Required Reading

A good starting point for those new to the degrowth story.

Photo by Krzysztof Niewolny on Unsplash

I started this blog about 15 months ago to advance the conversation on degrowth, because I thought that embracing the degrowth path could help us avoid some of the worst in store for us from climate change and overshoot. At the time there weren't many people writing about degrowth and degrowth resources in the mainstream were few and far between.

That is changing.

Last week a group of leading thinkers in the degrowth world published an article in The Lancet Planetary Health. I don’t often tell people to do specific homework, but Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries was written by a degrowth all-star team and does a great job of communicating where we are, where we can be in a post-growth world, and how to get there. The paper is a bit academic, but it isn’t that long. It serves as a good introduction to degrowth for the degrowth curious, with enough detail to provide a thorough encapsulation of the current state of degrowth thought.

Before I start, here are the authors. If you haven’t already, find some of their work, read it and share it. That is a great way to learn more about degrowth.

Prof Giorgos Kallis, PhD, Prof Jason Hickel, PhD, Prof Daniel W O’Neill, PhD Prof Tim Jackson, PhD Prof Peter A Victor, PhD Kate Raworth, MSc, Prof Juliet B Schor, PhD, Prof Julia K Steinberger, PhD, Prof Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, PhD

Here’s part of the summary to give you an idea of where they are coming from:

The paper posits that the central idea of post-growth is to replace the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Key advances discussed in this Review include: the development of ecological macroeconomic models that test policies for managing without growth; understanding and reducing the growth dependencies that tie social welfare to increasing GDP in the current economy; and characterising the policies and provisioning systems that would allow resource use to be reduced while improving human wellbeing. Despite recent advances in post-growth research, important questions remain, such as the politics of transition, and transformations in the relationship between the Global North and the Global South.

How can contemporary societies enhance human wellbeing in the absence of economic growth?

The paper expertly walks through the differences between degrowth, doughnut economics, wellbeing economics, ecological economics and steady state economics. The authors note that all approaches converge on the need for qualitative improvement without relying on quantitative growth, and on selectively decreasing the production of less necessary and more damaging goods and services, while increasing beneficial ones.

First, the authors explain how post-growth research has evolved within planetary sustainability science, engaging with ongoing debates about ecological, social, and economic limits to growth. Second, they provide an overview of controversies, advances, and breakthroughs in the field in the past 5 years and identify remaining knowledge gaps.

The authors visit the landmark Limits to Growth report written in 1972. They find that the historical trends since 1972 do not follow the baseline or Standard Run of the Limits to Growth model, but more to the Double Resources scenario, which assumes human ingenuity would find a way to increase resources in the future. This is encouraging, but does not mean such ingenuity can keep humanity ahead of the curve and avoid collapse. In the double resources scenario, collapse just occurs later and is driven not by scarcity of non-renewable resources (ie, a source limit), as in the Standard Run, but by persistent pollution and its impact on ecosystem stability (ie, a sink limit, otherwise known as a regenerative capacity limit). In other words, we have been able to avoid resource scarcity collapse, but the damage we are doing to our life support system will nonetheless catch up with us. We may be able to find sufficient resources to fuel growth in the short-term future, but we cannot ignore the breaching of planetary boundaries, which risks permanently moving past a safe operating environment for humanity.

The authors explore the issue of whether decoupling GDP from resource use is possible. They find that that while relative decoupling of GDP from material use is common (where GDP grows faster than material use and emissions), there is no evidence of sustained absolute decoupling. Moreover, modelled projections indicate that at the global scale, absolute decoupling is unlikely to occur even with optimistic assumptions about technological advancement.

Human wellbeing.

One of the sections of the paper that stuck with me the most was the section on human wellbeing. I’ve heard most of this before and even read some of the studies they cite. The authors note correctly that GDP growth does not increase human well-being and that we humans will always compare ourselves to others, which drives a vicious cycle of status seeking that leads us to believe our wants are our needs. We as individuals and collectively as a society engage in ultimately self destructive production and consumption that drives growth. What really hit me was the last sentence of this section. The authors state that above a certain level of GDP, the costs of growth (pollution, poor health, social upheaval, etc.) will offset wellbeing benefits. Growth is said to become uneconomic. Well, that’s the ballgame isn’t it.

At a certain point, our drive for growth becomes a self-defeating exercise. We can see that in the breaching of planetary boundaries and the negative impacts of climate change, overshoot and inequality, but we don’t measure those. We measure GDP.

Is it possible?

The authors show that by increased focus on degrowth policies that focus on public services, income equality, and democratic quality, while ceasing to chase economic growth beyond moderate levels of affluence, our needs can be met at much lower levels of energy and materials use.

The authors conclude by noting that a recent review of industrial transformation models and scenarios found that combined supply-side and demand-side measures could reduce current economy-wide material use by 56%, energy use by 40–60%, and greenhouse gas emissions by 70% to net zero.

Sign me up.

I recommend you share this Lancet article far and wide. It is the kind of succinct (relatively speaking) document I wish was around all those years ago when I was starting to learn about degrowth. It’s a great place to start for the degrowth curious, and a great piece of confirmation to all of those talking about this in public, to let us know we aren’t crazy.

The authors note that of course growth isn’t an economic imperative. Growth is a political imperative. Politicians, leaders and most of humanity can’t imagine a world focused on any other goal than growth.

We have our work cut out for us.

But it is the work that needs to be done.