CHAPTER 3

Degrowth in Practice

Degrowth has attracted support as a multidimensional and influential contemporary movement that is both human-centred and critically concerned about planetary ecosystems. Sometimes misinterpreted by newcomers as a return to a primitive past, in reality the degrowth movement is very future-oriented – attempting to map ways out of hyper-consumption, inequality, weak democracy and the environmental crises caused by growth-driven capitalism.

In organisational terms degrowth is best described as a decentralised, multidimensional and open network, which is currently stimulating fruitful debates within existing and emerging movements, academic and political circles, and regional cultures. In this chapter we explore, in thematic and indicative ways, the degrowth movement’s disruptive and enriching relationships with other movements with similar concerns.

Key questions for the movement have revolved around the extent to which degrowth transformations either simply require dramatic and extensive capitalist reforms or, instead, holistic system change to post-capitalism. How have degrowth and post-socialism in Eastern Europe converged, conflicted and informed one another? How has degrowth as a concept challenged socialists and been absorbed by ecosocialist thought? How far have other post-capitalist currents entertained, and integrated, degrowth as a strategy for transition? Is degrowth more than either a campaign or potential central demand of a series of associated campaigns? Is it, or can it be, an independent movement? Given that all such questions are open to contemplation, experimentation and debate, supporters and advocates take up varying positions and individuals adopt distinct or even uncertain positions over time sometimes due to changing circumstances.

Given the strong tendency to cluster, compound and dilute the meaning and force of degrowth as a demand in and of itself, we clarify its role synthetically illustrating its many shared goals and distinctions with respect to other movements. Local specificities and historic and cultural tensions impact on degrowth developments. Degrowth disrupts, engages with and supports other movements with similar approaches, including the transition, Extinction Rebellion and Occupy movements, as well as aligning to some extent with the transdisciplinary field of ecological economics.

The chapter focuses on activism and activists, revealing the diverse ways that activists have pursued degrowth by living simply; experimenting with alternative technologies and techniques for living and self-provisioning; forming political squats and social centres; campaigning against mega-infrastructure developments; experimenting with alternative currencies and non-monetary economies; developing action-based experiential methods and methodologies; imagining degrowth futures and discussing a degrowth agenda to ‘get there’, that is, working out strategies to implement a holistic degrowth project.

Key shared concepts are identified around ‘spheres’ of action and reflection emerging from degrowth activism. You will notice connections and contradictions between practices central to this chapter and theories outlined in chapter 2. A generic issue clear to practitioners is the ease with which abstract theory lays out visionary imaginaries without taking into account the very real barriers to achieving such transformation (issues detailed in chapter 4). At the same time, it is remarkable that the ideas and work of theorists of the late twentieth century remain so relevant, even as the social, political, economic and environmental crises have deepened.

Degrowth movements in specific locations develop certain defining characteristics. There are practices common to urban degrowth activists, such as squatting, supporting public transport and cycling, and developing relationships with food producers on the peri-urban or rural fringes of cities in arrangements such as community supported agriculture. In contrast, rural degrowth advocates can, arguably, more readily establish modest dwellings in ways known as do-it-yourself (‘DIY’) and do-it-ourselves (‘DIO’) – becoming substantially self-provisioning with respect to food and relying on slow and novel forms of transport.

A scholarly challenge is made to economists and ecologists to become more genuinely transdisciplinary and action-oriented, two directions which are already cutting-edge developments in several relevant social science fields, such as political ecology, disaster studies and action research. Such efforts to apply appropriate techniques for investigation and analysis of social movements and activism are essentially political in nature. As with climate change, science can never disarticulate itself from realworld economic and political implications.

A DECENTRALISED, MULTIDIMENSIONAL AND OPEN NETWORK

The concept of degrowth has certainly gained traction in the early twenty-first century as a provocative slogan derived from various strands of thinking. However, this interest and support has failed to evolve – so far – as a typical organised movement with a discernible formal structure. No international organisation or party has been established. Some attempts have been made to develop such a formal organisation. In assemblies within international degrowth conferences that attract thousands of participants, proposals supporting greater formality are often raised and fiercely debated.

Typically, certain spokespeople will claim that success relies on a clear and formally constituted organisation. However, many supporters insist that it seems more natural and realistic to assume and prolong the apparently ‘unorganised’ form of Occupy and other such movements of the twenty-first century. The devolution of the French Degrowth Party – Le Parti Pour La Décroissance (PPLD) – is instructive. As the articles of association section of its site explains, PPLD was established as a party that is no more. Playing with ‘parti’, which means ‘going to’ as well as ‘party’, it retained its acronym but has been renamed ‘Parti-e-s Pour La Décroissance’ understood as ‘on the way to degrowth’.¹

Thus degrowth has organically maintained an existence common to grassroots movements of our times: an open network of individuals, collectives, projects, platforms and gatherings. This dynamic and mobile open network that degrowth has developed is analysed here. Initially the rise of horizontal organising as a feature of contemporary, especially radical, movements is discussed. Then the degrowth movement’s four characteristic spheres of action are explained by teasing out typical expressions and activities in each sphere as well as identifying relationships between each sphere. These focal points of our analysis and spheres of action are the individual sphere, the collective sphere, the sphere of resistance, and the sphere of the degrowth project. The degrowth movement itself could well be mapped as a web of networks within and aside from such spheres.

