The manifesto of Degrowth Journal

Degrowth has become a thriving academic field, with several hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and a growing community of thinkers and doers. The field is complex, being not only transdisciplinary, but also bridging science and activism. The topic it studies is not an esoteric concern: the socio-ecological crisis and public frustration with our current economic system has catapulted degrowth to previously unseen heights of engagement. Just after the Covid-19 pandemic shaking the very foundation of how we think our relation to nature and others, there has never been a better time to research degrowth.

But doing so is not easy. For someone new to the field, gathering key publications is a daunting treasure hunt, with articles scattered over various journals and books. Quite problematically, it is not uncommon to read incoherent depictions of degrowth. For example, one can read about degrowth being compatible with capitalism, or confused with austerity measures.

Degrowth as a specialised topic deserves its own specialised journal. Degrowth thinkers and doers need an oasis for theoretical work; a place where ideas can be further developed without the need to constantly start from zero making the case for degrowth; a place to voice conceptual conflicts and bring up difficult discussions.

Therefore we, as a collective of junior scholars, have created Degrowth, an academic journal dedicated to the subject, where authors will be able to build on each other's work, expanding and strengthening the analytical power of degrowth imaginaries.

Degrowth needs a home, but not any home. Today, most academic journals are governed by a few privately owned, for-profit corporations. These publishers hold an oligopoly on peer-reviewed knowledge, to which they charge for access, even though there is no legitimate reason for them to do so. Most work required for publication processes - like editing and peer-reviewing - is done on a 'voluntary basis', and the research itself is not funded by the journals but by various funding bodies, including universities, who are later charged to access their own research.

Science cannot remain a prisoner of the capitalist game, and critical academics should not be bystanders to the unjust enclosure of knowledge. It is a tragic irony that those who criticise capitalism meanwhile rely on capitalist firms to publish their critiques of capitalism. Profit making should have no role in science, especially when that very science is about how to escape the social-ecological dead-end created by capitalism. This is not a call for heroic sacrifice; rather, we, the founding editors of this journal, are convinced that by taking a collective stance, critical scholars have the power to change academic culture for the better.

Let us apply the logic of commoning and create a safe 'knowledge commons' in order to protect our ability to study important questions, starting with imagining life beyond growth and capitalism. The journal Degrowth embodies core values of degrowth such as autonomy and solidarity: its goal is to decommodify knowledge, to go against the mass profiteering of commercial publishers and defend free access to science for the common good. This is why the journal is open access and free of charge for both readers and authors.

More than a journal, Degrowth promotes a new publication culture, one that puts quality before quantity and that embraces the principles of slow science. A collaborative science that is free, open, and accessible to all; and an emancipatory science that takes the urgency of the ecological crises seriously while also caring for researchers' well-being. In other words, a science that embodies degrowth.

The publication game is heavily stacked against counter-hegemonic discourses such as degrowth. Under the 'publish-or-perish' imperative, academics are pushed to worship impact factors and quantity over quality in order to have academic 'careers'. As GDP reductionism shows us, there is great danger in allowing a single metric to determine the success of a system as complex as society or science.

The reality is that if all authors strived to maximise indicators such as impact factors, a good way to do this would be to not write about degrowth. Unfortunately, many scholars are faced with focusing on such indicators in order to fund their research. This absurd situation calls for rethinking research priorities, diverting efforts away from people-pleasing, easy-to-publish ideas, to the more fundamental puzzles that stand in the way of social-ecological justice.

This metric-driven way of doing research and science reproduces a toxic system that encourages certain paradigms that are often unable to tackle the pressing issues of our time. On top of that, it is also a culture that weighs heavily on (often overworked) academics, perpetuating unsustainable practices of fast and furious scholarship. Science must be socially useful, but it must also be socially sustainable.

So, welcome to Degrowth: an academic, open-access, international, transdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that focuses on contributions in and around the topic of degrowth. The journal seeks to publish texts of various forms. Check our first call for contributions here.

The founding members of the collective are Tor Persson (administrator), Timothée Parrique (editor), Scott Leatham (editor), Sabrina Chakori (editor), Nick Fitzpatrick (editor), Eeva Houtbeckers (editor), Enrique Mejia (editor), and Ben Robra (editor).

Degrowth is organised as a free, academic, open-access, international, transdisciplinary, and peer-reviewed journal that focuses on advancing the goals of degrowth. It will be published online including open issues and special-issues, and later, rolling submission.

Organised as an international, independent, non-profit association, the editorial collective is decentralised across various countries (e.g., Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK). We meet regularly and operate following the principles of radical democracy. We are currently running without funding and affiliations.

February 2022

In our Manifesto, we call for (and claim to stand for): knowledge for people and planet, not for profit, and a publication counter-culture. Notably, we claim that: “More than a journal, Degrowth promotes a new publication culture, one that puts quality before quantity and that embraces the principles of slow science. A collaborative science that is free, open, and accessible to all, and an emancipatory science that takes the urgency of the ecological crises seriously while also caring for researchers' well-being. In other words, a science that embodies degrowth.” The manifesto goes on, but in a nutshell, it positions the journal against a metrics-driven, productivity-obsessed culture of academic production that is at odds with the ethos of degrowth.

This positioning is about attempting to develop a counter-hegemonic alternative that not only reduces the negative externalities associated with the growth paradigm, but importantly tries to protect and enhance the well-being of the (human) scholars working in this field. Specifically: “This metric-driven way of doing research and science reproduces a toxic system that encourages certain paradigms that are often unable to tackle the pressing issues of our time. On top of that, it is also a culture that weighs heavily on (often overworked) academics, perpetuating unsustainable practices of fast and furious scholarship. Science must be socially useful, but it must also be socially sustainable.”

Further, in our guide for authors, we note that: “We aim to provide our initial desk review response to the author within 2 weeks and we ask our peer reviewers to submit their reviews within 8 weeks. We are deeply mindful, however, that this process is entirely reliant on unpaid voluntary contributions and this means that these timescales will not always be possible. In line with our values, we will always prioritise quality over speed.”

The use of Generative AI in academic production is fundamentally at odds with these values. Not only is it disastrously entangled with the dominant sociotechnical imaginary and the pursuit of exponential economic growth through exponentially increasing productivity (in short, a tool of extractive, exploitative capitalism), but it also intensifies the toxic culture of capitalist-captured scholarly publishing that we claim to stand against. Generative AI tools for “research” do practically nothing to contribute to quality, but they do increase speed and scale. They accelerate the production of academic texts, including through offloading engagement with source materials and existing literature. This discourages and inhibits the development of authentic human skills and knowledge, communication, and critical reflection. 

AI-powered acceleration of academic publishing is not remotely counter-hegemonic. If anything, it will further skew productivity metrics (inflating publication and citation counts) and place even higher demands on academics. For those of us in precarious employment (or aspiring to even be granted precarious employment) in academia, it raises the bar higher, further out of reach.

As such, as now indicated in our guide for authors (external link), we will no longer accept content created by Generative AI.

July 2026