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Staff-student dialogue
What is, and isn’t, * degrowth? Dr Julien-François Gerber and MA student Arca Arguelles-Caouette discuss degrowth. Julien-François (J): There is something very obvious about degrowth: we need to decrease our use of resources and rethink the kind of society we want. At a very basic level that’s what degrowth is about. But it’s also about redistributing resources better. We need to have a collective discussion about what is required and what is unnecessary. Arca (A): I agree. But it also involves collective, bottom-up activism; initiatives and every-day practices that are already happening. I think it’s also an invitation to critically rethink our lifestyles and our societies. And it problematizes growth as tied to deeply racial, gendered and extractive hierarchies and dependencies. Degrowth brings in a new unit of analysis which moves away from the rational individual to really thinking about communities. And this brings in more thinking about who is included and excluded in communities. J: I agree. What I like about the word ‘degrowth’ is that it strikes at the core of capitalist modernity: the idea that more is better, that we need more stuff, more technological progress, that it’s never enough. Degrowth is meant to trigger discussion about this, to go beyond the notion of sustainable development. For degrowthers, sustainable development is an oxymoron because ‘development’ is
typically associated with endless growth, something that can never be sustainable.
A: Do you have any examples of degrowth in practice?
A: I would also argue that sustainable development and degrowth build from a different logic; for one thing degrowth criticizes growth and it also goes beyond the agency of the individual. Degrowth also advocates values or ethics around well-being which can include sharing, caring, nurturing, horizontality: it re-questions our social relationships.
J: There’s a lot to learn from historical and non-western societies that were often non-growing. Cuban agriculture of the 80s is a more contemporary example: all its relationships with the ex-USSR were cut and it had to completely rethink the way it organized its economy. It was the largest-scale transition to agro-ecology witnessed so far and it was pretty successful. Sustainability indicators were going up, agroecological production was doing well and health indicators were also on the up. Unfortunately, at the end of the 90s it went back to a normal growthbased model.
J: Many degrowthers would also embrace the circular economy, but they would add that we also need to problematize growth. Many circular economy thinkers believe that we can continue to expand the economy as long as we recycle; degrowth argues that we also need to stop unnecessary consumption and production. A: Indeed. Degrowth doesn’t just look at consumption but also at the problem of production: why do we still have extractive economies, or overdimensioning, over-producing and over-consuming systems? J: Right. Degrowth is not just about less consumption and less production while everything else remains the same. That already has a name, it’s called a recession. Degrowth is not a recession; it’s a rethinking of the economic and social structures that we live in.
A: My research looks at the reappropriation and sharing of peasantdriven technology on the peasant cooperative L’Atelier Paysan in France. Related to degrowth are the ideas that knowledge(s) and know-hows should be accessible to everyone. The peasant farmers learn how to build, assemble, fix and repair. They create and test tools and technologies that are adapted to their farming grounds and their practices, and advocate more ecological and resilient farming models. This is a concrete case of degrowth in an industrialized country. However, degrowth is also relevant in the global South.