NON-HIERARCHICAL ORGANISING

Since the 1960s, mass movements have evolved new forms of organising using techniques of direct action and non-violence, relating as equals in collective deliberation. The values underlying these developments are antithetical to the still mainstream model of capitalist bosses and managers; bureaucratic union officials and organisers; party politicians, representatives and spokespeople – all of whom lead and speak on behalf of a mass of institutionalised followers. A popular position that has evolved is explained in an interview with US activist-scholar Charlie Post in the radical UK Salvage journal:

While I am currently not a member of an organization, my politics remain those of revolutionary socialism from below – a commitment to a revolutionary transformation of society, led by the working class (in all of its racial and gender diversity) which will establish a democratic collectivist order, no matter how distant the prospect. This perspective shapes my day to day activity in this clearly non-revolutionary period – struggling for immediate demands/reforms through organization and struggles that do not rely on elections, capitalist legality or the forces of official reformism (the labour officialdom, middle class liberal leaderships of communities of color, women, queer folk, etc.).²

Non-hierarchical forms of organisation – often interpreted and referred to as ‘unorganised’ by those with triumphal confidence in hierarchical methods – highlight the value of every person’s understanding of the current circumstances, of each person’s right to be heard, to express an opinion and to act according to their beliefs, that is, to be respected and treated equally in everyday practice. If such organisation evolved in everyday resistance and protest action, it is also viewed as prefigurative. Prefigurative of a community-oriented form of politics necessary not only to combat but also to go beyond contemporary hierarchies that facilitate the reproduction of patriarchal and racial oppression, authoritarian exploitation, confrontation and a military approach to people and planet.

These values and associated forms of organising have existed in certain times and places for centuries – as highlighted in the Paris Commune.³ But, over the last 50 years, non-hierarchical organisation has gradually become common practice within radical elements of left-wing movements. Within the labour movement this thrust is expressed in a radical form of autonomous cooperatives, particularly well developed in horizontalidad in the early 2000s in Argentina.⁴ By the early 2010s, surfacing in various cultural clothes around the world, the politics of horizontal organisation became front-page news with Occupy, the 15-M movement in Spain, young protesters rioting in Greece, student uprisings in Quebec and the Arab Spring.

Neither a reactive nor informal mode of organising, the assembly is the cornerstone of face-to-face organisation typical of transformative politicking. By way of an example, in the early 1970s in Melbourne (Australia) the women’s liberation movement had an assembly every Saturday afternoon in a warehouse space. Any woman could attend. At the start of each meeting a facilitator and a note taker were elected and an agenda formed from everyone’s input. Whoever was there made decisions in as consensual a way as possible; there was no president, secretary or president. In a daily drop-in centre women were rostered to act as contact points recording their activities and interactions through a diary and phone messages. There was no formal spokesperson. The media had to speak with whoever was on duty who would either pass them on to a specific liberationist or speak themselves for the movement but, in both cases, only as ‘a’ representative.

Another essential form of non-hierarchical organising is working groups, which might be permanent or shortterm. They evolve to address a task or area of concern. They are open to anyone to join and knowledge and skills are freely shared. Typically, working groups have a rotating contact point and coordinator responsible for briefing newcomers and reporting to assemblies. The roles of a working group are subject to assembly decision-making but they advise and take part in such decision-making. They might collectively send out a media release. The participants of the working group change and their roles are fluid and dynamic. We are used to having books published by such groups, in which either no particular authors are named or an alphabetical list of seemingly innumerable people appears without any clear idea of who did what or who did more or less – the latter all characteristics of more hierarchical organising.

In non-hierarchical structures conventional leaders are denigrated: there is no position for a domineering leader. Rather, leadership is a skill held by many, wielded temporarily and widely shared. The processes developed for assemblies and techniques for smaller meetings – such as hand signals and the authority of the collective – benefit from various trials of techniques of consensual and collaborative decision-making. Such techniques express the open, dynamic, solidarity-oriented cultures of transformative movements that include pacifist, environmental, social, cultural, ethnic, cooperative (housing and workplaces), anti-racial and gender-focused movements. Yet non-hierarchical ideals remain aspirational and challenging. Practice often falls short of the ideals of self-management, non-monetary forms of relating, social and environmental values, care and nurture.

In the past half-century, the divide between hierarchical and non-hierarchical forms of organising has lessened. A lot more philanthropic, not-for profit and profit-making firms, as well as governmental agencies, incorporate participative decision-making into their organisation. As simple techniques, such reforms can be deceptive and superficial in their ultimate effect on the ways governmental and capitalist institutions function. Yet the fact that they have spread is testimony to their influence, the influence of movements on societal structures, and the fact that horizontal and flat networks are neither unorganised nor disorganised but rather have their own formal typologies. This form of organisation is an ideal fit for spontaneous and anti-systemic movements made up of people from vastly different backgrounds and with different constraints on their time in movements that prioritise sharing knowledge and skills, and value flexibility and openness.

It is in the context of such political organising that degrowth has flowered as an open, decentralised and multidimensional network. Yet the nature of transformation demanded by degrowth has also, most significantly, spawned spheres of activity in individual, collective, resistance and big-picture, future-oriented action.

THE INDIVIDUAL SPHERE

We start with ‘the sphere of the individual’ although we might have started with any other sphere. Even if the sphere of individual activity is fundamental and representative, it really only makes sense when articulated (that is, placed in relationship with) the other three spheres. Any focus on the sphere of the individual only highlights necessary connections with collectives, with resistance and with an intelligible project – a shared, if fluid, degrowth imaginary. Instead, unfortunately, degrowth is often presented in a reductionist way focusing only on the individual sphere and, even more distressingly, by simply treating this sphere in a partial way. For these reasons alone, it is a useful place to start – to dispel common myths.

