The 2024 State of the Climate Report could not be more pointed: “unlimited growth is a perilous illusion. We need bold, transformative change: drastically reducing overconsumption and waste, especially by the affluent … reforming food production systems … and adopting an ecological and post-growth economics framework that ensures social justice”.
Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg. Earth’s ecological crises are starkly modelled in the planetary boundaries paradigm. It identifies nine limits within which our activities can safely thrive. We already breach six of these limits – those related to climate, land system and freshwater changes, biosphere integrity, novel (synthetic) entities and modifications in biogeochemical flows. And, we’re trending towards breaching the limit of ocean acidification.
Fortunately, several 21st century movements such as ‘degrowth’ take a holistic approach to decarbonising transitions, with even-handed approaches to achieve both social justice and ecological sustainability. Degrowth explicitly critiques the all-encompassing and ever-eroding drive to growth at all costs, the expanding exploitation of humans and nature. Degrowth challenges growth-driven societies whose economies have proved highly damaging to people and Earth, human and more-than-human nature.
What’s ‘degrowth’?
Degrowth advocates collective sufficiency, caring for Earth and people. In contrast to the distinctly quantitative focus of big-is-better growth, degrowth is an essentially qualitative concept. Degrowth activists seek living practices of collective sufficiency, which means satisfying everyone’s basic needs, no more and no less, through light eco-footprints.
Degrowth is often misunderstood and maligned as if it referred to austerity and depression which are, conversely, intrinsic characteristics of growth economies. It may come as a surprise that the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Olivier De Schutter is a degrowth advocate, his latest book arguing that our ‘quest for growth not only clashes with the need to remain within planetary boundaries, but also creates the very social exclusion it is intended to cure’.
Degrowth is about realising ‘One-planet footprints’, acknowledging that many of us, especially those in the Minority World, radically overconsume whereas the significantly disadvantaged – disproportionately found in the Majority World – need to have their necessities met and their provisioning made more secure. Degrowth works in both directions with equity as the point of balance.
Degrowth micro and macro
Illustrating degrowth characteristics at the household and neighbourhood levels are three cases of ‘prefigurative hybrids’ presented in Chapter 6 of the Post-Carbon Inclusion: Transitions Built on Justice collection co-edited by Ralph Horne, Aimee Ambrose, Gordon Walker and Anitra Nelson. These exemplars of practical degrowth transitions – Cargonomia (Budapest), Haus des Wandels (Berlin) and Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie (Leipzig) –illustrate concerted collective activities by degrowth practitioners, activists and scholars. All three are about ‘open relocalisation’, with neighbourhood, citywide and regional alliances and impacts.
Haus des Wandels, for instance, purchased an abandoned and rundown vocational boarding school in 2018, for around the price of the land. The organisation is slowly renovating the extensive two-storey building with over 60 rooms, including a large concert hall, and useful outbuildings – and repurposing it as a collective household, neighbourhood facility hub and cultural centre. Haus des Wandels is centrally located in an ordinary residential street in the peri-urban village of Steinhöfel, 65km west of Berlin, an hour’s train ride from the city centre.
Haus des Wandels is much more about reducing urban–rural distinctions than a back-to-the-land experiment in self-sufficiency. The wider Steinhöfel community enjoys a pottery studio, library, sewing facilities, exhibitions and events by international artists who – along with other guests – visit and stay at the house. Such visitors are inducted into ‘utopian hospitality’ engaging in the soft radicalism of a cosmopolitan and radical culture of ecological respect, solidarity, self-care, activism, creativity, intersectionality and commoning.
An eagle’s eye view of international inclusion is the focus of another degrowth chapter in Post-Carbon Inclusion. Chapter 13, ‘From an “imperial mode of living” to a “caring commons”’ addresses inequities within global trade, details Zürich’s radical young housing and living cooperatives, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and a 40-year-old not-for-profit Indian environment action group, Kalpavriksh.
Based in Pune, Kalpavriksh engages and collaborates with many Indian communities on conservation and alternative livelihoods, such as community-conserved areas. Cooperation and communal living, autonomy and self-organisation, care for one another and for local ecosystems are all basic structures for these forms of living with nature. India has a long history of village self-governance and collective sufficiency, with community forestry just as common.
Transformational approaches expressing degrowth principles – whether their agents are aware of, or self-identify as, degrowth or not – don’t appear as simple transitionary exercises. Concerted degrowth experiments manifest as brave anti-growth metamorphoses.
Metamorphoses
In contrast to transitional shifts, metamorphoses imply remarkable and wholescale changes of material form, say revolutionising settlement patterns, and active ways of human being. Degrowth implies significant changes to our political, social, cultural and economic structures. To meet all community members’ diverse needs successfully within the limits of Earth suggests much more complex and sophisticated organisational processes.
Instead of private property and producing for trade, think commoning and provisioning for sufficiency. Rather than individuals competing for scarce resources, think collectives working collaboratively for a life of ‘frugal abundance’. Imagine us all participating in deciding what we produce, how we produce it and for whom – on the basis of the needs not just of humans but of the wonderful more-than-human universe within which we as a species want to remain alive.
Anitra Nelson is Honorary Pricipal Fellow at the Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-) at the University of Melbourne (Australia). Ralph Horne is Professor of Geography and Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research and Innovation for the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia).
Post-Carbon Inclusion edited by Ralph Horne, Aimee Ambrose, Gordon Walker and Anitra Nelson is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £27.99.
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