Alt solves degrowth

What Can Feminist Political Ecology Bring to Degrowth?” of “Contours of Political Feminist Ecology”, Gender, Development and Social Change Special Series, (2023), Palgrave Macmillan)

Degrowth is both an academic and activist framework, which seeks alternatives to current patterns of economic and socio-ecological destruction and calls for movement towards a fair and liveable future for all. Degrowth proposes a scaling down of certain sectors and aspects of the economy (such as advertising, the military industrial complex, planned obsolescence of products, and the fossil fuel industry) and supports other kinds of economies and policies (such as shorter working weeks, a care income, economies of renewables, and strong public education and healthcare systems). Degrowth transformations are envisioned as taking place in equitable and democratic ways by strategically addressing privileges so as to avoid abrupt changes that will negatively impact the most vulnerable groups and exacerbate injustice (Chertkovskaya et al., 2019; D’Alisa et al., 2014; Liegey et al., 2020; Paulson et al., 2020). Through interdisciplinary analysis, including with and through social movements and grassroots initiatives, degrowth aims to debunk the idea that continuous economic growth is necessary for modern life and civilisation, and that tweaked versions of “green growth” are capable of addressing the interrelated crises of ecological destruction, social injustice, and climate change. As Schneider and Pope (2020) eloquently summarise “degrowth is not a passive critique but an active project of hope”. However, the central issue of unequal power and privilege is often left unquestioned in degrowth propositions, especially in terms of who needs to or can afford to “degrow”, whose claims and demands are represented in the degrowth movement, and how subaltern, racialised, and gendered communities at the global and local levels would be impacted by degrowth initiatives, policies, and approaches (Smith et al., 2021). While these tensions and questions are common in many articulations of alternatives (Argüelles et al., 2017), we feel it is important to interrogate power relationships in emerging imaginaries of radical socio-ecological change like degrowth. In this chapter, we outline ways in which feminist political ecology (FPE) perspectives can contribute to degrowth analysis and political strategy. We aim to strengthen the radical potential of degrowth by problematising and pushing forward the questions of who is recognised in, or can be part of, degrowth communities of practice and thought. An emerging realm of FPE scholarship focuses on power analyses in degrowth (Paulson, 2017), with particular attention to coloniality (Dengler & Seebacher, 2019), race (Abazeri, 2022; Gilmore, 2013), class and labour (Barca, 2019), and gender (FaDA, 2020; Saave-Harnack et al., 2019). Neera Singh (2019), for example, stresses the need for deeper mutual learning between environmental justice movements of the global South and degrowth, in order to discover common ontological grounds for “other ways of being”. She argues that an examination of on-the-ground practices and epistemologies of local communities can help “reconceptualize work and care in a post-production, post-growth world” (Singh, 2019, p. 139). In a similar vein, Padini Nirmal and Dianne Rocheleau (2019) propose a feminist and decolonial perspective on degrowth that is “materially and ecologically rooted and culturally expanded” through practices of “re-rooting and re-commoning” (Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019, p. 470), what they refer to as “regrowth”— practices of regeneration and collective flourishing that counter the destructive legacies and paradigms of colonialist expansion and capitalist forms of growth. Feminist economists have been among the first to criticise GDP growth from the point of view of class, gender, and colonial inequalities (Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019; Wichterich, 2014). As scholars and activists from the “Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance” (FaDA) have highlighted, rather than understanding degrowth as just about shrinking the economy, degrowth should be focused on transforming core institutions that govern production and reproduction, inspired by and grounded in feminist traditions (Saave-Harnack et al., 2019). Part of this vision and challenge is to re-situate and re-value care at the centre of socio-ecological processes and systems: to treat care as a core common for a liveable future. But what is meant by the term and concept of care? And what kind of caring practices and communities can support a radical social transformation? FPE seeks to answer these questions in diverse ways. FPE is a convening space of research and ideas where scholars theorise different forms of power and access to resources. FPE understands people as embodied and emotional beings with “complex and shifting relationships to the natural world, embedded in place and shaped by interactions of gender, race, class, caste, culture, age (and so on)”, moving towards environmental and social justice (Resurrección, 2017, p. 74). In FPE, the concept of care is theorised in various ways. In their edited volume, for example, Wendy Harcourt and Christine Bauhardt (2018), delineate some main threads of thought around care as the gendered work of social reproduction: care as a form of commoning; care as looking after and providing for human and nonhuman others; and care as interspecies reciprocity and more-than-human relations. FPE thus highlights the central role of socio-ecological production and reproduction and the labour of care as the foundation of planetary well-being by asking more specifically: in what ways can economies be transformed in terms of provisioning and care while degrowing in a socially just manner? What can we learn, in this regard, from communities who are fighting every day for environmental and social justice, or simply for their own well-being and survival on earth? This learning might well go beyond social reproduction and the care of human families and communities to include the work of “earthcare” (Merchant, 1989) and environmental struggles in the defence of and care for more-than-human others (Barca, 2020b; Fragnito & Tola, 2021). What would this expanded understanding of care, beyond but including social reproduction, mean for a new politics of care commoning? As Chizu Sato and Jozelin Soto Alarcón point out, “community is, by definition, constituted through commoning. It is the process and site of being produced through sharing a property, a practice, or a knowledge” (2019, p. 38). Building on these different understandings of care, we ask: what are caring communities in a post-capitalist, post-growth future and what are the main challenges ahead?