Voluntary simplicity

How can an individual embody and express degrowth? The essential answer is to adopt or adapt to a life of voluntary simplicity, that is, reducing one’s environmental impact in an emancipatory and intentional way whenever, and however, possible. We are not all equal in terms of available choices. We live with constraints, sometimes due to relationships with other people and particularly due to economic factors, such as indebtedness. Pre-existing conditions can make it difficult or even impossible to individually take a radical step to live in voluntary simplicity, say refusing to use cars and relying on a bike or walking, or cutting down – even eliminating – use of a smartphone.

Because of the variety of circumstances different people find themselves within, the degrowth movement does not advocate a moralistic stance but rather a cautious open invitation to assess and renovate our lifestyles, when, if and as possible. Action in the individual sphere can consist of consuming less and working less yet enjoying a better quality of life. How might we achieve such an outcome? I might sell my car and, instead, use my bike, reduce my consumption of gadgets, clothes and only occasionally use devices and subscribe to associated services, minimise my consumption of meat, modify my travel habits (such as flying) and, ultimately, find myself less reliant on a monetary income.

At this point, I have created the opportunity to quit or reduce my working hours at my ‘bullshit job’.⁵ Thus I can re-appropriate free time for meaningful activities, such as caring more for others and looking after myself. I can contemplate, play games, hike, garden, read and engage in other such meaningful and pleasurable activities. We see here a dynamic situation in which a personal journey questioning one’s needs mobilises the process of decolonising one’s imaginary. Another world seems possible.

Identities and trends

Even so, changes in activities, thinking and consciousness in this individual sphere are not enough: we are not isolated individuals free to live our lives in whatever ways we want. We are embedded social animals facing contradictory circumstances and choices. We face social as well as material pressures, from mass media and social media – including advertising and cultural norms – regarding mores and habits. All of these pressures can make individual degrowth practices difficult to achieve. Changing our ways can create conflicts with relatives and friends or, conversely, offer opportunities to show others the constructive benefits of downsizing and changing pace. There are pros and cons, limits and potential, to all kinds of action in the individual sphere.

The emancipatory dimension of this sphere is influ-enced in structural and dialectical ways. This sphere highlights the significance of individual agency, pointing towards and integrated with other spheres. Even if the orthodoxy of a growth culture pushes us to desire, consume, produce and work more, there is a growing shared sphere of resistance. More and more surveys show rising expectations for quality of life rather than quantitative growth, and calls for more reuse, less work, more sharing and more recycling.⁶ We observe, increasingly, public debates against planned obsolescence and aeroplane use. People are rallying in support of expanding train services instead of eliminating night trains, and various less frequented train lines, as has been common over the last few decades. There are strong bike rider movements in many cities, advocating for bike lanes and bike storage in place of car lanes and car parks. Vegan and vegetarian movements show a widespread preparedness to cut down – and cut out – animal flesh from our diet. It has even become fashionable to eat less meat and to prefer foods that are procured locally, in season and grown organically.

We can see, then, how individual action articulates with the cultural and social spheres to impact on norms and status. Contra Global North travel fashions and status symbols of the 2010s – to ‘do’ every country and see every city, to pick up memorabilia and to tell stories of such in cafés – as the decade closes more and more people are conspicuously deciding to slow down, take their bikes and discover their own locale and region. These are degrowth trends, whether the agents of such practices are aware of them as such or not. They illustrate people reconstituting themselves and their identities around practices compatible with degrowth.

Frugal abundance

This is the sphere of the degrowth individual who embraces, to some extent or another, ‘voluntary simplicity’ or ‘happy sobriety’ both based on ‘frugal abundance’. Frugal abundance means letting go of work, consumption and environmentally unfriendly activities to make space and time to enjoy a rich quality of a life coextensive with a low ecological footprint. Frugal abundance is only achieved if we decide on meaningful limits and thus liberate ourselves from the frustrating ‘always more’ dynamics of growth cultures. Frugal abundance is intentional. We directly acknowledge Earth’s limits by slowing down. We experience small as beautiful. We have re-appropriated our human well-being – allowing us, in the process, to become more humane (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Seven types of ordinary happiness

Cartoonist: Michael Leunig (Australia)

The collective sphere

Most people active in the individual sphere also become active in the collective sphere, which consists of diverse local grassroots initiatives flourishing all around the world. In this sphere people re-appropriate, invent, adapt and experiment with new ways to produce, exchange and make decisions collectively. They act substantially outside the mainstream economy and polity. There are many inspiring and creative prefigurative ‘concrete utopias’ or, better, ‘want-to-be-utopias’, that is, utopias in the process of becoming, in different locations and sectors. Here we see distinct overlaps between degrowth activism and many other twenty-first-century movements with similar values and principles for living, such as slow movements, transition, Occupy, climate activists, the commons and land sovereignty movements.

Collective activities

The collective sphere represents an intriguing, multi-dimensional field in which degrowth individuals can develop skills and knowledge, create, invent, experiment, share, reconnect and care. Here the frugal abundance of a single individual can be multiplied many times over by an organised collective of degrowth-minded activists. Collective activities expand the opportunities, capabilities and capacities of degrowth households to enable collective sufficiency and collective governance, with greater benefits, economies and security. The individual goes beyond changing their, and their household’s, practices to interconnect with others like them in collectives that encompass care, producing goods and services, and cultural activities. Here the necessary holism of degrowth is made apparent and its social dimensions are emphasised.

