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The anti-colonial politics of degrowth
The anti-colonial politics of degrowth
As degrowth ideas speed their way into social movements and academic research, they have encountered some interesting critiques. In a recent contribution to this Virtual Forum, Huber (2021) dismissed degrowth as a preoccupation of middle-class environmentalists in the global North who feel “anxiety” about excess consumption. Such a movement, he argues, can never hope to connect with the working class, who are struggling to get by, and certainly cannot connect with social movements in the global South, where mass poverty is widespread and where, he claims, the concept of degrowth is largely unknown. These claims constitute a significant misrepresentation of degrowth politics.
Let me begin by noting a few facts. High-income countries are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown. The global North is responsible for 92 percent of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (Hickel, 2020a), while the consequences of climate breakdown fall disproportionately upon the global South. The South already suffers the vast majority of the damage inflicted by climate breakdown, and if temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees centigrade, much of the tropics could experience heat events that exceed the limits of human survival (Zhang, Held, & Fueglistaler, 2021). Likewise, high-income countries are responsible for the majority of excess global resource use, with an average material footprint of 28 tons per capita per year – four times over the sustainable level (Bringezu, 2015). Crucially, these high levels of consumption depend on a significant net appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange, including 10.1 billion tons of embodied raw materials and 379 billion hours of embodied labor per year (Dorninger et al., 2021).
In other words, economic growth in the North relies on patterns of colonization: the appropriation of atmospheric commons, and the appropriation of Southern resources and labour. In terms of both emissions and resource use, the global ecological crisis is playing out along colonial lines…
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Decolonisation and Degrowth
This blog post is the result from a discussion held between some participants at a Degrowth Summer School in August 2017. While some parts of this blog post are written to confront degrowth theory, we took the time to write up the discussions around the word “decolonise” because we think of degrowth as a project worth supporting and a community who is open to reflection. We recognise degrowth is an important academic and activist movement, which correctly diagnoses economic growth as a root cause of social and ecological crisis. We would like to see degrowth concepts spread. However, we have a problem with the use of the term decolonisation within degrowth literature.
Among the many ways to explain the degrowth key concepts, one common phrase is the ‘decolonisation of the social imaginary from economic growth’, first proposed by French economist and degrowth philosopher Serge Latouche. Here, the idea of decolonisation is co-opted to convey an idea of degrowth-based liberation.
In this blog post we want to question, whether decolonisation is the right and appropriate word to use. Placing decolonisation into a degrowth definition denies what decolonisation means. It turns it into degrowth jargon. This also doesn’t help alliances between degrowth and decolonisation movements, which we believe are necessary for degrowth to address growth as a global phenomena.
Exploring Decolonisation from Post-Colonial Studies
Let’s start by asking what colonisation and decolonisation mean to us. There are no (and shouldn’t be) universally accepted definitions. It’s not our place here to suggest what decolonisation is and isn’t. But examining a few examples shows that decolonisation doesn’t fit with what the degrowth usage suggests.
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