Post-growth Economy Research Articles

What makes a devoted local-food-buying club customer?

Local food-buying clubs (LFBCs) are special types of consumer-driven grassroots groups that are particularly well suited to enhancing the transition to a post-growth economy, given the finite growth potential of individual communities, the tendency of groups to distribute rather than accumulate capital, and the prospects of the movement for expansion. This paper analyses consumers of LFBCs and analyses how the different constructs proposed by the theory of planned behaviour are applicable according to engagement with LFBCs. A representative survey was run in May 2020 in Hungary. Respondents who were classified as devoted (regular) LFBC customers, occasional LFBC customers, and consumers not interested in local food were compared pairwise through matching-based treatment effect analysis approaches. Consumers of LFBCs comprised a heterogeneous group based on their pre-existing beliefs and attitudes. Occasional LFBC customers emphasised the broad quality-related features of local food and the potential for supporting local farmers. For more devoted customers, environmental aspects were very important. As belonging to a group has been shown to shape attitudes, targeted messages applied by LFBC managers may increase the level of engagement, contributing to the more efficient scaling up of local food systems.

L’économie sociale et solidaire, un mode d’entreprendre pour la post-croissance ?

Under what conditions can the SSE provide a mode of enterprise and development for post-growth? To answer this question, this article first looks at the place occupied by the SSE in degrowth theories, particularly the tensions that run through them, its prospects and its limits. It then looks at what the SSE can contribute to a post-growth economy, both from the point of view of territorial meso-economic development and cooperative modes of enterprise. This play of mirrors not only elucidates the problem surrounding the notion of development, but also paves the way for convergence between the two movements.

Una A ‘Transformation Compass’ for Social and Solidarity Economy Initiatives in their Transition towards Postgrowth

The current climate crisis and global inequalities trigger intense debates on the need of achieving socioecological transitions towards environmentally and socially just scenarios. In this context, the Social and Solidarity Economy and Postgrowth paradigms could play a major role in leading these transitions. The strong convergence between their principles opens the door for this article’s main contribution: a ‘Transformation Compass’. This tool allows Social and Solidarity Economy initiatives to approach a post-growth economy through a well-defined matrix, which incorporates Hinton’s (2021) characterization of postgrowth businesses. In addition, this Compass helps to assess the factors and dimensions that affect different initiatives during this process.

The wellbeing economy in practice: sustainable and inclusive growth? Or a post-growth breakthrough?

A wellbeing economy (WE) has gained a wide range of adherents in recent years, although the meanings they give to it vary. One point with conflicting understandings is whether a WE is a post-growth economy. Many environmentalists and other growth critics have long called for a move beyond the pursuit of economic growth as a societal priority and an embrace of an ethic of sufficiency. Some WE proponents highlight not only the WE’s post-growth character but also its ability to bring post-growth ideas into the political mainstream, pointing, for example, to the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo), a partnership of governments with shared ambitions of creating a WE. Does increasing support for a WE represent the long-sought breakthrough for a post-growth, sufficiency-oriented environmental approach? If not, how can efforts to implement a WE be taken further in a post-growth direction? These questions are examined through case studies of countries participating in WEGo, using an analysis of government documents and other sources to determine whether they have adopted a post-growth orientation. Expanding on previous analysis of the three founding WEGo members, this article examines three more recent cases: Finland and Wales, which are both WEGo members, and Canada, which has participated in WEGo gatherings. It confirms previous findings that WEGo nations have taken only limited steps in a post-growth direction, with emerging WE practice amounting at most to a “weak post-growth approach.” However, while previous studies have emphasized conclusions applying broadly to all WEGos, this article identifies greater variation among WE cases. One case, Wales, stands out for moving further in a post-growth direction, including significant sufficiency-oriented policies such as limits on road building, although a commitment to economic growth remains evident. Building on the findings, the article concludes with some options that WEGo nations and others could take to strengthen the WE’s post-growth character.