With respect to food, for instance, informal groups and formal associations have been forged to create food self-provisioning, from community supported agriculture to community gardens, from food cooperatives selling all kinds of organic food in bulk through to fermentation and food-preserving collectives, from local activities associated, say, with the Incredible Edible Network, to projects employing permaculture, organic, bio-organic, agroecology and agroforestry techniques.

As degrowth has become more widely known, many pre-existing groups pursuing such alternative techniques and approaches have adopted degrowth as a demand or to describe their activities. The book Degrowth in Movement(s), an edited collection, traces the intricate connections with other such movements ‘fighting for a good life for all beyond eco-modernism and growth, from a social-ecological and global justice perspective’; degrowth is at the core of this work because it ‘symbolizes the most radical rejection of the eco-modernist and mainstream focus on growth, extractivism and industrialism’.⁷ In the collective sphere these interconnections, co-influences, co-creations between and within like movements offers a rich environment for extensive experimentation with alternative techniques, relationships and ways of being.

Re-making the world and ourselves

The collective sphere features alternative activities based on goals of ‘fair trade’ and ‘ethical production’ from open and transparently run local production of high-quality organic goods to schemes involving non-speculative local and alternative currencies; from local exchange trading systems (LETS) to barter and ‘no-exchange’ (non-monetary) communities, from economies developed on the basis of reciprocity to sharing and gift economies, time-banks and solidarity economies. For such schemes to embody degrowth, they must go beyond offering a qualitative alternative to the mainstream to be more effective and efficient in genuine economies of elimination and reduction, both at source and within their mundane contexts. For instance, any car-sharing scheme that does not result in reduced travel and use of vehicles does not exemplify degrowth.⁸

The collective sphere encapsulates reusing and recycling with, for instance, various DIY and DIO makers’ workshops and repair cafés. Such collectives focus on, say, bike building and repairs, or sewing second-hand materials using simple technologies and skilful hands and eyes. Repair cafés undercut trends to take away, throw away and planned obsolescence by offering repair services and, perhaps more significantly, training people to develop their own repairing skills. Such activities have sprung up around towns, sometimes as initiatives of the transition movement or of grassroots municipalism, that is, political associations based on direct democracy through neighbourhood assemblies and radical cooperativism.

Activities in the collective sphere include cooperatives upgrading dwellings with insulation and renewable energies. Ideally the latter are not only local but also low-tech, trialled as neighbourhood micro-grid systems rather than installed for individual households, and they apply solar thermal technology, which has environmental benefits over photovoltaic solar panels. Associated co-housing, alternative technology centres and other ethical, socially oriented hosting and hospitality projects are also types of collective-sphere activities. Many ecocollaborative housing projects feature intergenerational solidarity, say through mutual caring, hosting alternative learning workshops, engaging in sharing schemes and disseminating alternative ways of creating, living and exchanging.⁹

This is a far from exhaustive but, hopefully, representative sample of collective activities enacting degrowth values, strategies and principles. Last but not least are those collective actions that focus on transforming democratic processes. Such activities include groups that readily employ alternative participatory media, community radio and television stations, and digital interactive platforms for sharing information and co-creating documents and maps.¹⁰ They experiment with community-based governance, say of commons, using consensual decision-making, ‘sociocracy’ (aka ‘dynamic governance’) methods and non-violent communication. Most collectives in various sectors and geographic regions adopt such horizontal and participatory forms of organising to some extent. Simultaneously, certain collectives are established primarily to develop, promote, disseminate and deliver programmes for learning participatory techniques of governance in all areas of life.

Networked collective activities

Significantly, especially in the past decade, many collective projects have expanded spatially through networking to develop more complex relations of production and exchange. They have created interactive networks of similar projects, and clustered dissimilar projects in complementary interdependent formations. In some locales in particular, such alternative collective enterprises are developing and interlinking in expansive and intensive ways, offering one another inputs and outputs using principles of fair trade, and production based on quality and care. Many draw on principles and processes associated with circular economies and social and solidarity economies.

Community supported agriculture, for instance, typically links farmers with food eaters living in a local urban centre through direct exchange networks. People sign up to purchase or pay in advance, or even purchase farm shares, in return benefiting from the farm harvest via regular deliveries or orders filled at pick-up locations. Within such farming communities, knowledge, skills, goods and services are shared across a range of agricultural pursuits. An abundance of raw produce might prompt a new collective based on processing and preserving, drawing on old and novel techniques. These expanded networks of collective activities are dynamic and fluid entities offering real-life experiments, experiences and images of the first stages of the degrowth project (elaborated on in chapter 5).

This collective level of activity is very dynamic, full of creativity and such initiatives attract rising interest. But not everyone can access, contribute to or benefit from such activities that tend to draw one into practices that conflict with the everyday demands of the dominant economic system. All members and participants face contradictions and make compromises with the capitalist market and state yet, wherever they exist, collective activities represent visible, and often persuasive, illustrations of degrowth in practice. They show what degrowth might look and feel like. They demonstrate solutions for more sustainable living, working and governing and that another world is possible even in very hostile contemporary environments.

