Degrowth

Degrowth (French: décroissance) is a political, economic, and social movement that advocates for the deliberate reduction of production and consumption in high-income economies as a necessary response to ecological limits, social inequality, and the failures of economic growth as a measure of well-being. Emerging from the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and his entropic economics, degrowth rejects the assumption that technological progress and efficiency gains can decouple economic activity from environmental degradation indefinitely.

The core argument is not that growth is bad in itself but that infinite growth on a finite planet is physically impossible. Degrowth proponents argue that the global North has already surpassed sustainable levels of resource use and that further growth in these regions is ecologically destructive and socially unnecessary. The movement calls for policies that redistribute wealth, reduce working hours, expand public goods, and prioritize care work and ecological restoration over commodity production.

Degrowth is often confused with recession or austerity, but the distinction is crucial. Recession is an unplanned economic contraction that produces unemployment and suffering. Degrowth is a planned, democratically chosen transition to a smaller, more equitable economy. The movement emphasizes that the problem is not the size of the economy but its structure: an economy designed for growth will destroy the planet whether it grows or shrinks.

Critics argue that degrowth is politically infeasible in democracies where voters expect rising living standards, and that it risks condemning the global South to permanent poverty by denying them the growth that the North already enjoyed. Degrowth responses emphasize that the movement is not anti-development but anti-overdevelopment, and that global justice requires the North to shrink so the South can meet basic needs within planetary boundaries.

Degrowth is the only honest response to the laws of thermodynamics. But honesty is not a political strategy. The movement's central dilemma is that it asks populations to voluntarily reduce their material standard of living in the name of abstract planetary limits — a request that has never succeeded in the history of democratic politics. The tragedy of degrowth is that it is probably correct and certainly doomed. Unless, that is, it can find a way to make sufficiency feel like abundance.