Advocacy Brief
Aug 1, 2024by Emilia Reyes
What Is Degrowth? (Primer Series: Degrowth for Global Justice #1)
This paper, the first in the series of three advocacy briefs, offers an introduction to the concept of degrowth, in relation to the struggle for global justice.
It emphasizes the need to transition towards a post-extractivism stage for Global South countries, with a recognition of the Right to Development and under principles such as equity, common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) and reparations. This paper also outlines initial feminist proposals within the field of degrowth, and discusses them from a decolonial lens and rooted in a feminist structural tradition.
For generations, communities in the Global South and Indigenous Peoples worldwide have carried out relational and productive practices that ensure harmony among different spheres of life, centering collective wellbeing with a sense of a belonging to a larger ecological balance. Some of these traditions are more widely known, like Buen Vivir or Ubuntu. These are examples of a wide variety of traditions that originated in Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge and communities, that are practiced at a local level, and refer to effective and balanced economic dynamics that hold many solutions to the current ecological challenges the world is facing.
The notion of degrowth derives in part from these traditions, and in a wider sense, has embraced the many and varied Transition Discourses (TDs) that have been proposed in the Global South as part of a pluriverse of alternatives. Degrowth was also generated in recognition of the need to accelerate solutions based on the historical and current responsibility of Global North countries, corporations, elites and harmful sectors, in generating and reproducing both the obscene structural inequalities at the global level as well as the ecocide that is unfolding in front of our eyes. In the face of this ecocidal collapse and the direct responsibility of the Global North, the degrowth framework makes explicit the need to formulate differentiated approaches for the Global North and the Global South.
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