Alts to degrowth - cosmovisions

Cosmovisions in planning as response to resource use and resilience

I use cosmovisions in planning to refer to other-than-growth-values, questions of ecologically unequal exchange and solidarities in resource use. These are degrowth alternatives that can engage the resource use and resilience approaches at multiple scales. A starting point of such cosmovisions is to forge cultural imaginaries of living in a region built on degrowth. Here, Buen Vivir cosmovisions provide an apt cultural entry point for re-imagining alternatives to growth, emphasising quality of life, wellbeing and intrinsic nature embedded in community (Gudynas, 2011). Originating from transboundary Andean communities in Ecuador and Bolivia and subsequently incorporated into national constitutions, Buen Vivir cannot be equivocated to degrowth. However, both reject growth as means to development, providing syncretic advantages (Gudynas, 2011). The cultural contribution of a Buen-Vivir-inspired-degrowth is to enable institutions to pursue other values beyond economic growth (Gudynas, 2011). Here, multi-sectoral planning practices can integrate reciprocity, cooperation and redistribution, rather than merely competition, into regional planning policies. Agenda 2030’s goal of poverty reduction through effective resource mobilisation could benefit from such cosmovisions. Buen Vivir also suggests qualitatively different objectives which could be useful, for example, in NUA’s food security objectives as part of territorial planning. Buen Vivir can also provide an ethical scaffolding for non/more-than human rights in environmental planning practices (). This goes beyond the instrumental and relational references to nature – as merely heritage, resource and habitat – in Agenda 2030 and NUA (, ).

Additionally, there is potential to re-ecologise economy through such cosmovisions, offering alternatives to the resource use approach. Here, planning practices could centre social metabolism assessments to highlight ecologically unequal exchange between different scales: rural–urban, regional, national, or international (Dorninger et al., 2021). This enables planners to re-ecologise and repoliticise questions of access and distribution of resources and waste (cf. ). Such assessments allow environmental planning practices to excavate the ecological underbelly of economy. They also potentiate the upscaling of regenerative planning practices beyond urban housing (Birkeland, 2008). Such practices therefore contribute towards the NUA goals of prioritising efficient use of energy, raw and building materials (, ; ).

A corollary is to rescale and regionalise production–consumption networks, with implications for resource use and resilience. Granted, upscaling practices like urban gardening as part of degrowth could perpetuate low density urbanisation, nature destruction and increase travel demands (). Similarly, globalising degrowth models like bioregions disregards the disproportionate ecological capacities and territorial restrictions involved (). Here, the commentary suggests the regional scale of production-consumption as requiring attention. The regional scale offers avenues to rescale production and consumption of food and materials beyond the local while cushioning risks of global dependence (cf. ). Reducing the length of extraction and food–fuel chains offers useful openings. For instance, Gudynas (2013) uses Buen Vivir to envision post-extractivist Latin American futures entailing regionalised exports, decentralised renewable energy and encultured food–fuel policies between neighbouring countries. Similarly, Wächter (2013) suggests regionalised renewable energy planning practices as part of degrowth. Such regionalisation will also enable the integration of solidarity economies and social enterprises into production networks (Latouche, 2009; ). Rescaling and regionalising such networks would aim to reduce the footprints of industrial production, intermediate and final consumption, thereby challenging the scales of unequal exchange. It would also highlight the redistributive mechanisms and planetary boundaries of resource use under degrowth (Kaika et al., 2023).

Industrial ecologists and economic planners are central to such practices. Such rescaled cosmovisions could potentially contribute towards the Agenda 2030 goals of reshaping global exports, reducing waste and enhancing production networks (cf. , ). Additionally, extractive policies like the EU’s Critical Raw Materials demands and other resource networks (including from emerging economies) could be potentially situated within similar contextually derived cosmovisions. Such cultural, ecological and economic cosmovisions could offer alternatives to the resource use and resilience approaches.