Growth’s too entrenched – no transition or transition wars.

Economic growth, as an attribute of market capitalism, has structural properties – it is needed to stabilise modern societies as it provides employment, public sector provision through tax revenues, rising wages, and hence social stability (Petridis et al., 2015: 178, Rosa et al., 2017). Economic growth is organised around and shapes a range of tightly coupled structures, including institutions, norms, discourses, culture, technologies, competences, identities, etc. Historically speaking, growth is a fairly recent phenomenon which only picked up in the 19th century together with the industrialisation of Western economies. In a co-evolutionary process, a range of institutions developed which are now coupled to a growth-based capitalist economy, including the nation state, representative democracy, the rule of law and current legal, financial, labour market, education, research, and welfare systems. These are based on philosophies which emerged to justify and give meaning to these institutions, for instance on individualism, freedom, justice, sovereignty, or power. The embeddedness of the growth-based capitalistic economic system in these co-evolved institutions and ways of thinking makes it difficult to transition to a degrowth system because the change of the economic system would need to involve a parallel transformation of those coupled systems. In Luhmann’s words, the constitution of the current system “defuturises” (Luhmann, 1976: 141) the future, it reduces the “openness” of the future; “path dependency” or even “lock-in” are related expressions that capture this idea. Two examples which directly link to people’s wellbeing can illustrate this point: the relationship between welfare states and growth, and between growth and people’s mind-sets and identities.

The satisfaction of needs is influenced by the character of socio-economic institutions, including the ways in which work, welfare, retirement, health, education and family life are governed; as well as by the structure of the distribution of a range of resources that support health and wellbeing. Welfare state institutions play an important role in these areas in high income economies, and they are closely coupled with economic growth (Bailey, 2015). Rising economic prosperity in the post Second World War period provided the resources for establishing welfare states in Europe and elsewhere, and the funding of current welfare state institutions is closely coupled to economic growth as it largely depends on income-related taxes and social security contributions. The positive relationship between economic growth and welfare states in many ways also works the other way round: welfare states support growth by enhancing the population’s health and education levels, providing unemployment and minimum income benefits for people out of work. This helps to increase productivity, maintain consumer demand, and more generally contain and minimise social conflict through redistribution and institutionalised conflict resolution between employers and employees.

Evidently, a fundamental reorganization of the economic and welfare system would be required under degrowth to sustain investments in health, education, and the reduction of poverty and inequality. This will be crucial in a context of decreasing material and financial resources, because if left unmanaged, this could provide fertile ground for new social conflicts with potentially detrimental implications for wellbeing. Various degrowth authors have made suggestions for alternative welfare institutions and policies, including working time reduction and redistribution as mentioned above (Victor & Rosenbluth, 2007), a basic income (Gorz, 1980; Dietz&O’Neill, 2013:94), and, from a Marxian perspective, the establishment of a cooperative economy in which businesses will be worker owned and managed (Blauwhof, 2012). These are all relevant suggestions, however, it should not be underestimated how radical the changes to existing social systems are that these new institutions represent. They challenge deeply entrenched ways of thinking about rights, justice, freedom, private property, individual responsibility, etc. A change of these deeply rooted ‘logics’ on which these institutions are based is not impossible, but very difficult to steer with political means.

This point closely links to the idea that economic growth is not only at the core of various socio-economic institutions but is also very deeply anchored in people’s minds, bodies and identities which is likely to make the transition to degrowth additionally challenging. The concept of social practices helps us understand the ways in which agents (and their mind-sets and bodies) and broader social structures are continuously implicated and reproduced in the performance of social life (Büchs & Koch, 2017: ch. 6). From this perspective, economic growth is not just an external premise that actors can decide to act upon or not, but it is a principle with structural properties that is engrained in ways of thinking and acting – for the most part habitually. Growth thus becomes something that is perceived as ‘natural’ by the vast majority of actors. A range of scholars have argued that the growth paradigm is deeply embedded in people’s minds and bodies (Göpel, 2016; Lane, 1991; Welzer, 2011; Büchs & Koch, 2017: ch. 6). This implies that people’s identities and life goals are closely aligned with the idea of growth – shaped by ideas of social progress, personal status and success through careers, rising income and consumption. Even seemingly alternative goals such as ‘personal fulfilment’ can be infused with ideas that remain tied to the growth paradigm, for instance if fulfilment is sought through high consumption and high emissions practices such as extensive long haul travel or expensive hobbies and gadgets. As Meadows (1999) has pointed out, the most effective, but also the most difficult step in system transformation is the shift of paradigms that underpin the system. Again, since this is difficult to influence politically, it presents a major hurdle for a departure from growth-based systems that also maintains wellbeing.