Degrowth

Michelle Appelros, Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, Fernando Racimo, Rebecca Rutt

Related terms: alternative economies (wellbeing, sufficiency, provisioning, doughnut, caring), postgrowth, socio-ecological justice, socio-ecological sustainability. 

Introduction

The term ‘degrowth’ is showing up more and more in public debate – but what exactly does it stand for?  Where does it come from? What does it offer us in pursuit of healthier ecologies and more fulfilled societies? This entry offers a broad introduction to the term. We argue that degrowth today is a lively scholar-activist field chock-full of ideas and a deepening and diversifying evidence base. But it also encompasses substantial, ongoing debates – some of which point in the direction of stronger engagement with the environmental humanities and environmental justice, not least critiques of anthropocentrism, colonialism, and modernity.

The Rise of Degrowth

‘Degrowth’, English for the French term for ‘reduction’ (decroissance), was first proposed by the French environmental philosopher André Gorz in 1972. He intended to bridge discussions on the philosophical, cultural, and political underpinnings of capitalist economic growth taking place in many critical disciplines at the time (Gollain 2012). This theoretical rethinking of previous scholarly conversations helped to move degrowth from smaller disciplinary circles to a broader readership.

More specialised discussions of degrowth developed through the work of ecological economists of the 1970s. Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) wrote The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, mobilising the notion of entropy from the second law of thermodynamics to criticise the notion in economics that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible. He thereby forwarded a comprehensive theory linking human economic activities and biophysical constraints, which he termed “bioeconomics”, and that would later evolve into what we know today as “ecological economics” (Ferrari 2023). In the following year (1972), the Club of Rome published a similar analysis in their famous report, The Limits to Growth. Another essential early degrowth scholar, philosopher and public intellectual, Ivan Illich, advanced a critique of the (anti- or pro-) democratic implications of technologies with his book, Tools for Conviviality (1973). Illich also first invoked the snail metaphor that later became the symbol of degrowth. As cited in the later work of the degrowth economist and philosopher Serge Latouche, Illich once stated:

A snail, after adding many widening rings to the delicate structure of its shell, suddenly brings its accustomed activities to a stop. A single additional ring would increase the size of the shell sixteen times. Instead of contributing to the welfare of the snail, it would burden the creature with such an excess of weight that any increase in its productivity would henceforth be literally outweighed by the task of coping with the difficulties created by enlarging the shell beyond the limits set by its purpose (Latouche 2009, 22).

Illich’s evocative statement helped illuminate the absurdity of striving for exponential economic growth. Latouche’s own more recent work, at the intersections of economic analysis, political science, and philosophy, was pivotal in lifting degrowth into an even broader academic debate, and like some of the earlier thinkers, his work constitutes an important early contribution from the humanities to degrowth scholarship (even if rarely recognised as such). Since then, however, degrowth has mainly developed in the context of research attempting to rethink the discipline of economics in the face of ecological crises (Jackson 2009). However, as we will show immediately below, the humanities remain of great importance to ongoing degrowth discussions.

Degrowth in the Present

What is degrowth now? An economic theory (Parrique 2025)? An umbrella concept (Mastini et al 2021)? A movement of movements (Kallis 2017)? A new vocabulary? (D’Alisa et al. 2014)? Although the term has been criticised for being elusive, it has also been celebrated for its breadth and poignancy. This breadth allows what is perhaps first and foremost an activist-scholar praxis to exist in critical but engaged dialogue with many movements (Burkhart et al 2020). Scholar-activist and artist Anitra Nelson (2024) describes ‘degrowth’ as closely associated with other critical d-words, like ‘deconstruct,’ ‘decolonise,’ and ‘demilitarise.’ Definitions of ‘degrowth’ vary in their emphasis on process versus goals, or on scholarship versus action (Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan 2022). Yet definitions are generally centred on the co-creation of just, sustainable, and democratic societies that emphasise care and sufficiency, and that do not rely on infinite capital expansion on a finite planet, instead pointing towards a reduction in and restructuring of consumption and production, particularly in the Global North.

Feminist and queer perspectives have been critical in the development of degrowth as an academic and embodied project. In societies organised around economic growth, most of the care work is predominantly delivered by females and is largely unpaid and unsupported by broader societal structures. Yet, the tasks of child rearing, cleaning, cooking, and tending to the sick and the elderly, as well as maintaining the very fabric of society through the maintenance of social relationships, are essential to all other remunerative (paid) activities on which capital accumulation relies (Fraser 2021). Degrowth-aligned schools, such as contemporary ecofeminist thought, feminist economics, and queer ecology, posit that the centring of care and reproductive work must be a pillar of socio-ecological transformation (Dengler and Lang 2022). They seek to reframe conceptually, ethico-politically and materially liberate how human gender, labour, and the more-than-human world interrelate (Gibson-Graham 2006; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010; Federici 2019; Barca 2020).

