This special feature brings together six contributions selected from papers presented at the Third and Fourth International Conferences on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity (Venice 2012, and Leipzig 2014) and an ad hoc call for papers that we launched in August 2013. While early degrowth scholarly contributions were generally focused on problem diagnostics, i.e. “Why degrowth?” (Schneider et al. 2010; Saed 2012; Martinez-Alier et al. 2010; Cattaneo et al. 2012), more recent debates have focused on the prognosis, i.e. “What needs to be done and how?” (D’Alisa et al. 2014; Sekulova et al. 2013; Kallis et al. 2012; Kosoy 2013). This special feature provides: first, some light on the discursive weaknesses of the sustainable development paradigm and on the economic and ecological implications of a global downscaling of resource and energy consumption; second, it provides new evidence on the actual practice of degrowth by analysing distinct political and social initiatives developed at distinct administrative and spatial scales, from local to regional and global levels. Overall, the articles shed light on some of the opportunities and challenges involved in the transformation that socially sustainable degrowth entails while contributing to challenge contemporary economic development narratives.
Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo open the collection of papers with a critical analysis of the shifting discourses on the relationship between growth and the environment in international sustainability policy. The authors review key policy documents from the publication of the Limits to Growth report and the celebration of the first Earth Summit in Stockholm (1972) to the celebration of the last Earth summit in Rio (2012). They identify three major discursive shifts in these policy documents over the studied period. First, whereas in the first years of international sustainability policy in the 1970s, perpetual economic growth was considered the origin of environmental problems, it is now fully acknowledged as the solution to them. A key insight is that the concept of sustainable development, as presented by the 1987 Brundtland Report, played a key role in the restoration of growth as a desirable objective from an environmental and social point of view. Second, the authors identify a discursive shift from states and public regulation to private initiatives and market-based instruments as preferred means for addressing global ecological problems. Third, the politically committed tone of the first declarations in the 1970s—linking sustainability to equality, autonomy and cooperation, among other societal goals—gave way to the current technocratic approach where sustainability is presented as an apolitical problem to be tackled through technical fixes. The authors conclude that from the sustainable development consensus, sustainability principles have been over time re-shaped to fit dominant economic ideas, including the axiomatic necessity of unconstrained growth. These ideas, they argue, have to be broken down to move towards a radical turn in international sustainability policy that effectively tackles the roots of ecological and social degradation. A critical question for future research and action concerns whether and how the degrowth movement can help in this endeavor.
Capellán-Pérez et al. address the potential limits of global economic growth by applying a system dynamics global model that allows economic, energy and climate dynamics to be analysed in an integrated way under different socioeconomic alternatives. Their results suggest that expanding the use of coal as a means to maintain global economic growth in the future would not only be unfeasible due to supply limits, but also undesirable because of the climate impacts that would unfold during the next decades. Subsequently, they explore the economic and energy implications of an anticipated democratic collective shift towards a smaller and equitable economy which does not depend on economic growth. Some guidelines are derived for such a transformation including: the prompt application of strong sustainable and transition energy policies, the decrease of around 10 % in global total primary energy demand, a radical transformation of the transportation sector and equal sharing of the total primary energy supply per capita. In terms of GDP, such a transition would imply a global convergence to the current world average level, whereby industrialized countries would reduce their per capita GDP four times while the Southern countries would increase it threefold. The transition would also require that the most energy-intensive countries should reduce their current per capita energy consumption by 70 % to allow the least energy-intensive ones to increase it by 30 %.
Gerber’s is the first of three papers providing insights on new forms of practising degrowth. He offers a preliminary overview of the main types of local credit systems, ascertaining their possible role in the degrowth transformation. He evaluates classical credit systems and modern credit alternatives to highlight their relevance for socially sustainable degrowth. He argues that post-growth-friendly credit arrangements should also consider the use of alternative forms of money, because the money we use on a daily basis has been created by commercial banks through credit and as such it creates constant pressures towards growth. He thus proceeds with an evaluation of local credit systems based on alternative money, from negative interest credit to social credit and mutual credit. He finds that the transformation towards a post-growth credit system apt for degrowth should go through different stages and levels. At the community level, local mutual credit systems could integrate the national currency and represent a good starting point for the degrowth transformation. At the national level, a Douglasian-type social credit scheme (with universal basic income and ticketing system) combined with a large-scale socialization of investment credit would cancel much of the routine needs for credit.
Kunze and Becker discuss the role that small-scale renewable energy cooperatives can play in a degrowth social–ecological transformation, thus enriching emerging debates about economic democracy and cooperativism within the degrowth literature (Johanisova and Wolf 2012; Johanisova et al. 2013). The authors define a new concept that would be able to embody such a challenge through its embedded normative goals: collective and politically motivated renewable energy projects (CPE). The political motivation rests on a participatory and democratic organisational structure combined with collective legal ownership and collective benefit allocation mechanisms. CPEs also include at least one of the following normative goals: an overall reduction of energy consumption, the protection of biodiversity, sustainable agriculture, a transition town agenda or more social equity and the empowerment of disadvantaged groups. Starting from an European survey on renewable energy projects, the study further narrows down the research scope upon sixteen projects, where in-depth interviews are carried out, and presents the results of four emblematic cases from Wales, Italy, Spain and Germany. The cases analysed show that CPE can involve an upscaling movement, growing beyond the niche in which they emerged. The authors argue that if CPEs and alternatives more generally emerge at multi-scalar levels, they could embody a transformational potential beyond capitalism.
Missoni deals with health, an almost neglected topic within degrowth scholarship (an exception is Borowy 2013). While acknowledging the important role of community action for local change and individual lifestyle changes, Missoni argues that these experiences would fail if not embedded in a global governance system aiming at correcting socioeconomic determinants of health. The author argues that trade liberalization and deregulation processes intensified the commodification and commercialization of vital social determinants of health, affecting it through a variety of mechanisms, including changes in lifestyles, environmental degradation, reduced human security, privatization and commercialization of health care. Further, global public–private partnerships allowed private interest to influence global and national health policies. In this regard, the author uses two case studies from the food and tobacco industries to exemplify the need for public regulation in contrast to corporate practices inducing unhealthy lifestyles, and he highlights the importance of transnational social movements in pushing the prioritization of health and equity goals in policymaking. The author advocates for a more comprehensive analysis of the relations between health and degrowth, which should extend beyond medicine and health-care systems to focus also on the social determinants of health and the study of how such determinants might change during and after the transformation advocated by degrowth. According to Missoni, health policy in the context of degrowth should be governed by the principle of ‘doing better with less’ (Benatar 2013), i.e. focusing on the promotion of healthy lifestyles and choices, the control of medical consumerism and a more cautious use of technological resources in health services. Missoni argues that the World Health Organisation can potentially play an important role in promoting these changes in health governance through, for example, international standards or a new legally binding global health treaty.
The special feature ends with a review article by Escobar who situates degrowth and post-development theory within the larger context of transition discourses. He presents an overview of transition discourses and initiatives. Then he pays attention to the resurgence of post-development debates in Latin American social movements through notions such as ‘Buen Vivir’. The author underscores that both degrowth and post-development theory challenge the centrality of development, capitalism, market and growth in economic and cultural representations; they share intellectual sources and converge in the link between ecology and social justice; and they are aimed towards radical societal transformations. Escobar also argues that both approaches can learn from each other in a number of critical issues. For example, degrowth could emulate some of the post-development epistemic practices in which local knowledges are central to cross-scale political and economic changes, while post-development could create scholarly networks similar to those of degrowth to gain greater impact on academic circles. Post-development scholars’ interest in biocentrism and non-dualist approaches could be a fruitful input to develop in greater depth the critique to modernity embedded in degrowth thinking, whereas degrowth’s notion of conviviality could be helpful to advance a critique to over-consumption in the global South. Finally, Escobar stresses the importance for transition discourses to move away from a view of globalization as the universalization of modernity and adopt instead a view of globality as the struggle to preserve and foster the ‘pluriverse’.
The articles together make evident that degrowth aims at re-embedding the economy within local communities and environments by means of re-localization and self-reliance through grassroot innovations and alternatives, and at the same time it is aware that such practices are insufficient for the transformation required unless major shifts in national and supra-national political and economic structures also take place. Additionally, the articles implicitly suggest that ‘the local’ is not contained or mobilized as a form of ‘militant particularism’ (Harvey 1996): radical localizers do not argue against connections out of the locality per se (such as in the form of networks), but argue against reification of connections as always inevitable and good, thus emphasizing the ‘materiality’ of scale (North 2005, 2010).
Repoliticizing the science and practice of sustainability
In the opening article of this journal, Komiyama and Takeuchi (2006) regretted the political biases of the concept of sustainable development, to which sustainability science is inextricably linked (Kates et al. 2001). Such biases, they argued, raised concerns about the solidity of its scientific basis, which remained unclear to many (Komiyama and Takeuchi 2006). For degrowth, the weakness of sustainable development as a truly transformative concept directly stems from its falsely consensual nature (Hornborg 2009). Degrowth unveils the ideological role of capitalist growth (Purdey 2010) and opens up the debate about the relations between economy, society and sustainability, including their cognitive, material and political interactions. In other words, degrowth helps to further emphasize the existing contradictions between growth, the environment and social well-being, and envisions a potential multi-scalar transformation pathway towards smaller and localized economies that redistribute wealth, supported by state and supra-national policies. In doing so, degrowth aspires to repoliticize the debates on the science and practice of sustainability.
It has been suggested that sustainability scientists have embraced a ‘thin sustainability’ concept—“meeting human needs, both now and in the future, without degrading the planet’s life support systems” (Miller 2013:283). Such a definition encourages widespread agreement, but limits the degree to which deeper discussions over a ‘thick sustainability’ and what it might mean to different people in different contexts take place (Miller 2013). By providing a thicker meaning of sustainability, degrowth re-politicizes the debate and asks the following question: If we are to guarantee a sustainable and just future for present and future generations, why should our economies grow?
Almost 15 years after sustainability science was coined as a new scientific endeavour (Kates et al. 2001), the problems it aims to address have not diminished but exacerbated. The mismatch between a growing scientific field and effective and sustainable social–ecological change can be explained by different factors, including insufficient scientific engagement with stakeholders, anachronistic academic institutions and incentives, lack of meta-studies making transdisciplinary sustainability research available to scholars and practitioners and, in general, a missing link between knowledge production and action (Wiek et al. 2012; van der Leeuw et al. 2012; Kauffman and Arico 2014; Miller et al. 2014). Accordingly, ways forward have been advanced including fundamental reforms in the academy, more comparative studies making sustainability insights accessible and applicable, and a new social contract between scientists and society in which scientists participate in the co-production of knowledge for action with other stakeholders (Wiek et al. 2012; Kauffman and Arico 2014; Wittmayer and Schäpke 2014). Important as these factors may be, we argue that if they are not articulated into a broader critique of the fundamental underpinnings of our societies, such as that offered by degrowth and other transformation approaches (Escobar 2015, this feature), sustainability science is unlikely to meaningfully inform the social–ecological transformation required to confront the global environmental crisis. Uncovering the ideology and practice of economic growth (connected to capitalism) as the ultimate driver of unsustainability may help sustainability science to further flourish and be more influential in re-defining the Earth’s sustainable future.
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