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Degrowth

Degrowth is about that reduction in the use of resources, both on the production and the consumption side for the purpose of actually preserving the thing that is most foundational to our collective lives together.

Bronwen Morgan

Sabrina Chakori | Bronwen Morgan | Jess Scully | Tommy Wiedmann 

Despite rapid technological advancements, increasing affluence and population growth continue to strain our planet. Currently not a single country in the world is operating at sustainable level of resource use – and yet that is what we need to aspire to if we’re going to slow climate change, reduce inequality and increase our quality of life. So, how do we get there?  

Listen to UNSW’s sustainability scientist Tommy Wiedmann and Professor of Law Bronwen Morgan, CSIRO researcher Sabrina Chakori, and former Deputy Lord Mayor and author of Glimpses of Utopia Jess Scully as host, discuss sustainability and the urgent challenge we face to create a world which ensures human needs are met without sacrificing a sustainable, inclusive future. 

Transcript

Centre for Ideas: UNSW Centre for Ideas.

Jess Scully: Good evening everyone and welcome to the UNSW Centre for Ideas this evening. My name is Jess Scully.

I'm really, really excited to be your host this evening. I want to start out by acknowledging that we're meeting today on Bidjigal land and to extend respect to Elders past and present and to acknowledge the next generation of Elders that are emerging in Bidjigal Nation. I also want to thank you all for being here tonight as well.

I want to extend respect to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person who is present here today too. So as I said, I'm Jess Scully. I'm really excited to be here.

My background is that I'm an author of a book called Glimpses of Utopia, which is a whole collection of exciting ideas to bring us closer to the fairer future that we could be living in. I've served as a local government representative and I've also, I'm trying to do some thinking around this idea of the civic imagination, which is, what is within the realm of possibility for us? What are the ideas that we conceive of as being possible when we imagine the social, political or economic alternatives to the way that we live right now?

And there are a few ideas that are more exciting in and stimulate my civic imagination more than this idea of degrowth. And you're all here because I think you're excited about this idea too. And you're the kind of people who think, but what if there's more to the world than jobs and growth? I mean, it's possible.

Laughs

And the conversation that we're going to have tonight with Bronwen Morgan, Tommy Weidman, Sabrina Chakori, and this conversation today about degrowth, and hopefully with all of you and your questions, is going to help explain a little bit about what degrowth is, what growth is, I suppose, first of all, and why degrowth and how degrowth can be a very useful frame for contemplating this historical moment that we're in, as well as suggesting how we might inhabit a degrowth future. So, let's meet our panel.

First of all, we have Tommy Weidmann. Tommy is Professor of Sustainability Research at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UNSW Sydney. He's been interested in environmental issues since he was a teenager, and he graduated in Chemistry Sciences in Germany.

His highly cited research is an integrated sustainability assessment combining industrial ecology and ecological economics. Tommy's main research interest is in modelling sustainability transitions to explore post-growth human and planetary wellbeing. In the middle, we have Sabrina.

Sabrina Chakori is a CSIRO researcher, educator, and multi-award winning social entrepreneur who's committed to building a socially just and ecologically sustainable society. In addition to her academic research, which explores degrowth transitions, in 2017, Sabrina founded the Brisbane Tool Library, a social enterprise that can be considered a degrowth lab. Additionally, Sabrina is the co-founder and editor of The Degrowth Journal, which embraces slow science and advances a decommodification of knowledge.

It's really worth having a look at. The Degrowth Journal is beautiful to look at. It's got some phenomenal principles, real labour of love, so I recommend all of you go and have a look at it as well.

And last on our panel is Bronwen Morgan. Bronwen is a professor at law at UNSW Sydney. She's a socio-legal scholar with long-standing expertise in regulation and governance and a particular focus, ever since becoming a parent, on interdisciplinary ways to reimagine how economy and environment work together.