THE SPHERE OF RESISTANCE

Even if individual and collective spheres are fundamental in establishing a degrowth society, there is another necessary characteristic of a degrowth transition – resistance. Only some people are in a personal and material position that allows them to make a move to a determinedly degrowth lifestyle. Even those who do practice degrowth are often keenly aware of concessions that they still make to the dominant system in their everyday struggle to survive. For instance, most of us are obliged to pay taxes to various governments and fees to service-providing agencies, even if we live marginally in relation to, and openly challenge, both conventional governments and markets.

We are expected to respect private property and contracts, private companies and public infrastructure whether or not they are fair or sustainable. Both as individuals and in collectives we find our practices at odds with mainstream market and state structures, challenging cultures and policies of growth. Our degrowth imaginaries urge us to resist the growth imaginaries, the growth forces, the growth processes and the growth institutions (such as banks), which all contribute to accelerating development, in short the destruction of our planet and social exploitation.

Resisting forces of growth, both growth imaginaries and the materialities of growth, degrowth activists have been particularly active in resisting the dominant form of transport in the Global North, private cars, and the plethora of massive road, motorway, flyover and parking infrastructures that they require. Degrowth Adbuster and anti-advertising campaigns signal resistance to the consumer society. Degrowth activists resist mega-infrastructure projects that either support the use of aeroplanes or expand commerce, such as new and expanding airports, new and expanding shopping malls. Degrowth advocates resist false solutions, such as so-called innovative ‘smart’, ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ technologies, vocally and in print.

Significantly, the degrowth movement arose alongside the environmental justice movement, which has amalgamated concerns over the incidence of environmental damage and harms with matters of social disadvantage and inequity to find that poorer areas often suffer more deleterious environmental impacts than wealthy areas. The degrowth movement attracted increasing interest as a result of the deprivations and dislocations caused by the global financial crisis and ensuing austerity, recessions and depressions. First and foremost, within all degrowth reductions, is the principle of reducing inequalities of income and wealth between all of us as human beings. Resistance against inequity elicits further and more detailed concerns over corruption, tax evasion and the growth of public debts, which indebt entire nations of people.

Degrowth promotes deeper, inclusive and direct democracy. Degrowth activists resist violence, racism, xenophobia and sexism. In cooperation with other movements, degrowth activists develop non-violent strategies – such as direct actions, civil disobedience, blockades and flash mobs – to raise public awareness and to resist mega-infrastructure plans. Beyond employing classical forms of actions in street demonstrations, strikes and protest, degrowth activists engage in novel, customised actions (such as street theatre, and hiking banners on high buildings) in order to attract publicity – in order to alert people and raise consciousness, and implement constructive dialogue in public debates. The degrowth movement engages in these kinds of activities to occupy mainstream politicking and polity.

An example of resistance: Zone à Défendre

The sphere of degrowth resistance is neither wholly defensive nor wholly reactive. Degrowth activists do not act as a singular self-contained movement but merge with a collage of similarly associated, active and intentional change-makers. As such, degrowth principles and strategies of resistance have been demonstrated in an area known as the Zone à Défendre (ZAD) of Notre-Damedes-Landes, a town close to Nantes (France). Here, several hundreds of activists occupied more than 4,000 acres of land, which was to be impacted by a planned airport. This internationally newsworthy blockade of long duration has incorporated a massive variety of social actors, many of whom are involved with, or aware of, the degrowth movement.

Surrounded by up to 4,000 soldiers at times, the ZAD activists not only defended the land but also started to experiment with and construct, in situ, an alternative utopia with direct democracy, local food production based on agroecology, local markets and alternative solidarities based on reciprocity and care, low-tech eco-constructions and energy production. These activities were intentionally emblematic of a commons, ‘the common horizon that we share’.¹¹

The main struggle of the ZAD has gone well beyond forcing the abandonment of the airport megaproject. Their struggle has been defined as ‘not only a fight for the land, but above all for a way of living in common, which gives a whole new meaning to the idea of work or activity’.¹² The farmers, conservationists, unionists and environmental activists involved were keen to reframe public debate. Being against the airport could be construed as a selfish not-in-my-back-yard (aka ‘NIMBY’) protest. However, this coalition of forces was equally vocal against the worldview, the imaginary, behind such an airport project, its environmentally destructive construction and operation.

Active resistance was not only defensive but also constructively assertive. The protesters insisted on establishing a credible future:

since the decision to abandon the airport was announced, the assembly hall is always full, filled by those who form the heart (not legal, but real) of the entity that we desire, and which will fight so that the forms of life that we have built here last and deepen. Forms of life that depend on ways of sharing that, to say the least, are not the norm.

If there exists a place where the ownership of capital is not a source of pride and valorization, it is surely this zone. Many things are free here … ¹³

The main challenge is finding strategies that enable such activists to co-construct conditions for an emancipatory, fruitful and calmly conducted debate at the same time as blocking further damage to planet and people. Indeed, as shown with the ZAD, degrowth activists try to infuse acts of resistance with clearer visions of their worldview and of the degrowth paradigm.

Those in the degrowth movement appreciate the complexity of challenges associated with socio-material change and use actions of resistance as opportunities to embrace more and more people in the co-construction of degrowth imaginaries, degrowth discourses and degrowth solutions.

The degrowth project: an articulated agenda

The degrowth movement and activists also inhabit a sphere of reflection and auto-critique. What, we ask ourselves constantly, is the agenda for degrowth? How can we define our ‘project’ to newcomers? Chapter 5 focuses specifically on the degrowth project; chapter 4 is on strategic matters, so here in chapter 3 it must suffice to address just one teasing question: how can we achieve democratic and peaceful transitions away from growth-addiction towards new degrowth models implementing degrowth principles?

