Introduction
In the late 1980s, the sustainable development paradigm emerged to provide a framework through which economic growth, social welfare and environmental protection could be harmonized. However, more than 30 years later, we can assert that such harmonization has proved elusive. Steffen et al. (2015) have shown that four out of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed: climate change, impacts in biosphere integrity, land-system change and altered biochemical flows are a manifestation that human activities are driving the Earth into a new state of imbalance. Meanwhile, wealth concentration and inequality have increased, particularly during the last 50 years (Piketty 2014). In 2008, the collapse of large financial institutions was prevented by the public bailout of private banks and, nowadays, low growth rates are likely to become the norm in the economic development of mature economies (Summers 2013; IMF 2015; Teulings and Baldwin 2015). The three pillars of sustainability (environment, society and economy) are thus simultaneously threatened by an intertwined crisis.
In an attempt to problematize the sustainable development paradigm, and its recent reincarnation in the concept of a “green economy”, degrowth emerged as a paradigm that emphasizes that there is a contradiction between sustainability and economic growth (Kothari et al. 2015; Dale et al. 2015). It argues that the pathway towards a sustainable future is to be found in a democratic and redistributive downscaling of the biophysical size of the global economy (Schneider et al. 2010; D’Alisa et al. 2014). In the context of this desired transformation, it becomes imperative to explore ways in which sustainability science can explicitly and effectively address one of the root causes of social and environmental degradation worldwide, namely, the ideology and practice of economic growth. This special feature aims to do so by stressing the deeply contested and political nature of the debates around the prospects, pathways and challenges of a global transformation towards sustainability.
The ‘growth’ paradigm (Dale 2012; Purdey 2010) is indeed largely accepted in advanced and developing countries alike as an unquestioned imperative and naturalized need. It escapes ‘the political’, i.e. the contested public terrain where different imaginaries of possible socio-ecological orders compete over the symbolic and material institutionalization of these visions. In this sense, the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism appears as a post-political space, i.e. a political formation that forecloses the political, the legitimacy of dissenting voices and positions (Swyngedouw 2007). As Swyngedouw (2014:91) argues: “the public management of things and people is hegemonically articulated around a naturalization of the need of economic growth and capitalism as the only reasonable and possible form of organization of socio-natural metabolism. This foreclosure of the political in terms of at least recognizing the legitimacy of dissenting voices and positions constitutes a process of de-politicization. […] (The) wider framework of neoliberal growth is in itself not contestable.”
Counter-hegemonic discourses and praxis are needed to re-politicize the debate about what kind of society (and sustainability) we want to live in and to open up alternative avenues (Mouffe 2005). Degrowth aims to repoliticize the debate on the relationships between sustainability, economy and society (Kallis et al. 2014) and to advance a new vision of social–ecological transformations. It contributes to building a counter-hegemonic narrative, in alliance with equivalent alternative frameworks emerging from the global South such as Buen Vivir from Latin America (Gudynas 2011), ecological Swaraj from India (Kothari 2014) and Ubuntu from South Africa (Metz 2011).
In what follows, we present first the intellectual origins of degrowth, to explain how such a paradigm understands the question of sustainability. Special attention is paid to the social and ecological limits to growth and to the social–ecological transformation envisioned by the degrowth paradigm. Next, we discuss the contents of the papers included in this Special Feature. Finally, we conclude by stressing the contribution of degrowth to sustainability science and practice, and argue for a re-politicization of the science and practice of sustainability
Degrowth
Origins and foundational scientific premises
The concept décroissance (degrowth) was first coined by André Gorz in a debate organized by Le Nouvel Observateur in Paris in 1972, as a follow-up of the Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al. 1972; Demaria et al. 2013). Participants included philosophers Herbert Marcuse and Edgard Morin, the ecologist Edward Goldsmith and the then President of the European Commission Sicco Mansholt. Gorz employed the term to question the compatibility of the capitalist system with the “degrowth of material production”,1 and he underscored the importance of reducing consumption and promoting values like frugality, autonomy and conviviality.
Gorz’s commentary exemplifies the encounter of the ecologist and culturalist critiques of economics (Latouche 2011, 2013; Bonaiuti 2013; Martinez-Alier et al. 2010). The former draws centrally on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s bio-economics, which relies on ecological science to challenge orthodox economics (Sorman and Giampietro 2013). The culturalist critique is inspired by ‘post-development’ theorists and political ecologists, who critiqued the widespread adoption of particular technologies and consumption and production models from the global North worldwide (Illich 1973, 1978; Gorz 1975, 1991, 2009; Latouche, 2009, 2011). For Bonaiuti (2008, 2013), these two lines of critical thought share similar pre-analytical premises and they antagonize with the sustainable development paradigm, which does not question the anthropological, political, cultural and institutional premises of growth economics. Indeed, Georgescu-Roegen’s bio-economics unravelled the entropic nature of the economic process. While economic science was built on the mechanistic paradigm (Newton–Laplace) and on the model of classic science, the thermodynamic revolution, Georgescu-Roegen (1971) argued, should urge us to consider the fundamental element of irreversible time and the increase of entropy in a closed system. Georgescu-Roegen (1971, 2009) emphasizes the ecological limits to growth (Grinevald 2008) and his works, alongside Boulding’s (1966) thesis on biophysical limitations of economic activity and Kapp’s (1961, 1970) reframing of environmental externalities as an inherent aspect of modern consumption and production, are considered the foundations of ecological economics.