She's found it most rewarding to help build networks and organisations that bring together academic research, activism, and advocacy. In this capacity, she's helped co-found the Transition Towns chapter of Montpelier in Bristol, UK, the New Economy Network of Australia cooperative, NENA, which is really worth looking into if you're interested in these ideas, and, and this is a mouthful, the Collaborative Research Network on Utopian Legality, Prefigurative Politics, and Radical Governance.

Bronwen Morgan and Tommy Wiedmann laugh

Which I love the sound of all of those bits, and who would have thought to bring them together? And most recently ReGen Sydney. And Bronwen is also one of those people, whenever I come across something that's new to me, like a really exciting network or a new idea, Bronwen's already there.

Bronwen Morgan laughs

So, I knew this would be a good session because Bronwen was in it, and I'm so delighted, I've been so delighted to connect with the two of you as well. We have been talking up a storm, let me tell you, we are in trouble, because we only have 55 minutes left.

Tommy Wiedmann laughs

And we are desperate to hear from you too, because there are so many good questions to be asked about degrowth and how it might change our world and our lives.

But first of all, the number one question we have to begin with is the question, well, what is growth? And also, what is growth not? And, and does growth sometimes get credit for things that it maybe shouldn't? And my favourite fact about growth that I've learnt recently, is that the whole concept of economic growth is about as old as my parents, which is not that old, they're not even retired yet. So, we'll talk a bit more about that. But Tommy, I want to come to you, what is growth? And what is it not? What are some myths about growth?

Tommy Wiedmann: Thank you, Jess.  And thanks everyone for coming. It's wonderful. Growth, we used to think growth is good, right? It gives us jobs, it gives us income, it gives us innovation.

So, all is fine. But increasingly, we come to realise that growth also comes with really detrimental bad economic, sorry, environmental and social outcomes all around the world, but in particularly also in developed countries. So environmentally, the growth, gross domestic product, GDP per capita is the single most influential sector for increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

It's the strongest driver of greenhouse gas emissions. So, if the economy grows, so do the CO2 emissions, they are coupled together. And there is more.

There's also energy consumption and material consumption. And again, both of them are coupled together with economic growth. That's quite clear.

Now, there's the idea and the hope that at some point, we should be able to decouple this, that is, we should be able to continue growing our economies. And with the help of technology, in particular, we should be able to bring down CO2 emissions. Renewable energy is a good example, doesn't really cause that many CO2 emissions.

So why can't we bring this down? There are some examples where this works, some countries, but the evidence for this is very limited. And it's also very slow. We don't have a lot of time.

It's very slow bringing down the CO2 emissions. So, there is this intrinsic coupling. There's actually really something interesting. You talked about history, you know, economic growth being as old as your parents. I can go back to 1865. There was an English economist called William Stanley Jevons, who observed at the time that the steam engines became more efficient in England at the time.

They used less coal. So, you would think that overall, the coal consumption should decrease. But he observed that the opposite was the case, calling some coal consumption increased.

And why was that? Because when a technology becomes more efficient, it becomes cheaper, it becomes more available, we use more of it. And that's exactly what happened. We use more of it, or they used more of it at the time and coal consumption went up.

Now, the interesting thing is that was 160 years ago. Nothing has changed in those 160 years. Yes, we don't have the steam engines anymore, but the principle still holds.

It has become a Jevons paradox, a rebound effect. And it held true over all these years up to the present day with the most modern technology. Think of artificial intelligence.

Yes, artificial intelligence can make things much, much more efficient. But we are using more and more of it. Energy consumption for artificial intelligence is going through the roof.

We have to build new data centres all over the place, needs energy, needs materials, steel, concrete, copper, everything. There is no decoupling of these energy materials flows from economic growth. And that's why we need to think about bringing down economic growth.

That's the idea.

Jess Scully: Thanks, Tommy. Sabrina, can you tell us about your take on growth?

Sabrina Chakori: Yeah, I think it's actually probably the most fundamental point today, because sometimes we just assume we understand how the economic system works, which actually we don't really because it became so complex.

But without being too trivial here, our economies are based on growth, which basically means that we measure everything in terms of GDP, the Gross Domestic Product, which is an indicator of all the exchanges of goods and services. And it's just an indicator. But the problem here is that it became a policy objective.

