About degrowth

We define degrowth as a just and participatory process of political, economic and cultural transformation – a transformation that rapidly reduces a society’s absolute negative impact on the environment to sustainable levels while enabling a good life for all. This requires a reduction of material and energy use in high-income countries, most likely resulting in a decline of their GDP. Hence, wellbeing needs to be made independent from economic growth.

The call for degrowth is based on the simple observation that what really matters is wellbeing, not economic expansion. In our society, GDP growth has become an end in itself, independent of whether it is still beneficial for human wellbeing or not. At least in high-income countries, this has become highly questionable.

More than that, the goal of ever more production is pursued even though our growing economy puts ever more pressure on the ecological systems it eventually relies on. But since an intact biosphere is an existential condition for human safety and thriving, societies with high levels of consumption must reduce their absolute impact on the environment in a rapid and lasting manner.

There is abundant evidence that an absolute decoupling of GDP from ecological impacts is not happening and very unlikely to happen to the necessary degree in the future. Therefore, reducing resource use in high-income countries is very likely to stop or even reverse their economic growth at some point.

However, a decrease in GDP is not the goal of degrowth, just an anticipated consequence. In our current society, this would be a huge problem because many important institutions, such as pensions or employment, rely on economic growth. Thus, we have to transform these institutions to become growth-independent and enable people to live a good life in absence of material expansion.

Degrowth means to abandon economic growth as a societal goal and to find a new definition of progress. For this to happen, we need to overcome the current growthist paradigm in our culture and profoundly reshape our economic system. Degrowth is therefore a transformation on all important levels of society, drawing on the experience of other social movements on how social change can be achieved.

The concrete policy proposals brought forward by degrowth actors are diverse and similar to many classical demands from progressive environmental and social movements. The degrowth perspective adds to this an overarching analysis of the root causes, showing the need for growth independence – in our institutions and in our heads.