Building on ecological economics research, degrowth challenges the possibility that economic growth can be decoupled from material and energy flows (Jackson 2009; Dietz and O’Neill 2013). It is argued that even if there is some evidence for relative decoupling—e.g. world GDP has risen faster than carbon dioxide emissions over the last 18 years (Jackson 2009)—absolute decoupling, i.e. absolute decline in resource use over time while the economy grows, is not occurring (Ayres et al. 2004; Krausmann et al. 2009; Galeotti et al. 2006; Stern 2004; Soumyananda 2004). Degrowth thus challenges the possibility that some ideas, such as the dematerialization of the world’s economy (UNEP 2011), ecological modernization, green growth (Martinez-Alier 2014; Latouche 2009; Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo 2015, this feature) and the circular economy (Haas et al. 2015) fulfil their promises. Additionally, degrowth calls attention to the fact that eco-efficiency gains are often re-invested in further consumption or economic activities that counterbalance the improvements achieved (Jevons’ Paradox or rebound effect, Polimeni et al. 2007).
The interest for critical engagements with economic growth and development paradigms faded during the last two decades of the twentieth century, but revived with the turn of the new one (Kallis et al. 2014). A special issue in 2002 was published in the journal Silence (No. 280), and a colloquium entitled “Unmaking development, redoing the world” was held at UNESCO in Paris on that same year (Duverger 2011; Muraca 2013). With the organization of the first international colloquium on sustainable degrowth in Lyon in 2003, which gathered hundreds of participants from France, Switzerland and Italy, degrowth established itself as an international movement (D’Alisa et al. 2014). Degrowth became “both a banner associated with social and environmental movements and an emergent concept in academic and intellectual circles, [which] are interdependent and affect each other” (Martinez-Alier et al. 2010:1742). At least five international academic conferences with civil society participation were subsequently held in Paris (2008), Barcelona (2010), Venice and Montreal (2012) and Leipzig (2014) with increasing number of participants (in Leipzig there were about 3000 participants) and the next one will be organized in Budapest in 2016. Once a marginal perspective, degrowth is starting to being referred to also in the mainstream debate. For instance, recently Paul Krugman (2014) in The New York Times noticed that “anti-growth environmentalism is a marginal position even on the Left, but it’s widespread enough to call out nonetheless”. Even Pope Francis (2015), in his Encyclical Laudato Si’, argues that “the time has come to accept degrowth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources for other places to experience healthy growth”.2
Defining principles
As noted above, degrowth was originally placed at the junction of ecological and cultural critiques to economic growth and development, but has recently evolved to encompass also concerns on democracy, justice, meaning of life and well-being (Flipo 2007; Demaria et al. 2013). Degrowth has thus given birth to an incipient social movement and activist-led science and it has been depicted as “a performative fiction indicating the necessity of a rupture with the growth society” (Latouche 2013:7). Some scholars and activists have tried to define degrowth more concretely as a downscaling movement. Schneider et al. (2010:512) define it as “an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long term”.
The adjective ‘socially sustainable’ has often accompanied the term to stress that the normative content of degrowth is overall related to the improvement of social well-being and equity, and to distinguish it from ‘unsustainable degrowth’, that is, from economic recessions that deteriorate social conditions (Schneider et al. 2010). The objective of degrowth is not to reduce GDP, an arbitrary indicator (Fioramonti 2013; Philipsen 2015), but to increase social justice and ecological sustainability. Therefore, degrowth should not be understood in its literal meaning (i.e. negative growth of GDP) or just as shrinking of material throughput (Sekulova et al. 2013; Kallis et al. 2014). The mere shrinking of consumption and production levels by themselves would be even more deleterious than current growth systems. Growth economies do not know how to degrow: there is nothing worse than a growth society that does not grow (Latouche 2008:18; Kallis et al. 2012). Degrowth is a provocative slogan to challenge, and escape, the ideology of growth (Hamilton 2004). It is a social project or, borrowing from Bloch, a ‘concrete utopia’ (Muraca 2014; Latouche 2009) that envisions a deep social–ecological transformation. Emphasis is not put on ‘less’, but on ‘different’: “In a degrowth society, everything will be different: different activities, different forms and uses of energy, different relations, different gender roles, different allocations of time between paid and non-paid work and different relations with the non-human world” (Kallis et al. 2014:4).
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