Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide

by Vincent Liegey

A sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism, and the degrowth movement is bursting into the mainstream. As climate catastrophe looms closer, people are eager to learn what degrowth is about, and whether we can save the planet by changing how we live. This book is an introduction to the movement.



As politicians and corporations obsess over growth objectives, the degrowth movement demands that we must slow down the economy by transforming our economies, our politics and our cultures to live within the Earth's limits.



This book navigates the practice and strategies of the movement, looking at its strengths and weaknesses. Covering horizontal democracy, local economies and the reduction of work, it shows us why degrowth is a compelling and realistic project.

Genres: Economics, Ecology, Nonfiction, Theory, Environment, Climate Change, Academia

212 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 20, 2020

Reviews

[Debbie Notkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very strange book; Liegey and Nelson are so very close to their subject that they have trouble talking about what it is: they spend easily half the book talking about why degrowth is called degrowth, what different meanings people assign to the word, what other words people have considered, who is believed to have started the movement, and what the internal disagreements are. These conversations are probably fascinating if you live and breathe degrowth, but as a person trying to get a handle on the concept and the philosophy, I found it somewhat frustrating.

Nonetheless, once I pushed through the meta-analysis, there is a lot of good information. Liegey and Nelson take the basic, very defensible position that corporations and governments are not going to embrace degrowth, so the heart of the movement is in small independent efforts. They rely a lot on the mycelial concept so common in contemporary politics--tendrils of small groups reaching out towards each other underground and creating masses of connections and cross-fertilization. I find this very appealing.

I appreciated some of their examples and I am not sorry I read the book, but I also hope there is a better "Degrowth for Beginners" book out there somewhere.

[Kieran · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was intrigued by degrowth, so I thought this would be a good place to start, I ended up reading about half of it because it only had one thing to say, that degrowth is new, so we can't really put too fine a point to it other than that it's anti-perpetual-economic-growth, that there was that thing in Paris that went well, and a few bits of writing here and there, but that's about it.

Even as a starting point, for me, this was way too repetitive, dull and unengaging to hold my attention.

[Robert Stutchbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it is short and easy to understand, it's attempts to simultaneously provide a history and introduction to Degrowth step on eachother's toes somewhat. Still a good read, esp. for those just getting into the topic, but the next *Common Sense* it is not.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fairly dry and waffly introduction to the degrowth movement. I found it quite frustrating - lots of description of the movement's values and activities but very few concrete examples. Functionally, it's more like a manifesto, but it's just too repetitive and mechanical to really stir up much feeling. The actual manifesto in the appendices is far better at this. The ideals are something I can get behind but I'm not sure the book has much persuasive or explanatory value.

The discussion of class was quite thought provoking - it's refreshing to have talk about the ambiguities and fluidities of class identity, while acknowledging the structural inequalities that many people face. (Some of the language is clumsy - I wouldn't talk about "coming out" as a degrowth advocate, for instance..!) The authors acknowledge the challenges of right wing populism and their hope seems to be that local participatory democracy will form a more engaged, meaningful opposition.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Theory at the beginning is useful and contextual but it starts to show fraying in discussion of individual activity without any acknowledgement of climate debt to the global south

[Colin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The great strength of degrowth is that the imperative to reduce absolute energy/material throughput follows straightforwardly from basic empiric premises about the global scale of ecological breakdown. Green growth is an illusion and circular economies are necessary but not sufficient to live in balance with the rest of nature.

Beyond this shared premise, degrowth remains open-ended on how exactly to scale down throughput in a way that is safe and equitable (and even, to some extent, what is driving growth in the first place - not all degrowthers are anticapitalists). This feature of degrowth, which is both a strength and a limitation, manifests in Exploring Degrowth as an inventory of various degrowth tendencies that range from statist to anti-statist, reformist to revolutionary, utopian to nowtopian. All find room under the degrowth umbrella, despite their varying and at times contradictory political commitments.

Nonetheless, Exploring Degrowth identifies some commonalities shared by streams or tendencies within degrowth - emphasis on autonomy, horizontal organizing, place-bound/local organizing, conviviality, Global North culpability, production for use, anti-work/anti-productivism. To the extent that the authors come down on the side of one set of strategies or another, they make mention of direct action (sabotage, squatting, blockades) but devote much more ink to 'radical reforms' like zero reserve banking, UBI, UBS, income caps, and advertising bans without much critical exploration of such proposals - understandable as a pamphlet, but with the unfortunate effect of feeling like a laundry list of proposals lacking theoretical coherence. Again, unsurprising that prescriptions vary if degrowth, as an umbrella concept, does not imply a specific set of causes of endless growth.

For me, Less is More remains a more coherent and better-organized intro to degrowth for the uninitiated. More empirics for the unconvinced social democrat or left productivist, more substantial engagement with the drivers of growth as understood by existing works of political economy and philosophy.