‘Degrowth’ is often used interchangeably with the term ‘postgrowth,’ and in some degrowth circles, a strict definition of both terms is still sought (Parrique 2019; 2025). Degrowth both critiques and incorporates elements of circular and doughnut economy (IPE 2024) and is further linked to notions of well-being economy (WE), a public policy framework aiming to stop the use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a main indicator of societal health. Nonetheless, the link between degrowth and WE is not unproblematic, as WE maintains an ambiguous relation with capitalism (Buch-Hansen 2025), in stark contrast to degrowth. Many also point out that degrowth is not just an economic theory criticising growth and capitalism, but rather one that strives to re-politicise the economy at large (Latouche 2009; Swyngedouw 2015). As formulated by Latouche (2009, 8), recounting one of the primary misunderstandings of the term – mistaking degrowth for recession:

De-growth is not the same thing as negative growth. That expression is an absurd oxymoron, but it is a clear indication of the extent to which we are dominated by the imaginary of growth.

The risk of misunderstanding is, of course, real, given the positive connotations of growth in many publics. John Bellamy Foster (2011) has suggested replacing the concept the degrowth with deaccumulation, placing capitalist accumulation as the core problem. Even if they may agree, Schmelzer et al. (2022) and others still defend the term ‘degrowth’ as a crucial provocation, constituting an implicitly oppositional stance that reveals the hegemonic ideology of growth across the political spectrum. Thus, Schmelzer and co-authors argue in favour of holding on to the strong critical potential intrinsic to the name.

Engagement with this critical potential is distinguishable from critical scholarship of specific discourses or ideologies, although degrowth scholars can also leverage such critiques. As a concept to describe socio-ecological processes across science, economics, and politics, ‘degrowth’ has proven relatively immune to becoming watered down, e.g., compared with ‘sustainability,’ ‘regeneration,’ and ‘circularity’ (Morsoletto 2020). In relation to economics and politics, this is highly relevant since it sustains a movement away from the predominant focus on making existing practices and technologies more efficient without accounting for the lack of absolute decoupling between economic growth and global resource use (Alexander & Rutherford, 2019). Degrowth as a movement and an approach is strongly committed to creating a global economy that respects planetary boundaries. The concept is directed at the heart of the growth-dependency that has guided most attempts at finding incremental methods to transform the economy. This makes degrowth clearly distinguishable from established schools of economics that remain aligned with most politics as usual, even in the face of global ecological crises.

Degrowth scholarship does not seek to model typical notions of ‘win-win’ situations for policymakers and broader publics, given its astute focus on fundamental and global socio-ecological imbalances as outlined above. This suggests that some will ‘lose’: degrowth futures will certainly entail substantial change for some. Yet degrowth is anything but austerity for the masses – including in currently wealthier parts of the world. On the contrary, ‘degrowth’ stands for “radical abundance.” As Hickel et al. (2019, 66) point out: “While austerity calls for scarcity to generate more growth, degrowth calls for abundance to render growth unnecessary.” By expanding practices of commoning and public infrastructure, and by redistributing existing income and wealth more evenly, degrowth posits that everyone should be able to access the goods and services they need to live thriving lives, while also reducing work. Loss is turned upside down, transformed into gains attained through more equitable sharing of what we already have alongside a liberation from the constraints of contemporary lives under capitalism, such as time scarcity.

To face this task of defining what is understood as ‘good lives’ and ‘good communities,’ degrowth has long invited new utopian thinking and new imaginaries (Kallis and March 2015; Kallis 2018). This requires us to creatively envision and embody radically abundant futures in which no one is forced to abide by techno-capitalist values of violent extractivism, unbridled accumulation, and ruthless competition, of elitist visions of extra-terrestrial colonisation and artificial intelligence. It is the inter- and transdisciplinary approach to urgent socio-ecological problems that prompts degrowth proponents to engage with normative questions at a fundamental level. Degrowth is essentially about rethinking (Latouche 2015) and worldmaking (Schmelzer and Nowshin 2023). This concerns rethinking desires, needs, and the means to satisfy them. In addition, this means rethinking values, what is subjugated and invisibilized to reproduce modern societies, as well as rethinking organisation and mobilisation in the face of exploitation. Such calls for new or renewed ways of thinking and being in the world are, of course, not unique to degrowth. Rather, degrowth scholarship – especially more contemporary conversations within the field – draws upon longstanding work by Indigenous and anti-colonial voices (Agarwal and Narain 1991; Escobar 2018; Nirmal and Rocheleau 2019; Kimmerer 2013; Whyte 2017). There is also great potential here for deeper engagement with the environmental humanities and environmental justice.

