The alternative is Global Ecological Justice – only by moving away from extractivist logics can a sustainable world be built

Andrea Vetter, Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, “The Future Is Degrowth”, Verso Books, Pages 164-168, 2022,

First, achieving global ecological justice will require a planned contraction of economic activity to a globally equitable level and a deprivileging of those people who currently externalize the costs of their mode of living to others – humans and non-humans – elsewhere or in the future. And that means that the more affluent, who are responsible for most environmental impacts, would need to accept ‘far-reaching lifestyle changes [that] complement technological advancements’.41 A central element of a degrowth society is therefore that the material metabolism with nature, and therefore also economic production in different societies, is aligned with a long-term, ecologically sustainable, and globally generalisable level. Degrowth, in this sense, aims to replace the imperial mode of living with a solidarity-based one, to overcome the externalization society, and to foster sustainable lifestyles that end overconsumption by the affluent (which is environmentally unsustainable) and the poverty and need of the dispossessed (which is socially unsustainable).42 Degrowth has been criticized that it focuses on consumption and renunciation and its demands are thus directed against the working class in the Global North, who need more rather than less.43 However, this critique misses what degrowth is about. Degrowth explicitly aims at improving the living conditions for everyone – including those in the Global North who struggle to get along, who have to juggle three jobs to afford rent and cannot pay for health care. Degrowth, however, claims that this can be achieved without increasing overall economic output (which would be unsustainable and globally unjust) by tackling inequalities and guaranteeing public abundance. Indeed, degrowth is about challenging the very system in which working class wellbeing depends on accumulation – and shows how this can be changed. It’s not a politics of less, but a politics of enough for all.

So, one might wonder, if the main goal is global ecological justice and a reduction of the biophysical size of the economy, why all this talk about economic growth? Though degrowth is often misunderstood in this way, economic contraction is not its goal, and neither should degrowth be understood as the opposite of growth. Reductions in production and consumption are, rather, a consequence of the fact that it is impossible to sufficiently decouple material throughput and emissions from growth (for evidence, see chapters 2 and 3). These are, therefore, merely a necessary corollary of the transformation towards a globally just society. 44

Still, while degrowth aims at reducing the social-ecological metabolism of Global North economies to a sustainable and globally just level, it is not indifferent about economic growth. On the contrary, for a wealth of reasons the question of economic growth is absolutely central to the degrowth discussion. One of these is that because, as the ecological growth critique shows, an absolute decoupling of resource consumption and emissions from economic growth is unlikely, and therefore reducing the consumption of nature also implies a (less pronounced, due to economy-wide efficiency improvements) reduction in economic output, also measured in GDP. 45 Let us put it another way: because degrowth aims for global ecological justice, and because it is not possible to sustain economic growth to meet that goal, degrowth also requires the transformation to an economy that does not depend on growth to meet well-being. This has profound repercussions, leading to the second presupposition.

The second presupposition – that degrowth also requires systemic change beyond growth and capitalism – is one of the key consequences of the demand for global ecological justice, and explains why many in the degrowth community are critical of capitalism and seek to move beyond it. As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, the question of whether an economy is expanding or not is anything but ancillary: since capitalist societies stabilize dynamically through growth and because the logic of growth is deeply inscribed in the material, social, and mental infrastructures of growth societies, it would be grossly negligent to remain agnostic about the growth question and, by extension, but also not exclusively, about capitalism.46 Rather, degrowth confronts head-on not only the ideology of growth, but also addresses the question of transforming social and economic structures so that they ensure stability, democracy, and a good life for all under conditions of a declining economic output.

The third presupposition – that this transformation must not unequally fall on the shoulders of the poor and, in particular, the Global South, but rather create the conditions for global justice – follows from the first two. Many proposals for sustainability transitions in the North, which rely mainly on green investments, green technology, and renewable energies, do in fact imply increasing extraction of key materials from the Global South, through vast demands for land to create biofuels or hydrogen, or dangerous negative emission technologies. From a degrowth perspective, a just transition in the North cannot depend on increasing extraction, exploitation, and pollution in the Global South. Rather, global ecological justice amounts to a radical redistribution of wealth, resources, and emission rights globally, resulting in the need to decrease the biophysical size of the economies of industrialized countries – or the amount of stuff that is moved through these economies and the energy needed for this. Today, this includes a serious assessment of the role of green technologies in driving mining conflicts and land grabbing in the South.47 The importance of the global justice perspective for degrowth (and thus how wrong-headed the critics are who claim that degrowth wants the poor to stay poor) can be seen from the declaration adopted during the first international Degrowth Conference in Paris in 2008. It introduces degrowth as a concept aimed at ‘ “right-sizing” the global and national economies’. Specifically, it states:

At the global level, ‘right-sizing’ means reducing the global ecological footprint (including the carbon footprint) to a sustainable level. In countries where the per capita footprint is greater than the sustainable global level, right-sizing implies a reduction to this level within a reasonable time-frame. In countries where severe poverty remains, right-sizing implies increasing consumption by those in poverty as quickly as possible, in a sustainable way, to a level adequate for a decent life, following locally determined poverty-reduction paths rather than externally imposed development policies.48

In other words, degrowth in the North also necessitates ‘right-sizing’ the relationship between the North and South. As Jamie Tyberg and Erica Jung put it, the ‘contradiction between the material overdevelopment of the Global North and the extreme overexploitation of the Global South indicates that, for the latter to end, the former must end first’.49

It is therefore no wonder that degrowth proponents, who call for a reduction of production in early industrialized countries, also offer themselves as allies of environmental justice movements from the Global South.50 Inspired by the principles of environmental justice, as they guide the grassroots movements of the poor in the Global South, degrowth follows the principles of ‘cap and share’, ‘contraction and convergence’, and ‘reparations’.51 A sustainable level of consumption requires addressing not only the extremely unequal consumption between different world regions and countries, but also their historical trajectory. This means that all existing and remaining wealth, resources, raw materials, and emissions budgets would be distributed fairly, both between countries and regions of the world and within them. The ‘ecological debt’ of the industrialized countries as well as the consequences of colonialism and centuries of exploitation must also be taken into account, resulting in reparations.52 However, as argued recently by Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, reparations can also be understood as a constructive programme of ‘worldmaking’ that aims at undoing the currently racialized and unequal global economy and systems of power, whose advantages accrue among the privileged, and at creating systems that work to the benefit of those currently disadvantaged.53 Building on this, degrowth can be interpreted as part of this future-oriented project of building a better social order that addresses the specific challenges for the Global North arising from the imperial mode of living. Global justice therefore also means standing up to the repressions of border regimes and against racism, which serve to defend the imperial mode of living for islands of prosperity in the capitalist core. In addition to combating the forces driving people to flee their home – protecting the right to remain – this must also include global freedom of movement – the right to move.54