Authoritarianism is likely due to lack of mechanisms for allocation or conflict resolution.
Terzi, 22—Economist at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, Adjunct Professor at Sciences Po and at HEC Paris (Alessio, “Post-Growth Dystopia,” Growth for Good: Reshaping Capitalism to Save Humanity from Climate Catastrophe, Chapter 3, pp. 75, dml)
Degrowth, by definition, will reduce available resources and create some scarcity, albeit, according to its advocates, only for goods or ser vices that are unnecessary or superfluous. The implicit assumption, or hazardous bet, is that this would be voluntary scarcity—that everyone, once free from the iron cage of consumerism, would gladly embrace it as part of a superior mode of simple living.68 In this chapter we saw that, if this were not to happen, and the “infinite desire for more” (as Daniel Cohen calls it) were to remain prevalent, degrowth would likely turn into the proverbial road to hell, paved with good intentions.
Ecosocialism does not have an allocation mechanism, or a way to assuage tensions within society. The problems this chapter has described would rapidly cause the entire degrowth utopian vision to unravel, leaving citizens with some combination of perceived misery, social tension, autarky, emigration, and welfare reductions. An intricate web of rules would be spun up to regulate most aspects of life—all presided over by a strong central government at high risk of turning illiberal in its efforts to shore up its ideological raison d’être. The distance between ecosocialism and ecoauthoritarianism is shorter than one might imagine.