This question is central to political debates and to discussions of degrowth with people in the street. It is central to academic, mainly transdisciplinary, theorisation and to empirical investigation ideally based on action research. Activities in all spheres contribute to co-developing a moral compass, social organisation and a contemporary voice for degrowth that, in turn, offers hope for and visions of a different future.

Many other questions beyond the central one arise from activities in each, and all, spheres. Is one particular strategy most appropriate and, if so, which? Which principles are key to driving or levering social, economic, institutional, cultural and psychological changes to enable the fruition of degrowth in practice? Discussions, debates and interventions around such questions occupy the sphere of the project and are central to creating a degrowth agenda.

As mentioned in chapter 2, degrowth initially became visible as a provocative slogan and quickly morphed into a matrix of increasingly well-articulated complementary thoughts driving action and seeking a real-world existence in the degrowth movement. Following similar dynamics and conditions for the different spheres of degrowth action, the sphere of the degrowth project or agenda can be readily defined but cannot be easily separated from the other spheres.

Individual action is inspired by the sense of a project, an endpoint. The collective sphere relies on individual skills and collective will but, equally, often evolves, and requires protection, from the sphere of resistance. Implemented by self-organising individuals, the collective sphere nurtures new forms of social agency and has a greater capacity to reach out to potential new supporters of degrowth. As demonstrated in the case of the ZAD, the collective sphere is protected by activities of resistance and resistance itself offers possibilities for expanding the notion and practice of degrowth.

It is argued that more clearly articulating the project of degrowth might enhance possibilities for consistent principles and characteristic processes to flower in various concrete degrowth experiments. Certainly this kind of coherence would improve opportunities to socially interconnect and materially integrate isolated and local initiatives into a clearer multi-functioning societal form. In developing a theory of change best suited to degrowth principles and conditions, the sphere of resistance offers rich cases to compare and contrast with the experience of the constructive sphere of pro-active collectivity.

In summary, the ‘project’ is not only speculative theory regarding what degrowth might look and feel like but also reflects on, and plays with, knowledge of the conditions, actions and results of concrete individual and collective experimentation. Here practice feeds theory just as theory, at another point, inspires action. A latent theory of change based on such praxis is gradually developing in the degrowth movement. Questions and claims around ‘the project’ drive radical debates defining paradigm transformation, ultimately evolving in multidimensional ways – intellectual, philosophical, economic, political, material, cultural and social.

INTERNATIONALISING DEGROWTH

The open degrowth network started and flourished in France. Step-by-step it became internationalised, primarily through activist and academic interest. Biennial international degrowth conferences, and a variety of other pop-up gatherings followed. Not surprisingly, the First International Degrowth Conference took place in Paris, in 2008. Since then, international conferences have been held in Barcelona (Spain) in 2010 and in Venice (Italy) in 2012, the same year that several universities in Montreal (Canada) sponsored the first international degrowth conference in the Americas. The Fourth International Degrowth Conference took place in 2014 in Leipzig (Germany) and, the fifth in 2016, in Budapest (Hungary; see Figure 3.2).¹⁴

These conferences followed degrowth principles in their organisation, planning and practice. They applied DIY, DIO and open source techniques. Each was unique, embedded well within local urban neighbourhoods and the natural local and regional environments to successfully symbolise the degrowth idea of ‘open relocalisation’. Conscientiously co-organised by local people – most often a heterogeneous local collective of academics, activists and practitioners, including artists – the degrowth network Support Group worked to connect each and every dynamic local collective to the global degrowth movement.

Figure 3.2 Fifth International Degrowth Conference banner

Graphic artist: Eszter Baranyai

Conference collectives go to great lengths to make sure that food is locally prepared from ingredients that are locally produced and/or obtained by dumpster diving. Processes are set up to seek and offer hosting by locals during the conference, which generally takes place over five days and in numerous locations. Local degrowth initiatives are promoted through tours and other types of events are informed and created by key degrowth activists. Sessions emphasise local political debates so that international degrowth communities can be inspired by, and contribute to, local experience and knowledge. At the same time, all international conferences emphasise strong planetary and international themes, which makes the gatherings genuinely ‘glocal’.

Three large and complementary degrowth gatherings were organised in the second half of 2018. The Sixth International Degrowth Conference: Dialogues in Turbulent Times took place in Malmö (Sweden), 21–25 August. The First North–South Conference for Degrowth–Descrecimiento was held in México City (Mexico), 3–7 September. A two-day conference in mid-September was held in, and with, the EU Parliament in Brussels (Belgium), with a preparatory one-day seminar of activists and scholars at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and a wrap-up day at the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels, all stretching from 17 September to 20 September.¹⁵

The three parallel and complementary 2018 events show the influence of degrowth across several spaces. The biennial conference in Malmö focused degrowth within Scandinavia where, for example, the myth (and limits) of a green technological transition were of particular interest and, consequently, scrutinised. In Mexico, the organisers revived one of degrowth’s fundamental pillars in the form of criticism of development to feature local indigenous movements fighting against extractivism, to produce on their own land in ways they chose, to enhance self-government and to celebrate the living idea of ‘buen vivir’.¹⁶

Last but not least, in 2018 the degrowth movement occupied one of the lobby-dominated sanctuaries of growth on the international stage, the EU Parliament, to explore what could – and could not – be done within this political space and its associated institutions. Frank exchanges ensued. Already, in discussions immediately prior to this conference, degrowth activists and scholars had become acutely aware of differences within and beyond the movement around questions such as: does postgrowth/degrowth mean post-capitalism? Such questions were raised again within the EU processes of engagement. Testimony to the success of the EU dialogue was an invitation to broaden and deepen such debates within this large institution.

