GDP has become a mean to organize society on the assumption that only markets create wealth.

Questioning GDP and searching for alternative indicators is not just a technical question, but a political and cultural project that requires significant reorganization of economic institutions, such as markets and ownership structures, as well as diverse sociocultural institutions that organize social security, social stratification, and prestige.

The rise of the growth paradigm was integral to the invention of development and the “making of the Third World”.

In Latouche’s spirit, degrowth is not only about downscaling energy and resource use, but also about an overall project of exiting economism, that is, decolonizing the social imaginary and liberating public debate from prevalent discourses couched in economic terms, privileging growth.

ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS: THE LIMITS OF GREEN GROWTH

Just as increases in labor productivity lead to growth and new jobs, not to less employment, increases in resource productivity increase output and resource use . Capitalist economies grow by using more resources and more people, more intensively. Accelerating this is unlikely to spare resources.

Growth can become “cleaner” or “greener” by substituting, for example, fossil fuels with solar power, or scarce, environmentally intensive metals with more abundant and less intensive metals. But new substitutes have resource requirements, and life-cycle impacts that cross space and time.

Ending the use of fossil fuels is likely to reduce labor productivity and limit output. Solar and wind power are constrained only by their rate of flow, but unlike fossil fuels, they are diffuse.

To collect and concentrate a diffuse flow of energy, more energy is necessary and more land is required. The EROIs (energy returns on energy investment) of renewable energies are between 10:1 and 20:1, compared to more than 50:1 for earlier deposits of oil and coal.

An economy powered by a diffuse energy flow is then likely to be an economy of lower net energy and lower output than one powered by concentrated stocks. Land use for solar or wind also competes with the use of land for food production, and rare materials are necessary for infrastructures and batteries that store their intermittent flows, with significant environmental effects.

At the global level, GDP and material use have increased approximately 1:1. Carbon emissions have increased somewhat slower than GDP, but still have increased 

Clean energy investments can stimulate the economy in the short run, but in the long run growth may be limited by their low EROIs. Studies suggest that economic growth requires a minimum EROI of close to 11:1.

Slowing down the economy is not an end but a likely outcome in a transition toward equitable wellbeing and environmental sustainability. 

Substantive evidence indicates that prosperity does not depend on high levels of production and consumption.The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare for example, has stayed at the same levels in the United States since 1950, despite a threefold growth of GDP

The stability of current economies does depend on growth—growth is necessary to avoid unemployment, reduce debt, and fund public services. Recent economic research, however, shows that this is not necessarily so—under certain conditions, economies may function well without growth.

MANAGING WITHOUT GROWTH: THE ECONOMICS OF DEGROWTH 

Whereas Smith and Ricardo painted a dark picture of the stationary state in contexts with high levels of economic inequality, Mill argued that distributional policies could lead to a high degree of social welfare.

There is nothing in neoclassical models to suggest that zero or negative growth is incompatible with full employment or economic stability.

From a neoclassical supply-side perspective, Irmen  shows that market economies do not always generate growth, nor do they need growth to function. Lange  tests several models and shows that the major condition for stable degrowth is a decline in the supply of production factors—labor and/or natural resources—and a reduction of working hours.

In Keynesian models, the primary condition for an end of growth is constant aggregate demand. Fontana & Sawyer  emphasize the role of investments: If firms invest less, wage income stabilizes and growth is low;The central condition for zero growth is nonincreasing demand by households and government, which leads to low levels of investment by firms. In this model, nongrowing economies have zero net investments and savings and a constant sum of consumption and government spending.

Ecological economists have been explicitly concerned with the question of steady-state economies. In Daly’s concept, market mechanisms bring about an efficient and stable steady-state economy, if (a) a relatively equal distribution of income and wealth is guaranteed, (b) energy and resource throughput is capped, and (c) population growth is limited. 

Reductions of working hours are included in all major degrowth scenarios . They are meant to prevent unemployment in nongrowing economies and free up time for reproductive, subsistence, social, and recreational activities

Without saving and accumulating, growth would come to an end. However, they deem this scenario incompatible with capitalism, given that owners of capital are propelled to accumulate wealth (rather than spending all money on consumption) and firms must reinvest to stay competitive.

Recession and depression are possible within capitalism; degrowth is probably not. Whereas in theory, growth may not be necessary or inevitable within capitalism, in practice, the system generates growth via dynamics of competition, private ownership, and the availability of cheap energy supply. Economic growth is also perceived as a political necessity to pacify social conflict and ensure reproduction of the system.

Lange argues that a combination of collective firm ownership, prevention of economies of scale, and limits on the exploitation of fossil fuels would prevent actors from accumulating interest and reduce pressures to do so.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIAL SCIENCES: STUDIES OF SOCIETIES LIVING WITHOUT GROWTH

Global economic growth is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon, driven by historically unique sociocultural systems and values that developed in tandem with capitalism and colonialism.

Ethnographers draw attention to sociocultural features of human populations who flourish without pursuing growth. In the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lewis observed that Mbendjele Yaka people value resources for their abundance, rather than scarcity, and practice management strategies aimed at sustaining that abundance, together with moral obligations for nonreciprocal sharing among community members via distribution of forest resources such as meat and honey.

Woodburn found that the most egalitarian societies favor immediate consumption rather than surplus accumulation, and they sustain social institutions that undermine uneven buildup of power, wealth, or authority.

Involuntary declines are not degrowth in themselves, and countries in recession or depression are not degrowth experiments, unless communities make a virtue out of necessity, building lowimpact livelihoods that enhance wellbeing and equality. Although there are plenty of studies of the social and economic effects of recessions, there are fewer studies of how societies adapt to them. 

