Abstract
This chapter introduces the main tenets of postgrowth economics and the degrowth movement, in order to familiarize the reader with these notions. The first part of the chapter provides an overview of the cultural and ecological situation in Spain in the twenty-first century, focusing on cultural scholars’ responses to the Spanish neoliberal crisis and showing how such critical interventions might be significantly enriched by paying attention to the ongoing ecocritical transnational debate. The next section studies a number of recent Iberian socioecological essays that have adopted a cross-disciplinary perspective to critique the unsustainable social and environmental degradation caused by global capitalism and its addiction to growth. The last part of the chapter makes the case for the value of advancing a degrowth-inspired ecocriticism within a Euro-Mediterranean context. Degrowth provides an alternative to mainstream Euro-American reform environmentalism. The latter is infused with a neoliberal rhetoric, rationality, and sensibility that promotes technical fixes to avoid engagement in the social and political changes needed to avert ecological collapse. While degrowthers advocate radical cultural change to achieve environmental justice, reform environmentalism only supports minor modifications to the existing order, such as sustainable development, green growth, and ecological modernization.
Highlights
Postgrowth Imaginaries time to delve into the emergent Spanish cultural sensibilities that have been gaining visibility and questioning the dominant imaginary of economic growth since that unique historical moment
On May 15, 2011, a number of protesters assembled improvised camps in symbolic central public spaces in many Spanish cities. This was the beginning of the 15-M, a massive, decentralized, and nonhierarchical social movement that responded to the implementation of socially devastating austerity measures after the global financial crisis, but to several decades of top-down financial and political neoliberalization that has privatized the benefits of economic growth in a few hands and socialized its associated downsides to everyone else.[2]
In Spain, the severity of the global financial crisis and the increase in public debt were aggravated by the real estate bubble that had spurred the rapid economic growth of the previous decade
Summary
Historical Iterations of the Growth Imaginary in Spain Where did the present cultural imaginary come from? The dominant cultural reading of the Spanish transition to democracy, which Guillem Martínez refers to and criticizes as the Culture of Transition (Cultura de la Transición, CT), has functioned as a baseline to ingrain and naturalize the imaginary of economic growth in Spain.[28]. Growing challenge to the CT has revisited and exposed the myths of the grand narrative of the Spanish transition as a long-desired and exemplary path to the country’s normalization, modernization, and Europeanization (supposedly consensual and desired by most Spaniards) after the end of the dictatorship This cultural narrative ignores the connections and continuities between the elites favored by Franco’s regime and the economic and financial actors who benefited from the subsequent Spanish neoliberalization that resulted in the financial crisis. It has been proven that this dominant reading of the transition imposed itself over other narratives constructed to make sense of the Spanish transition (obviating the imposed continuity with Franco’s economic regime, the extermination of rural cultures, and the forced cultural depolitization orchestrated by elites committed to a global project of neoliberalization), and how it rendered invisible other cultural sensibilities of the time that did not match the preferred cultural narrative These ‘disnarrated’[30] cultural modes are heterogeneous and have been identified by several cultural scholars. We cannot afford to ignore these game-changing processes for they have the potential to radically transform our cultural ecology in the near future
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