[Norma J]

I need an operable eReader to work so I can read this electronic version I bought from Pluto.
Now that I've glanced at the reviews here, I do have things to say about it. I bought the e book because the pages I'd read were so preachments from a pulpit - be nice, pretty much, so to handle the very deep problem.
I've been 'a marxist for maybe 70+ years, long despising the system we live in regardless it's called 'democratic'. If you're steeped in it, if you get it, you get what all I might say. Analysis is void - what causes the problem is not approached; it can be inferred if, like me, you're devout. Somebody mentioned that there's not proper reflection to the benefits to maybe 50% of us on Earth, by the global South. - looking around - and I do that a lot - I expect it to be fewer and fewer of us all the time - 40%.....20%..... The horrors our Owners wreak upon most of us ..... causing THeir benefit and our deprivation, humiliation, suffering, torment ....
The book's tone is all too friendly. I tell people to hate - hate what's done/been done to us - by our brutally armed Owners.
I'm reading a book titled 'Russka: The Novel of Russia' by Edward Rutherfurd. In it he has the people long trying all manner of communal organizing - for millennia!!, escaping brutal rule - but not for long. Until 'the revolution'. The lengthy preparation brought all forms of advancing their gains - regardless what you might have been told. People by that time were virtually 'all' imbued with the ideas that advanced their difficult liberation. The revolution was a mass movement! for individual and communal liberation, with people practiced at working it.
That's what we are to do. Serve each other and say so - develop the basis of mass control - of production, of use, of care - of all of it. We have to preach THAt, so we're 'all' able to say it together, not just have in the backs of our minds.
We are suffering the 'peace' of an 'Irish' peace - the one that gave up 800 years of struggle to be able to function with dignity. We scrabble along on our knees....

[Marlo · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. the first couple of chapters of this are a solid and clear thesis on the necessity of degrowth which was useful to me and a good starting point for selling the idea to anybody. however, the book then tasks itself with proof of strategy on which it cannot deliver, devolving into vague waffling and broad inarticulate concepts with few examples and asking you to take a whole, whole lot of statements and assertions at face value. it is not a sober presentation of differing theories and conceptualisations of degrowth praxis, it is the authors conception of what is best practice and this at first claims to be totally bottom-up grassroots networks - but then later seems to imply the necessity of some top-down political economic changes, ideas it does not flesh out or reconcile which to be fair is a big task which i wouldn't necessarily expect any book this radical to deliver upon, only it dedicates such a laborious chunk to "strategy". the charts in the appendices are absolutely more useful than the chapters dedicated to them. also for a book that uses the term "decolonise" so frequently you would think it could have referred to some indigenous land husbandry practices or something and expounded the relationships between degrowth and actual decolonisation or something. not substantial enough as an account to be a whole book and seemingly confused about its own purpose and audience

[caio · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a great introduction to degrowth. The language is very digestible and accessible, the authors even provide a glossary in the beginning for people to familiarize themselves with the lingo.

That said, I disagree with a lot of the points the book makes, in a way that made me a little apprehensive at first but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to dig deep and find what I could actually extract from the reading.

I agree with a lot of the philosophical takes of the book, however. It taught me a lot about how we can try to find enjoyment and fulfillment in things in life that are dissociated from the growth mentality, which is closely attached to colonization.

At times, the book reads like a TikTok. If that’s good or bad, I’ll leave it up to you.

[Perline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting essay about degrowth. This goes through the history of the movement. I enjoyed the last chapters more about the strategies for the movement and the balance between organized/unorganized and clear plan/diverse actions, etc. If you want to learn more about what is degrowth and what you can do as individual, this is NOT the appropriate book. I felt it was redondant at times and could have been simplified.

[Benjamin Solidarity · Rating 2 out of 5]

Supremely dissapointed. What I was hoping for was a book thoroughly exploring the idea and practical politics on how you build an economy not geared towards perpetual expansion. What I got was a book lost in hack post modernist and old ineffectual global justice movement ideas of localism and lifestyle environmental politics.

[Devanshi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great easy to understand introduction to the degrowth movement. However, it is not always accessible for a general audience, especially the last chapter. I felt I needed quite some more knowledge of advanced economic concepts to make sense of it. If only there were more sources accompanying the text!

[Susanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very concise introduction to the whole degrowth system.. But it's so unsexy. I can't understand why, but I need this to be written in a more.. popular way? (oh maybe that's why it's "a critical guide" hah)

Degrowth will save us, for sure.
This topic should be included in compulsory reading for students, it surely would have helped me with climate anxiety.

[Luciano Asinelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful perspective on today’s society. The degrowth movement present an interesting alternative to the current system. Not sure if I agree with everything but the book depicts its idea fairly well.

[Zoltan Pogatsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good summary of the main ideas of degrowth, especially for a beginner!

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice introduction to degrowth, covering key concepts in a critical and accessible manner.

[Kamila Michowska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild