The time for DEGROWTH is now:
As the debates on the climate and ecological crises have entered mainstream politics, we urgently need to envision a just transition towards an ecological society. More and more evidence suggests that such a transition cannot be achieved without reducing production and consumption in industrialised countries. This strategy – known as degrowth – contradicts the most pervasive public policy paradigm: economic growth as measured in GDP. If infinite economic growth on a finite planet is a “fairy tale”, as Greta Thunberg said at the UN, degrowth is both a realistic and serious alternative to this fairy tale.
We face a revolutionary moment in many places of the world where ideas such as degrowth could effectively contribute to transformative politics. Importantly, degrowth is not narrowly concerned with alternatives to economic growth, but rather with the multifaceted issue of what principles and mechanisms could guide an ecologically regenerative and socially just society. The question degrowth poses is how to transition to such a society, in both theory and practice.
Degrowth in Action
Organising for Transformation
WHAT IS DEGROWTH?
Degrowth is a multifaceted concept that escapes single definitions.
One of them defines it as a movement as well as a call for radical social, political and economic transformation, associated with a democratically-led and equitable reduction of resource, material and energy throughput, starting from the overdeveloped West, aimed at improving well-being, ecological sustainability and global justice.
A degrowth economy would be decolonised, democratised, based on care and the commons, and it would translate into an abundance of meaningful convivial time.
Degrowth is a dialectical, pluralistic, subversive and open-ended utopia: a call for an altogether new, qualitatively different world that will evolve through confrontation with the existing one.
Degrowth is not alone. It is just one among many alternatives to development. All these worldviews and practices compose the Pluriverse: “A world where many worlds fit”, as the Zapatistas say.
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