The 2016 Budapest conference, with the motto ‘Walking the Meaningful Great Transformations?’, questioned degrowth in a post-socialist context, in a city amalgamated from two discrete cities around 150 years ago. Budapest is where East meets West to form something other than a pure mix of the two, a curious parallel with activists fighting for a vision of a new world while they live in a very different, and decidedly ‘other’, all too well-established, world.

Such conferences are organised in a spirit of openness, based on degrowth principles and radicalism, to constitute a living platform for dialogue.¹⁷ Activists, academics, artists, politicians, inquisitive citizens and aspiring degrowth advocates meet to reflect, listen and learn about local and global realities. These conferences exemplify, experientially, the role of the degrowth network to facilitate better understandings of twenty-first-century environmental and social challenges. They embrace other similar movements and debate how to implement fruitful cooperation and to create useful synergies between distinct schools of thought in different regions, that is, distinctive socio-material conditions, all around the world.

Malmö was an ideal location for the 2018 conference due to its cultural diversity and social challenges associated with its industrial character. Immigration has meant that Arabic is second only to Swedish as a spoken language there. Those born outside Sweden make up 43% of the city’s residents, migrants hailing from Africa and the Balkans as well as the Middle East. Alternative, degrowth and grassroots activities are strong and varied.

In 2020, the Seventh International Degrowth Conference, to be jointly held with the 16th International Society of Ecological Economics Conference, had been planned for 1–5 September at the University of Manchester (UK). Due to the coronavirus, it was postponed to 2021. However, a complementary event – the Vienna Degrowth Conference, with the theme Strategies for a Social Ecological Transformation – did take place online in the 2020 European spring. Thus the crisis created an opportunity for the degrowth movement to experiment with techniques and technologies that avoid the environmental and financial costs of travel for international face-to-face conferences and have challenged the network to enhance an open relocalisation of their sphere of communication.

The intention of the Manchester 2021 conference is to invite participants to prolong debates that started in this very city in the Industrial Revolution around the contentious nature of capitalist practices, inspired by labour and cooperative movements. Here the legacies and failures of Marxian inspirations remind degrowth activists and scholars of the constant need to re-think their own founding principles, to be self-critical and to engage with and adapt to new developments.

DEGROWTH IN ACADEMIES

Degrowth became an active international field of research after the first conference in Paris in 2008. At that stage, the organisers of the conference had difficulties finding any peer-reviewed academic paper referring to degrowth! From this minuscule base, the number of journal articles, edited collections, sole and co-authored works has exploded, particularly in the last few years. Interest has been piqued and associations developed with scholars from several fields of research, such as ecological economics, sustainability studies, community and economic development studies, alternative economies, ecosocialist studies and heterodox economics.

In reference to the accumulative impact of this rise in academic contributions, Kallis et al. wrote in a 2018 Annual Review of Environment and Resources article that:

Research on degrowth has reinvigorated the limits to growth debate with critical examination of the historical, cultural, social, and political forces that have made economic growth a dominant objective … This dynamic and productive research agenda asks inconvenient questions that sustainability sciences can no longer afford to ignore.¹⁸

Indeed, in terms of research methods, degrowth is also forging a new path. Degrowth calls for transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary processes of investigation, and the constitution of anti-systemic logic. Degrowth practice has synergies with empathetic scholarly and participatory action research as well as critical governance and decolonial perspectives. Along with other edgy and provocative, if relatively marginal, fields of study, degrowth scholarship is dedicated to challenging and decolonising the comfortable imaginaries of certain well-established academic mind-sets.

As indicated in chapter 2, from Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen to Ivan Illich, from Jacques Grinevald to Serge Latouche, degrowth theorists have questioned science at its epistemological source. Can ‘objectivity’ be achieved? Is objectivity even necessary? Degrowth activist-scholars question the logic of market-based society’s divisions of labour that have their parallels in disciplinary silos, many with reductionist perceptions of reality. Degrowth activist-scholars have sought research processes that exhibit a range of inclusionary methods, that involve the investigator in the investigation, methods such as participatory action research, citizen science and digital peer-to-peer sharing. All this in an effort to imbue degrowth studies with holistic approaches, to analyse and evaluate degrowth experimentation in the most appropriate ways. Here the ‘activist-scholar’ has been synonymous with degrowth research and theory.

‘DEGROWTH IN MOVEMENT(S)’: A PLATFORM FOR CONVERGENCE?

When degrowth first appeared, Paul Ariès spoke about it as a ‘political UFO’. Indeed, it was misunderstood, rejected and demonised by green and left movements even if for different reasons and in distinctive ways. For the greens, degrowth was too anti-capitalist and anarchist. Why speak about capitalism or neoliberalism as the problem? Why not focus on the environment? For the more conventional union-aligned and hierarchically organised left, degrowth was suspiciously anti-work and anti-production. Why criticise industries which provide us with jobs? Why talk about bullshit jobs, part-time work and freedom from money when unemployment and precarity are both rising? Moreover, the old left sneer at ‘unorganised’ twenty-first-century movements such as degrowth – ‘they won’t amount to anything, they’re not even organised!’