TECHNOLOGY STUDIES AND DEGROWTH

Until recently, degrowth literature had little to say about technology other than a critique of technological fixes. 

Ellul went as far as claiming that profit-seeking, growth, and capitalism are epiphenomena of the technological system, not its driving forces.

An ecologically sensible social project should restrain technological practice. Others emphasize instead an appropriation and habilitation of technology to destabilize the hegemonic order of the growth-oriented technological regime and enable new modes of economic (re)production

Using a “matrix of convivial technology” based on five dimensions (relatedness, accessibility, adaptability, bio-interaction, and appropriateness), Vetter  ethnographically evaluates the practices of several degrowth-related groups who produce, develop, or adapt different technologies. Grunwald  applies a technology assessment to evaluate green technologies that are often promoted in the name of growth, and considers the position of those who expect to overcome ecological crises merely by technological progress morally hazardous, because they ignore the ambivalences of technology and its unavoidable, unintended side effects.

Integrating conviviality criteria into the design process with attention to relationships between the life-cycle stages of a product or service and the five main threats to conviviality identified by Illich DGML (“design global, manufacture local”) processes through which design is developed, shared, and improved through global digital commons, in which shared resources are managed by a community according to rules set by the community. Manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures, and the convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing technologies in products ranging from three-dimensional printers and laser cutters to low-tech tools and crafts is giving rise to new forms of value creation. Successful low-cost DGML projects include wind turbines, farming machines, and prosthetic robotic hands.

POLITICAL SCIENCE: DEMOCRACY AND DEGROWTH

Liberal welfare democracies have tempered capitalistic social relations by maintaining a distinction between the economic and the political order, subtracting spheres of life from the capitalistic logic and adding a form of social citizenship to civil and political rights. But given their dependence on economic growth for the pacification of class conflict, welfare democracies have also legitimized capitalism

Growth has been instrumental for securing employment, tax revenue, and investments in large-scale infrastructures. In addition, it has kept alive the promise of social mobility and increasing wellbeing 

Concepts of real and direct democracy, albeit intended in different ways and open to scholarly and societal debate, are central to alternative projects articulated by degrowth thinkers and activists. New social movements, such as the Spanish Indignados, often compared to the US Occupy movement, and various social experiments following the dissolution of both formal movements, explicitly incorporate degrowth critiques and advocate real democracy against the pseudodemocratic face of (neo)liberal representative democracies.

[Castoriadis]. Democracy for him means that society becomes autonomous by recognizing and taking responsibility for its self-instituting character against the imposition of imaginaries based on nonquestionable truths coming from gods or immutable pseudoscientific laws, such as the invisible hand of the market, the selfish gene, or an economy’s need to grow.

In the absence of social forces that can catalyze radical change, the scenario of stagnation and an authoritarian drift seems more likely. This underscores the importance of strengthening social movements and political tendencies aiming to revitalize democracy and politicize economics.

CONCLUSION: A DEGROWTH TRANSITION?

Abandoning economic growth seems politically impossible. As a result, many scientists prefer to study policy and technological fixes that promise to make growth sustainable rather than think about managing without growth.

In future degrowth societies envisioned in the literature examined here, the economic is no longer at the center of everything; democracy is direct; surplus is expended for reproduction or fun; income and wealth are distributed according to egalitarian principles; vital resources, infrastructures, and spaces are shared and held in common; technology is convivial and serves social purposes; resource throughput is minimized; and working hours are reduced by cutting consumption, production, and wasteful expenditures

History is shaped by collective action or inaction. As economic growth falters and as the toll of its limits and costs becomes unbearable, a transition in the direction of something akin to degrowth could emerge from dynamics among unforeseeable reactions, experiments, adaptations, and political struggles.

Degrowth is an action, or activist, research program. The scholarship presented here constructs intentionally novel forms of knowledge, sensibilities, and values, and circulates new narratives aimed to support positive transitions.

Key points

• Economic growth is a recent social and political objective
• There is no empirical evidence of absolute decoupling of throughput from economic growth
•  Economic growth has long worked as the key dynamic stabilization mechanism for modern, capitalistic societies. The end of economic growth without social transformation would lead to destabilization.
• Economies can be stabilized without growth if basic monetary, fiscal, labor, and welfare institutions are transformed
• Capitalism as we know it is incompatible with degrowth.
• Perpetual growth is ecologically limited and, in all likelihood, disastrous
• Planned degrowth is politically unlikely, given established interests and power relations
• An authoritarian and more unequal variant of capitalism is likely to emerge after a period of stagnation, unless social forces organize politically to produce more democratic alternatives.
• Human history offers myriad examples of noncapitalist societies, and of community economies not based on capitalist relations, that have lived well without growth.
• Appropriate and “design global, manufacture local” technologies can provide localized solutions to human needs, while degrowing throughput

Interesting Research questions

1. How and under what conditions may work sharing, basic income, green taxes, or reinvestment plans allow economies to manage without growth?
2. How do digitalization, automation, and artificial intelligence open or limit possibilities for a degrowth transition? What are their implications in terms of throughput?
3. Is growthmanship coming to an end, and why? Or is it morphing to a new, authoritarian variant?
4. How does the idea of growth reproduce its commonsensical hegemony through everyday practices and performances?

[1] Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, and Federico Demaria. 2020. The Case for Degrowth The Case for Degrowth. Oxford, England: Polity Press.