Publications

Sustainable food systems are essential for societies to be able to thrive within planetary boundaries. Multiple visions compete to cast light on the future of food production and consumption worldwide. However, it has become difficult for many to imagine pathways to just and sustainable food systems. To navigate this bloc, this essay explores food system sustainability from a degrowth perspective. Departing from socio-technical and socio-ecological readings of food systems’ unsustainability, degrowth builds on a critique of our dominant socio-economic system that pursues growth at all costs, resulting in human exploitation and environmental destruction. Thus the purpose of this essay is to sketch visions and pathways for post-growth food systems, stimulating readers to imagine and practice food systems – and other forms of society and economy more broadly – that ensure environmental justice and a good life for all within planetary boundaries.

This article provides a case study of the game Le Grand Jeu (LGJ), which extends into a general analysis of the potential of games in the diversification of the economy, in particular with regard to money. Further, we explore LGJ’s capacity to expand the horizon of the possible, as is often called for in theories of degrowth and related literature. Le Grand Jeu is a game, developed via community arts, used for the introduction of cryptocurrencies. We explore the development of that game and how it can be used as a tool that allows the utopian propensity to be explored and purposed to our own reality. We discuss the role of money, or more appropriately, monies, in generating social change, and locate this discussion in the context of degrowth literature. Practical degrowth alternatives to current mainstream economic approaches are needed. We argue that money games are a practical approach to fostering political imagination and are real-life versions of economic modelling. Furthermore, the ‘open world assumption’ within some games adds personal presence and mutual reflexivity to the general understanding of an economic model. We show that the use of games in workshops and real-time play allows a more realistic, integral economics to be explored.

Skeptics of degrowth often place their hopes in clean energy technologies, such as wind turbines, to offset the consequences associated with a growing economy that demands equally high rates of energy. Rather than reduce economic production, as proponents of degrowth argue is necessary to mitigate social and environmental consequences, clean energy is held up as a perfect ‘business as usual’ solution that will allow economic growth to continue. Taking a degrowth perspective, this paper uses a supply chain analysis to de-fetishize the wind turbine as a source of immaterial clean energy. While affirming that renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels are necessary, they are insufficient from a degrowth perspective to offset the consequences of continuous growth. Instead, technological improvements, including wind power, must be complimented by policy that reduces economic impact overall.

Ailie Rutherford is a visual artist, curator and the founder and artistic director of Feminist Exchange Network, a Glasgow based collective led by women and other marginalised genders which uses social and activist art to explore feminist economics in practice and in relation to women’s lived experience. Ailie’s feminist economic artworks have been shown internationally including Unbox festival (India), Institute of Network Cultures (Netherlands), Supermarkt (Germany), Rum 46 (Denmark), Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands), Sheffield DocFest (England), and Documenta 15 (Germany). In 2023, artist Ailie Rutherford was commissioned by the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) to create an exhibition and workshop series as part of the project ‘Women in multiple low-paid employment: pathways between, care and health’ (2020-2024). The academic project was the first to study the nature and extent of women’s multiple low paid employment (MLPE) in the UK. Ailie Rutherford led a series of workshops at GWL entitled ‘Mapping Women’s Work’. The resulting exhibition Pouring Out, Pouring In shared prints and other outcomes from the workshop series wherein the women involved mapped out their multiple paid and unpaid roles, thinking together about what a more equitable economic system might look like. This excerpt is from the Pouring Out, Pouring In exhibition booklet, co-authored by artist Ailie Rutherford along with lead researcher Louise Lawson, at University of Glasgow, and GWL curator Caroline Gausden. It describes the process and shares prints and other outcomes from the workshop series which visualized the complex nature of work and care for many women. Pouring out, Pouring In demonstrates how artistic work intersects with the Degrowth Agenda to collectively research and develop alternative socially just futures. The work is funded by the Nuffield Foundation, an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being.

Chastened humanism offers philosophical grounding for an alternative hedonism that might make degrowth palatable to consumer societies. Though not identical to degrowth, alternative hedonism is attitudinally adjacent to its deflationary impulse, its “soft landing” approach to global political-economic restructuring. For degrowth to become ideologically attractive, wealthier humans need to enjoy “less” more. Chastened humanism suggests one philosophical foundation for such enjoyment or retraining of desire. Under conditions of scarcity and risk, but prior to the intensely diminished resource access to come, chastened humanism redevelops classical humanist thought toward a vision of enjoyable transcendence-toward-less, offering a strategy for collective meaning-making that can ground alternative hedonism and degrowth alike. Chastened humanism comprises (1) humility on the basis of species-membership and (2) commitment to transcendence-toward-less. This offers a way of negotiating hard cultural and planetary constraints with an eye to transcending an apparent ecological law of niche construction. If humans, like other species, construct our ecological niche to maximize resource metabolization until interrupted by other biota, and if capitalism and carbon technologies intensify our capacities for niche construction unto death, what will allow us to interrupt ourselves? What habits of mind can help us to desire, and so strive effectively for, the transcendence of “ecological law” that would be collective self-limitation of resource consumption at a mass scale? Chastened humanism draws out from Italian humanist Giambattista Vico’s orations On Humanistic Education a way of thinking about such desirable self-limitation as transcendence.

In Céline Keller’s Who is Afraid of Degrowth?, the publicly accessible debate on degrowth is curated and restaged in a comic format. Keller’s illustrations not only visualize the conversations as they happen across a range of platforms—from snappy, heated retorts on “X,” to long scholarly treatises, memes, and infographics floating around the web—but contextualizes them within the network of references and influences. Moreover, drawing on Victor Fei Lim’s framework for multimodal discourse analysis, Keller’s own stance within the debate becomes clear through the illustrations and her staging of the mise en scene and the mise en page (to apply Geraint D’Arcy’s terms, 2020). This review examines how Keller not only indexes the argument for and against debate, but inserts her own arguments through the visual plane, showing how Who is Afraid of Degrowth? imagines an alternative to the current patterns of public discourse.

Drawing on Marx's previously unpublished research, Saitō argues for a radical rethinking of Marxist theory. The book critiques both green capitalism and state-led climate solutions, revealing how market mechanisms merely displace the contradictions of capital. Instead, Saitō advocates for degrowth communism through commons-based production, shortened work weeks, and worker cooperatives. These findings suggest that a revolutionary strategy of class war is more suitable to achieving social-ecological transformation rather than a reformist approach to markets and states. 

This article explores the relationship between degrowth and the theory of Capital as Power (CasP), aiming to understand how socio-ecological transformations can unfold against capitalist power dynamics. While degrowth scholars have largely overlooked this perspective on capital, CasP argues that capitalism is primarily a mode of power, with capitalisation quantifying power – the confidence in – the ability to shape society against opposition. Key CasP concepts are brought into dialogue with degrowth research to identify potential implications and offer a step towards a theory of change for degrowth. The article first outlines the CasP perspective, including its notion of power, the process of capitalisation and the conflictual nature of capital accumulation, and highlights links with degrowth research. It then looks at the elements underlying the valuation of capital as power and how they provide entry points for degrowth transformations. The role of dominant capital groups and the concept of “sabotage” in exercising power over society are then addressed. As such, degrowth transformations must challenge the confidence of dominant capital groups in their ability to rule, as these groups inhibit possibilities for socio-ecological change. This dynamic, summarised in a conceptual diagram, provides a first step towards a theory of change for degrowth in the face of capital accumulation. Finally, the conclusion offers potential directions for further research.

In this paper, I argue that the discourse around a degrowth transition may be conceptualized as following two distinct narratives, or narrative strategies: one that highlights a threat (or a challenge) to be overcome, and one that highlights a promise to be fulfilled. Whereas the former proposes that there are no ‘win-win solutions’ under current conditions of capitalism, the latter argues that ‘win-win solutions’ are very much in reach, if only one were to reconceptualize ‘winning’ in terms of non-materialist abundance. Arguably, both narratives are valid, but at the same time they lead to diametrically opposed conclusions on ethical demands: while the threat narrative implies an ‘ethics of constraint’, the promise narrative implies an ‘ethics of abundance’. I argue that being aware of the dialectical character of these two narratives that degrowth scholars typically make use of in different contexts will help to understand divergent policy advice and proposed leverage points, and it might help to avoid misunderstandings within the community and beyond.

The essay explores how speculative fiction and sound art can serve as powerful tools for envisioning and promoting desirable futures. We take extractivist practices in Mozambique as a starting subject of indignation. Reflecting on how artistic mediums allow for an emotional and imaginative critique of real-world issues, such as neocolonialism and environmental exploitation. We argue that fictions shape societies and that our world is driven by dominant narratives - such as capitalism or growth metrics like GDP - that often obscure alternative ways of living and being. By blending speculative fiction with sound art, our theater play The Dynamic Ministry of Insubordination aims to challenge these prevailing dystopian narratives that dominate our cultural and political landscapes. Through our theater and radiophonic play, we critique the exploitation of resources and labor, exploring the absurdity of modern practices through the lens of a post-capitalist, animist future. We call for a reclaiming of imagination to foster hope and envision utopian futures. The work highlights the need to shift from an anthropocentric worldview and embrace a more holistic understanding of existence, where humans, non-human beings, and inert matter share agency. Through artistic expression, we wish to question established hierarchies and inspire paradigm shifts that promote more sustainable, equitable, and joyful futures.