The practical left has a point. Unions of the twentieth century built their power base on struggles for full employment and maintaining or expanding their piece of the capitalist pie. That was the mainstream left project, the left agenda. But degrowth advocates have a point too: the traditional left has sat very vulnerably on a plinth of economic growth, compromising with capitalism to the extent of being co-opted, especially in adopting its economic language. Now that carbon emissions related to capitalist production threaten the future existence of humanity, the left and the greens – just like the EU Parliament in 2018 – are much more prepared to listen to degrowth theories and reconsider the meaning of degrowth practices.

In these left and green framings of new futures, anticapitalism has greater currency and degrowth offers ways of both identifying and connecting the dots between the key material and social challenges of our century. Degrowth has a holistic view with a logical emphasis on key foci and steps to reach a pre-ordained end. Thus scholarly modes for degrowth researchers are transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary by the very nature of the case. When advocates of degrowth get into debates, they become acutely aware that dealing with our current challenges in singular and separated ways – or simply using economic frameworks – loses most of the key points and nuances of the radical and holistic degrowth perspective.

Too frequently there are mainstream media, political and economic discussions about accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss and the need to reduce consumption or waste without any reference at all to degrowth. Growth remains central in vain attempts towards decoupling, in creating so-called ‘renewable’ products, ‘sustainable’ services and, consequently, new ‘green’ jobs. The vast majority of familiar sustainability ‘solutions’, such as sharing and circular economies, are market-based – neglecting or distorting discussion of growth and degrowth. To attack growth is seen as commensurate with encouraging unemployment and deepening inequalities. Notice the cognitive dissonance when the logic of growth, which is coexistent with both the rise of contemporary forms of environmental unsustainability and the dynamics of establishing and maintaining inequality, is employed to solve these implicit consequences of growth! Anyway, the point is that degrowth has gone against the grain of established politics, left, right and green.

Confronted by environmental and economic crises, the human species also faces a well-acknowledged crisis of democracy and widespread incidence of anti-politics and populist parties of the right and left. Representative democracy offers individuals little power, but the chance to vote every few years for a ‘representative’ among a narrow range of options. Not only have political institutions, including political parties and the increasingly politicised media, been discredited – but also unions, progressive associations and non-government organisations have lost grassroots support to the extent that they have been corporatised.

Degrowth offers a radical invitation to examine the roots of our problems, a platform to connect the dots. The specific forms of inequality and unsustainability that we experience daily were bred within capitalism: productivism, consumerism, extractivism and materialism that have developed with added anti-social and anti-planet, racist and patriarchal, characteristics. Inequality and environmental unsustainability are not separate and cannot be solved separately. We are facing the collapse of a model of a thermo-industrial society based on more, always more.

As such, degrowth invites us to systemically analyse each of the crises we face, to broaden and deepen our understanding of economic and political structures, and to scrutinise the articulation of associated factors and forces. Degrowth prompts us to reflect and act accordingly. As neoliberalism privatises and eliminates public institutions, deregulates social welfare and retrenches or moves jobs offshore, we must develop more radical responses than the conservative (if legitimate) reaction of simply protecting our rights to public assistance, goods and services, and jobs.

In short, there is a need to go further than a defence mounted in traditional discourses and frameworks. For instance, if the plan is to relocate a massive automobile factory that has been the engine of the local economy, why not open up the local responsive debate? Why not decide on what constitute real basic needs for local people and devise ways of meeting such needs for all instead of making more cars for trade in precarious markets for unknown people in unknown places? Perhaps think more about the collective goods and services needed in this locale and how those goods and services might be produced say by a local cooperative? Degrowth treats news of collapsed firms as opportunities for conversations around new activities to create futures along sustainable and equitable principles.¹⁹

By way of an example, the union movement Earthworker Cooperative in Australia has been at the forefront of ‘just transition’ programmes for workers facing redundancy as non-renewable energy industries are replaced with renewable energy production and distribution.²⁰ Similarly, the yellow vest movement in France has argued that no green political agenda would be acceptable unless it included principles, practices and policies for social justice. Moreover, ecological taxes are only acceptable if they are embedded within a broader political project that addresses income inequalities and acknowledges that people on higher incomes have a greater capacity to pay such taxes.

Degrowth activists and scholars are particularly interested in ‘praxis’, in joining practice with theory. Degrowth has no fences and offers a platform for dialogue between numerous diverse movements. Degrowth acknowledges significant distinctions between the cultural and political contexts of each and every condition or struggle. Degrowth emphasises complementarities and distinctions between the different spheres of action – individual, collective, resistance and project-oriented. Furthermore, degrowth activists readily acknowledge a diversity of strategies appropriate within the glocal internationalisation of degrowth.

DEGROWTH IN PRACTICE

In summary, degrowth has evolved as a decentralised, multidimensional and open network facilitating emancipatory debates, dialogue and experimentation. Attempts at and arguments for a more conventional organisation of the degrowth movement have failed. Instead, the movement’s radicalism has pivoted on an enduring provocative, interventionist, experiential and experimental stance. Combining various themes and arguments into a multidimensional demand, and surrounded by many movements with similar values, degrowth has long entertained a convergence, achieved by theoretically connecting the dots, and making practical alliances and identifying – if not forging – joint goals.

In the next chapter, we turn to some highly political questions and debates within the movement, namely: what political agenda, what political platform and which effective and desirable political strategies are most appropriate for degrowth?