'Māori tourism and a post-growth economy'

A post-growth economy is a comparatively new paradigm in the tourism discourse. The aim of this article is to find out the commonalities between this concept and Māori tourism and in which way the latter can contribute to a post-growth economy. A qualitative mixed method approach, including in-depth-interviews, participant observation, and secondary analysis is applied. The results show that there is a lot of overlap between Māori tourism and a post-growth economy. Differences are visible, as well, regarding the value approach of Māori tourism and the indicator approach of a post-growth economy. Especially the social innovation created in Aotearoa New Zealand at the instigation of Māori groups of granting legal personhood to parts of nature may serve as a driver for a form of tourism that is in line with the idea of a post-growth economy.

„… verdammt wichtig!“: Hartmut Rosa über die Bedeutung der Kirchen in Krisenzeiten

The sociologist Hartmut Rosa is a stimulating interlocutor for theological reflection. In his most recent publication, Democracy Needs Religion (2022), he attributes an enormously significant role to the churches with regard to a sustainable development of society. Even more: For Hartmut Rosa, the churches are the only remaining lifeline of a society that is in a “frenzied standstill” and facing an abyss. The article traces Hartmut Rosa’s argumentation, places it in his overall work, illuminates the intellectual-historical background and critically examines his thesis. More than Hartmut Rosa, the article emphasizes the exemplary performance of church congregations in the sense of a provision-oriented post-growth economy and thus uncovers a deficit in Hartmut Rosa’s argumentation.

Secular stagnation: a tough test for the post-growth economy

Secular stagnation: a tough test for the post-growth economy

Secular stagnation: a tough test for the post-growth economy

Secular stagnation: a tough test for the post-growth economy

The Future of Divestment: Proliferations of Counter-Hegemonic and Post-Extractive Divestment Movements

Fossil fuel divestment has quickly become the largest divestment campaign in history, drawing attention to the large discrepancy between national climate commitments and the continued support of the fossil fuel industry. Yet, fossil fuel production and emissions continue to escalate rapidly. Our question is: what's next for the divestment movement? We propose a conceptual framework that identifies two waves of divestment leadership in which public pressure campaigns move towards targeting the extractive economic structures and predatory behaviors that permit fossil fuel extraction, and unsustainable resource extraction more generally, to continue without limit. Building on the three waves model of divestment, we postulate that a fourth wave of fossil fuel divestment organizing has already begun, one that focuses on banks, insurers, and other financiers of fossil fuel projects. Further into the future, we envision a fifth wave of divestment campaigns, whereby divestment is used in climate and environmental activists' arsenal to target firms that engage in environmentally damaging and unjust behaviors such as destructive mining activities, overconsumption, predatory debt or arbitration processes, or Indigenous rights violations. While divestment is not a panacea and does not displace the work of existing post-extractive or climate justice campaigns, we argue that divestment is a powerful tool that can be used to complement and amplify the work of environmental justice activists in other contexts beyond fossil fuels. This paper offers actionable suggestions for current and future activists and frames divestment as a tactic that will proliferate within other environmental movements in the transition towards a post-growth economy.

Sufficiency and transformation–A semi-systematic literature review of notions of social change in different concepts of sufficiency

Sufficiency is an indispensable strategy for sustainable development that is gaining growing attention in both the scientific and the political sphere. Nevertheless, the question of how sufficiency-oriented social change can be shaped by different actors remains unclear. There are many different concepts of sufficiency and all of them entail certain notions of social change. However, these notions of social change remain mostly implicit. By conducting a semi-systematic literature review on sufficiency and transformation, this article makes explicit notions of social change in various concepts of sufficiency. Additionally, these notions are structured and discussed concerning their possible contribution to a broader socio-ecological transformation to advance the debate about sufficiency-oriented strategies. The literature was sampled by a systematic search in the databases of Web of Science and the ENOUGH-Network, a European network of sufficiency researchers, and complemented by texts known to the author. In total 133 articles, books and book chapters were reviewed. The sufficiency concepts were analyzed regarding two dimensions: the goal of and the approach toward social change. Various ecological and sometimes social goals that different concepts of sufficiency pursue were identified. Some scholars operationalize the social and ecological goals in a sufficiency-specific way as consumption corridors or a pathway toward a post-growth economy. Furthermore, three different approaches to sufficiency-oriented social change were identified: a bottom-up-approach, a policy-making-approach and a social-movement-approach. Specific contributions and limitations of these approaches were identified. The three approaches differ regarding the role of conflicts and the conceptualization of behavior and social practices. By interpreting the results utilizing the Multi-Level-Perspective of Sustainability Transition Research and Erik O. Wright's transformation theory, synergies for sufficiency-oriented social change were identified. The review founds a theoretical basis for further empirical and theoretical research on shaping sufficiency-oriented social change.