Degrowth Futures with Environmental Humanities and Justice

The environmental humanities, too, have provided a wealth of studies and experiments into worldmaking, collaborative futuring, and new ecological ontologies. Since the early 2000s, scholars of environmental humanities have been theorising in roughly two main directions, with some overlap. One direction works broadly across different disciplines – including history, cultural studies, ethics, language studies, and eco-criticism – to provide a more comprehensive picture of human and cultural interactions with non-human environments and how these interactions differ over space and time (Emmett and Nye 2017). While helpful, another strand of environmental humanities, primarily developed in anthropology and political theory, provides a more significant challenge to degrowth research due to its focus on the study of more-than-human ontologies (Van Dooren 2018). In this strand, the ontological status of beings and materials – animals, plants, and habitats that are co-constitutive of worlds rather than objects in the human world – is a strong and shared research focus. These debates challenge anthropocentric thinking by examining how beings differ in their modes of perception and in their agency. It is in the insights and methods of this strand that one appears to find the greatest potential for dialogue with degrowth, as part of ongoing efforts to world-build anew and reimagine key aspects of living on this planet.

Central to many ontological discussions in the environmental humanities on environmental action over the last decade, Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘response-ability’ describes an ethic of situated accountability that becomes visible through entangled relations, rather than abstract universal approaches to socio-ecological transformations (Haraway 2016). While rarely engaging directly with environmental humanities ideas – such as Haraway’s notion of response-ability in relation to the more-than-human – existing layers in the degrowth literature and degrowth-aligned approaches can form a starting point for responding to the ontological challenge posed by the environmental humanities. While the emphasis on human interaction in many degrowth arguments about the economy can be interpreted as a re-centring of human needs, the underlying foundation is a deeper engagement with ecological sciences. Indeed, degrowth analyses often hinge upon notions from ecology and biology that recognise the deep interdependence between human societies, economies, and biodiversity (Otero et al. 2024). As we have seen above, however, in many parts of the degrowth literature, it is the immediate concern with the risks and destructive patterns of market-centric economics that takes the analytical foreground. This has hitherto resulted in a lack of direct theorisation on how human economies interact with more-than-human economies. However, we argue that there is a potential for more convergence than is often acknowledged. Recently, degrowth scholars have expanded their critique of extractivist views of nature, which are embedded in mainstream economic and political systems. This work is oriented toward creating conditions in which life – human and non-human – can flourish, emphasising slow temporalities, care, and relationality (for an overview, see Hurtado et al. 2024).

Anna Tsing’s (2015) work to reveal how global economic systems mediate relations between human and more-than-human worlds may offer another compelling bridge between the domains of environmental humanities and degrowth scholarship. Specifically, Tsing suggests that “latent commons,” or sites of entangled human and more-than-human worlds, are both ubiquitous and brimming with potential toward living mutually and non-antagonistically – yet they also largely go unrecognised (Tsing 2015, 255). Nourishing such potential will thus require improving our attentiveness and the art of noticing. It will further require “stretching concepts of the commons,” and here Tsing explicitly questions efforts to ‘institutionalise’ commons through policy, which may appear popular in much degrowth scholarship (ibid.). Yet several people working in the degrowth field are also advancing conceptualisations and concrete arrangements of commons (e.g. Denger and Lang 2022), and the potential for cross-fertilisation is ripe. Tsing’s analysis also reveals how structural constraints shape the lives of frontline communities, and her attention to precarity and interdependence resonates strongly with degrowth’s vision of socio-ecological transformation (Perkins 2019).

A similar lack of engagement with existing key paradigms has been raised in the literature concerning environmental justice. Despite the inherent connection of degrowth to feminism and environmental justice, internal decolonial voices call for “more in-depth and explicit engagement with feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous thought” (Nirmal and Rocheleau 2019, 468; Perkins 2019), and for more substantial involvement of Global South perspectives (Magalhaes Teixeira and Koşanay 2024). Schmelzer and Nowshin (2023), for example, have argued for a convergence between the decolonial reparations movement and degrowth. They argue that some within the degrowth movement have only gone so far as to adopt local self-sufficiency approaches that risk downplaying global dependencies and historical injustices. Worldmaking after growth and imperialism requires a focus on degrowing the Global North while dismantling the debt system and transforming unjust structures of money, mining, and legality (Táíwo 2022).

Concluding Remarks and An Invitation to Degrow Together

As regards motivating (re-)thinking, degrowth as a field of research and praxis provides several key elements: a bridge to link different critical bodies of scholarship and progressive movements; a space to put these into dialogue; a word where many wor(l)ds fit, including different types of thinking across disciplines. Degrowth can further provide a way to re-envision our place in this world, inspiring collective action in the local as embedded in the global and allowing us to reconceptualise human relations as well as our relations to more-than-human beings, from a position of humility. Other worlds are possible, and ‘degrowth’ is ultimately an invitation to join the collective endeavour of helping to build them.

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