As humanity faces multiple mutually-reinforcing social-ecological crises, rhetoric on transformations abounds. However, transformations are normative, politically-contested processes that risk perpetuating, or even exacerbating, the ecological and socio-economic crises of today. We argue that transformations should seek to enhance human and non-human well-being within the planetary boundaries; a goal that is enshrined in degrowth theory. In this paper, we present an analytical framework that synthesises key concepts from transformations and degrowth literature against which a niche initiative’s degrowth transformative capacity can be evaluated. This is based on a set of 32 qualitative, codable criteria. We delineate the constitutive elements of degrowth transformative capacity based on five key elements: 1) Degrowth Goals and Visions, 2) Building Networks, 3) Empowerment and Learning, 4) Democratic Governance, and 5) Fair Resource Flows. We then illustrate the usefulness of this framework by presenting a comparison of seven energy communities in Greece, in terms of their degrowth transformative capacity. The framework can be seen as a descriptive starting point that can be expanded or adapted by academics and/or practitioners to explore degrowth futures and degrowth transformative capacity in other sectors (e.g., food or transportation) and contexts (e.g., Global South countries).

Healthcare is not only an essential human right; it is one of the largest and most complex industries in the world. Maintaining access to effective healthcare while reducing harm to both human and planetary health is a central task for a successful voluntary degrowth transition. Safely transforming large, complex and often for-profit healthcare organisations and systems will pose significant challenges for degrowth planners and policymakers, yet this transition may also offer important opportunities to address hitherto intractable problems common to most high income healthcare systems. A range of organisational options for local, democratically controlled health services exist including small-scale local enterprises, cooperatives and social enterprises, yet most nations already run extensive public healthcare systems, suggesting that more straightforward nationalisation and public ownership may also be feasible. Meanwhile, preparations are required to improve healthcare system resilience against risks of collapse and unplanned, involuntary degrowth. This discussion of healthcare illustrates important tensions within the broader degrowth paradigm: a focus on organic, bottom-up re-localisation will frequently be in tension with the need for complexity and scale in several crucial aspects of modern healthcare delivery, risking economic dualism if not adequately resolved. There is no alternative to acknowledging the central role of the state in leading and driving a safe and effective degrowth transition in healthcare. Degrowth thinkers need to develop more pragmatic, practical policy visions if their theoretical models are to be capable of realisation.

Developed in the early 1970s, the concept of “Black ecology” addressed the experienced realities of separate and unequal sets of ecological vantage points and environmental concerns both within the United States and around the world. As a predominantly European movement, degrowth has given relatively little attention to questions of racism and racial barriers, not just globally, but also within Europe and the United States. While some attention has gone toward discussing Indigenous models (e.g., Buen Vivir, Ubuntu), questions of race seem largely relegated within degrowth literature to the coverage of the Environmental Justice movement. In doing so, degrowth scholars and activists have missed a broader view of Black ecology, a more critical analysis of racism, and additional opportunities for inspiration and practical alliance. Ecological priorities within degrowth have also largely missed several areas related to Black ecology such as prison abolition, addiction/sobriety, and intersections of sanctity, animals, and health. Black ecology (exemplified here with womanism, Rastas, MOVE, and others) may help degrowth address some of its glaring omissions, heal debilitating colorblindness, better navigate complex socio-ecological issues, and build more balanced and effective alliances. Situated on the frontlines of both ecological vulnerability and an alternative life-centered economics, Black ecology offers a fertile opportunity for degrowth to develop a bridge between unsustainable “imperial modes of living” and the sustainable “original model” of many stateless Indigenous societies.

This book review discusses Clive Spash’s Foundations of Social Ecological Economics: The Fight for Revolutionary Change in Economic Thought. It summarises each chapter and highlights the book’s significance for degrowth scholarship. Additionally, it critiques Spash’s overly scholastic interpretation of judgmental rationality, which underestimates the significance of pragmatism in strategically important policy contexts. However, the review acknowledges the book as an unparalleled effort in outlining a consistent framework for social ecological economics grounded in an understanding of economies as social provisioning systems.