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This handbook takes stock of 'degrowth', a concept and movement, gaining increasing visibility in the 2020s. Contributors explain contexts for degrowth's significance, elaborate its diverse history and detail its unique approaches, practices, challenges and potential futures.
List of contents
Part I. The current growth conjuncture 1. Degrowth has come of age 2. Fossilised metabolism: The social ecology of capitalist growth 3. Unequal uses of Earth 4. Capitalist crisis and affective alternatives
Part II. Degrowth: Origins and steppingstones 5. The French origins and pillars of degrowth 6. Degrowth in Italy: Early beginnings, political disputes and a plural social movement 7. Postwachstum: German roots and currents of degrowth 8. A Catalan way towards degrowth 9. Accidental degrowth practices: Illustrations from Czechia 10. Greece: Real-existing degrowth and its challenges 11. Degrowth' and the implications of English language hegemony 12. Latin American indigenous perspectives meet degrowth 13. Degrowth in an African periphery: From necrocapitalism to a pluriverse of nowtopias
Part III. Degrowth practices: Concepts in action 14. Conviviality and commoning 15. Autonomy and freedom in individual to societal transformation 16. The degrowth doughnut 17. Frugal abundance: Meaning in practice in an Icelandic village 18. Defining defashion: A manifesto for degrowth 19. Degrowth: Health and healthcare 20. Holistic care economies: Degrowth ways of provisioning and the Global East 21. The pedagogy of degrowth and the political ecology of technology 22. Mapping the spectrum of degrowth work 23. Reimagining collaboration: Degrowth practitioners, scholars and activists
Part IV. Degrowth futures: Perspectives and strategies 24. Twenty years of degrowth: What has been achieved? 25. Roles of utopian thought in a degrowth transformation 26. Growth, degrowth and poverty reduction 27. Imperial and solidary modes of living: Alternatives to eco-imperialism 28. Prefigurative degrowth politics: Decolonisation and the nonaligned movement 29. Ecofeminist and decolonial feminist degrowth futures 30. Fostering degrowth in men: Beyond masculinity and the gender binary 31. Degrowth, urbanisation and spatial planning 32. Degrowth-aligned commoning organisations 33. Ecosocialism and degrowth 34. Beyond growth: Beyond divisions 35. Degrowth: Future research directions
About the author
Anitra Nelson is an activist scholar and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-), University of Melbourne (Australia). Among numerous degrowth publications, she is co-editor of
Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities (2018) and
Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices (2021) collections, and co-author of
Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (2020). See https://anitranelson.info/
Vincent Liegey is an engineer, interdisciplinary researcher and lecturer on degrowth. He has co-authored several books on degrowth including
Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (2020), and
Décroissance, Fake or Not (2022). He is one of the coordinators of the international degrowth conferences and of Cargonomia, a centre for research and experimentation on degrowth in Budapest.
