Reject the binary between growth and degrowth – only exploration of partial connections opens up the path to sustainable transformation.

To further elucidate the drawbacks of degrowth (described in the preceding sections), it is useful to draw on the notion of ‘partial connections’, as advocated by Marilyn Strathern (2004). This notion is instrumental in problematising the stance of degrowth debates that downplay the pursuit of economic growth. It draws attention to the need to avoid dichotomising growth-seeking and degrowth- oriented measures and instead to explore complementarities between them. The drawback of degrowth debates arises from the binary worldview prevailing among scholars who are liable, as pointed out by Strathern (2004, p. 209), to complacently accept the ‘part-whole’ distinction. Scholars thus tend to believe a simplistic view that the ‘whole’ is composed of distinctive ‘parts’ that require separate treatment, and that the relation between a ‘part’ and the ‘whole’ is irreducibly hierarchical. Degrowth debates are accordingly founded on the following dubious premises. First, the ‘whole’ debate concerning economic growth consists of the degrowth ‘part’ and the growth-seeking ‘part’. Second, by making a distinction between these two ‘parts’ with recourse to the analytic category named ‘degrowth’, it is plausible to amplify information about the ‘whole’ debate. As long as scholars are complacent with such a ‘part-whole’ distinction, however, ‘information is lost proportionate to … new information gained’ by way of a new analytic category (Strathern, 2004, p. xv). This is because each single ‘part’ making up the plurality of the ‘whole’ consists of a similar plurality that demands an equally close inspection; ‘there are always potentially “more” things to take into account’ (Strathern, 2004, p. xiv). In studying Strathern’s contribution, Holbraad and Pedersen (2017, p. 131) use the example of classifying a dog as a quadruped (a distinct ‘part’ or category of the ‘whole’ life form). This analytic category helps to reduce the complexity of data on various life forms to pave the way for a comparative analysis, say, of quadrupeds and bipeds. At the same time, it also incurs ‘information loss’ (Strathern, 2004, p. xv). A dog is also a mammal and vertebrate, and a ‘partial connection’ can therefore be ascertained, for instance, between a dog as a quadruped and a human being as a biped in that both are mammals. Against this background, ‘[c]omparability is not intrinsic to anything’ (Strathern, 2004, p. 53). On the contrary, there exists fertile ground for forging a ‘working compatibility’ between different analytic categories (Strathern, 2004, p. 35). Such categories should neither be rigidly separated from nor contrasted with each other to make high-level abstractions and generalisations. ‘Partial connections’ can be explored across different analytic categories in such a manner as to collapse hierarchical ‘part-whole’ distinctions. This allows scholars to conduct research ‘at the same order of reality and concretion as the object of study by unearthing differentiations within it’ (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017, p. 138). As noted above, in reality, growth-seeking and degrowth-oriented measures do not always collide with each other because there is ‘good GDP’ and ‘bad GDP’. The notion of ‘partial connections’ thus helps to illustrate how degrowth advocates erroneously focus on the ‘comparability’ of the two ‘parts’ and resultantly incur ‘information loss’. Instead, a ‘working compatibility’ should be explored to pursue both ‘selective growth’ and ‘selective degrowth’. This is to capture the full range of sustainable development issues, as described above. This proposed approach should not be confused with the fashionable idea of ‘green growth’. The latter fails to break away from excessive economism: It merely proposes to shift the contents of growth-seeking measures towards the development of resource-efficient technologies to stimulate rapid growth and create new jobs (Kallis, 2018, p. 149). While ‘green growth’ thus downplays degrowth, the non-dual approach, put forth in this study, encompasses ‘selected degrowth’ to overcome the economic imperatives that stand in the way of sustainable transformations.