Public acceptance of post-growth: Factors and implications for post-growth strategy

Growing evidence supports the need to re-evaluate the nature and function of our economies in favour of post-growth principles if we are to have a socially and environmentally viable future. This study contributes to the discussion on how to achieve such a future by addressing a remaining gap in the literature about the public acceptance of post-growth, since a viable transition requires public support to validate political actions. Taking a mixed-methods approach, we ask which values and socio-economic characteristics are associated with support for post-growth and why. On average among 34 European countries, 60.5 % of people are in favour of post-growth. Values such as environmentalism, collectivism and post-materialism were found to support post-growth visions of the future, but support for post-growth and these values is lower among disadvantaged people. We conclude that greater emphasis on redistribution and improving opportunities and livelihoods for disadvantaged people in a post-growth economy is key to making such a future more acceptable to them. However, this conflicts with policy preferences and values such as hierarchy, meritocracy, and individualism that tend to be more prominent among people who are well-off.

COVID-19 AS A SPRINGBOARD TO A JUST AND GREEN FUTURE? THE ROLE OF SOCIAL WORK

The devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic taught us vital public policy lessons in Canada about the necessity of public healthcare, the feasibility of universal and unconditional income support, and the urgency of moving towards a new post-growth economy that is in harmony with the environment and allows people to control their time and life choices. Social work has a key role to play in helping us to navigate our way past the pandemic emergency and towards such a radical new vision of an economically just and ecologically sustainable Canadian society.

Achieving a post-growth green economy

A transformation in human values in a ‘post-materialist’ direction by middle-class youth around the world may be setting the stage for a new reality of near-zero economic growth and a sustainable and healthy global biosphere. Evidence from the World Values Survey suggests that a global expansion of post-material values and experiences leads to (1) a reduction in consumption-oriented activities, (2) a shift to more environmentally friendly forms of life that include living at higher, more energy efficient urban densities, and (3) active political support for environmental improvement. Such behavioral shifts provide a foundation for a turn to a slow-growth or even no-growth economy in comparatively affluent countries to the benefit of a healthier global biosphere. To set the stage for a ‘post-growth green economy’ that features climate stability and a substantially reduced ecological footprint, the timing is right for a ‘Green New Deal’ that focuses on de-carbonizing the global economy and has the side-benefit of fostering an economic recovery from the Covid-19 global recession currently underway. The financing of global decarbonization by the world’s wealthiest countries is affordable and could stimulate much needed economic improvements in developing countries by creating within them modern, efficient clean energy systems that can serve as a basis for increased economic prosperity. Such prosperity will in turn accelerate declines in population fertility and result ultimately in reduced global population growth.

The promises of drop-in vs. functional innovations: The case of bioplastics

This paper introduces the difference between “drop-in innovation” and “functional innovation”. The former aims to maintain the existing paradigm, while the latter aims to fulfill equivalent functionalities favouring low-tech and degrowth options, instead of promising sustainability without changes thanks to technological change. Moving beyond the debate regarding the nature of eco-innovations, a social ecological economics of eco-innovation promises is developed to determine the potential contribution of eco-innovations to the transition towards a post-growth economy. This framework is applied to the case of bioplastics showing how they may depart from the productivism paradigm.

What structural change is needed for a post-growth economy: A framework of analysis and empirical evidence

In order to avoid environmental catastrophe we need to move to a post-growth economy that can deliver rapid reductions in environmental impacts and improve well-being, independent of GDP growth. Such a move will entail considerable structural change in the economy, implying different goals and strategies for different economic sectors. So far there are no systematic approaches for identifying the desired shape of structural change and sectoral goals in terms of output, demand and employment. We present a novel analysis that addresses this gap by classifying economic sectors into groups with similar structural change goals. Our framework for the classification considers sectoral characteristics along three dimensions, which are (a) the final energy intensity, (b) the potential and desirability for labour productivity growth and (c) the relationship between labour productivity and the energy-labour ratio. We present empirical evidence on the three framework dimensions for economic sectors in the UK and Germany and derive structural change goals for the four sector groups representing particular combinations of the sector characteristics. Our analysis allows us to discuss the specific role of different economic sectors in the structural change envisioned in the post-growth transition and the most important challenges they might be facing.

Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, by Wendy Parkins

Reviewed by: Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture by Wendy Parkins Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (bio) Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, by Wendy Parkins; pp. vi + 238. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £110.00, £36.99 paper, $155.00, $47.95 paper. At first blush, the topic of Victorian sustainability may strike some readers as wildly anachronistic. After all, the term sustainable development entered into widespread circulation with Gro Harlem Brundtland's 1987 UN report "Our Common Future," that warned of long-term challenges to global and intergenerational equity, including deforestation, desertification, fossil fuel exhaustion, climate change, population pressure, and decline in biodiversity. These concerns were plainly products of a specific historical moment. And yet it would be a grave mistake to assume that worries about environmental degradation have surfaced only in recent decades. Historians and literary scholars have for some time now explored the deep roots of sustainability, preservationism, Malthusianism, and environmental utopianism. Wendy Parkins's Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging and stimulating exploration of the problem of environmental degradation and its remedies during the nineteenth century. Major themes include discourses of urban pollution and sprawl; affective and spiritual bonds with animals and with the wider natural world; debates about agricultural chemistry and soil fertility; experiments in post-growth economies and simple living; and the Victorian science of climate change. According to Parkins, the Victorians were the first to contemplate "the widespread environmental despoliation wrought by industrialization" on a national and planetary scale (1). Victorian writers challenged the "instrumentalist view of the natural world" in literature "as well as in the fields of politics, economics, philosophy and agriculture" [End Page 322] (Gillen D'Arcy Wood qtd. in Parkins 2). This critique also had a constructive side, aimed at conceiving social "alternatives beyond the imaginative horizons of industrial capitalism" (33). Victorian forms of sustainability thus ranged beyond the ecological and technological realms into psychology and everyday practice. John Parham opens the anthology with an exciting essay on John Stuart Mill, which rightly stresses the radical character of Mill's famous chapter on the stationary state in Principles of Political Economy (1848). Parham places Mill's call for voluntary limits to growth in the context of his exchanges with French utopian thought, especially Auguste Comte's sociology and Joseph Fourier's communitarianism. He then traces the evolution of Mill's views forward to the 1860s, connecting stationary state economics with his interest in the Common Preservations Society and the Land Tenure Reform Association. Subsequent chapters by John Holmes, Peter Adkins, Emma Mason, Roslyn Jolly, and Mary L. Shannon explore a series of parallel projects in sustainability, springing from the same context as Mill's environmental sensibility. Holmes looks at William Morris's sprawling narrative poem "The Earthly Paradise" (1868–70), while Adkins examines the intellectual roots of Edward Carpenter's socialist experiment in simple living. Mason turns to theology to uncover what she calls the "ecology of grace" in Christina Rossetti's poetry (69). On her reading, Rossetti's The Face of the Deep (1892) articulated a radical promise of multi-species community and spiritual kinship with the nonhuman. Jolly's essay uncovers in early Victorian travelogues an ideal and practice of "slow travel" intended to counter the "speed and artificiality of modern life" (103). Shannon investigates the many meanings of the Thames in Charles Dickens's writings. She shows how the river linked country and city both as a pastoral idyll and as a conduit of pollution and waste. The second half of the volume includes contributions by Lesley Kingsley, Matthew Ingleby, Michael Shaw, Paul Young, and Dennis Denisoff, with an afterword by Gillen D'Arcy Wood. Kingsley explores the many cultural meanings of guano from high farming and popular chemistry to sanitation and social theory. Ingleby tackles incipient concerns with suburban growth through a genealogy of the term sprawl. Shaw's piece carries on the theme of urban planning by looking at Patrick Geddes's social theory from an aesthetic point of view. Young considers W. H. Hudson's The Purple Land That England Lost (1885) as an eco-romance about the environmental consequences of British global meat markets. Young also demonstrates how...

A tale of two utopias: Work in a post-growth world

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature on post-growth futures. Modern imaginings of the future are constrained by the assumptions of growth-based capitalism. To escape these assumptions we turn to utopian fiction. We explore depictions of work in Cokaygne, a utopian tradition dating back to the 12th century, and William Morris's 19th century News from Nowhere. Cokaygne is a land of excessive consumption without work, while in News from Nowhere work is the route to the good life. These competing notions provide inspiration for a post-growth vision of work. We argue that biophysical and social dynamics mean that in a post-growth economy we are likely to have to be less productive and work more. But, this can be a utopian vision. By breaking the link between work and consumption at the level of the individual, we can remove some of the coercion in work. This would free us to do jobs that contribute to the social good, rather than generate exchange value, and empower us to fight for good work. Finally, we draw on eco-feminist analyses of capitalism to argue that by challenging labour productivity growth we can also challenge wider forces of oppression.

Structural Change for a Post-Growth Economy: Investigating the Relationship between Embodied Energy Intensity and Labour Productivity

Post-growth economists propose structural changes towards labour-intensive services, such as care or education, to make our economy more sustainable by providing meaningful work and reducing the environmentally damaging production of material goods. Our study investigates the assumption underlying such proposals. Using a multi-regional input-output model we compare the embodied energy intensity and embodied labour productivity across economic sectors in the UK and Germany between 1995 and 2011. We identify five labour-intensive service sectors, which combine low embodied energy intensity with low growth in embodied labour productivity. However, despite their lower embodied energy intensities, our results indicate that large structural changes towards these sectors would only lead to small reductions in energy footprints. Our results also suggest that labour-intensive service sectors in the UK have been characterised by higher rates of price inflation than other sectors. This supports suggestions from the literature that labour-intensive services face challenges from increasing relative prices and costs. We do not find similar results for Germany, which is the result of low overall growth in embodied labour productivity and prices. This highlights that structural change is closely associated with economic growth, which raises the question of how structural changes can be achieved in a non-growing economy.

Basic Income and Social Sustainability in Post-Growth Economies

AbstractA central task in efforts to identify pathways to ecologically and socially sustainable economies is to reduce inequality and poverty while reducing material consumption, which has recently inspired future post-growth scenarios. We build a model to explore the potential of a universal basic income (UBI) to serve these objectives. Starting from the observation that post-growth trajectories can take very different forms we analyze UBI in two scenarios advanced in the literature. Comparing UBI in a “local self-sufficiency” economy to a UBI in an “automation” economy, we show that although both scenarios satisfy central sustainability criteria, the impact of a UBI would differ greatly between these contexts. Our analysis shows that a UBI is less compatible with a labor-intensive local self-sufficiency economy than a capital-intensive, high tech economy. We conclude that the feasibility and attractiveness of a UBI in a post-growth scenario depends greatly on the specific characteristics of the economy.

The state in the transformation to a sustainable postgrowth economy

ABSTRACTThe limits of the environmental state in the context of the provision of economic growth are addressed by applying materialist state theory, state-rescaling approaches and the degrowth/postgrowth literature. I compare state roles in a capitalist growth economy and in a postgrowth economy geared towards bio-physical parameters such as matter and energy throughput and the provision of ‘sustainable welfare’. In both cases state roles are analysed in relation to the economy, welfare, and the environment, as well as state spatiality. Finally, I address the state in a transition from a growth economy to a sustainable postgrowth economy. I argue that materialist state and sustainable welfare theories are capable of informing state-led ‘eco-social’ policies that, if integrated in a comprehensive policy strategy, have the potential to overcome the growth imperative in the economy and policymaking and break the growth-related glass ceiling of the environmental state.