It's not just measuring what is exchanged. It became an objective to continue growing that indicator. And when we want to grow GDP, that translates in exploitation of labour and resources in various domains.

And we came up with very perverse mechanisms in society to just simulate that indicator. For example, if we think about e-products, companies started introducing planned obsolescence, teaching their industrial designers and manufacturers to design products that they would be obsolete after a few years. Why is that? That is to stimulate more consumers to replace their items.

And that comes at a great social and ecological cost in the production phase. And also, as many of you might know, in the post-consumer discards of those products. So, when e-waste is not treated or even when it's treated, it still requires resources and labour into it.

And that's just one obsolete mechanism that we have just to stimulate that indicator, which is GDP. But we can also think about, we often think about globalization and we think that we exchange products because we need them across countries and regions. But there's also what we call intra-industry trade.

So, countries export and import the same product. So, for example, the US exports beef to Europe and imports beef from Argentina. And so that then unlocks different conversations when we start understanding that.

It's like, do we need a need-based globalization? Can we rethink, you know, macro system as well as localized? So, there's so many examples in this sense that once we understand how they actually work and why they work that way, where we are called to rethink probably the system to attenuate the social and ecological costs.

Jess Scully: Thanks, Sabrina. Yeah, I think it's a really important point to unpack very briefly what GDP actually is.

And none of us are economists up here. But the idea of GDP being this measurement of transactions and exchange within a nation, it's sort of decoupled from the actual impact or the benefit or even the perversity of that transaction, whether it's sending beef in and out or, as you brought up a little bit earlier, Bronwen, when we were talking, sending gas in and out of the country. Bronwen, can you tell us about your take on growth?

Bronwen Graham: Yeah, I think I just, to what's already been said, maybe just emphasize that other decoupling, which is happening.

So, Tommy's pointing out that there isn't sufficient decoupling from emissions and growth, but there is actually, I think it's widely felt now that there's an increased decoupling between our overall sense of well-being and our individual sense of well-being and growth, that they don't correlate nearly as neatly, even when they're producing things that are formally counted as positive for jobs and growth. And that's in part because of the distortions of what I think GDP also measures, exchanges of harms or activity that occurs around harms, and we don't like to specify what's good or bad in advance in this sort of growth paradigm. We just say growth is good in itself.

So, the harms that are counted by GDP mean that economic growth is over-inclusive of things we don't want to have more of. It's also under-inclusive of things that we tend to think of as invisible. So, there's a wonderful scholarship on diverse economies by Catherine Gibson and other colleagues working in that network, where they point out that the economy is thought of very much in formal terms as a particular set of activities, typically wage labour, the activities of private corporations, and market transactions, where money takes place, exchanges between people.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg, and they have a visual metaphor emphasising the enormity of exchange of goods and services that takes place without money or in alternative ways that aren't necessarily counted as core to the mainstream economy and don't turn up in GDP. And those invisible, diverse forms of economic activity are, as many feminist economists have said for many years, often what keeps the economy going. And so, the growth of those is paradoxically, if you started counting that, we could get sort of unintended effects in terms of some of these side effects that we might talk about as we go.

But that's a really important aspect of growth's misperceptions as well of what it does and doesn't do.

Sabrina Chakori: And can I just add an example of the decoupling of wellbeing? I don't know if you drove here by car today on your way back home, if you get an accident, you're contributing to the economy, you know. So based on what newspapers and media tell us that we need to stimulate, I would invite you to get in a car accident.

So, when we really start about the decoupling with wellbeing, yeah, it gets really problematic to keep this system in place.

Tommy Wiedmann: So, drive carefully, please.

Sabrina Chakori: Yes.

Jess Scully: Degrowth wants you to drive very carefully. And, you know, to your point as well about what's not counted from when, you know, there are some really fundamental colonial and patriarchal notions at the foundation of our economy. That's a whole other session, by the way.

But, you know, things that occur inside the home are not productive. The care that we have for each other is not productive. And this comes down to the particular quirks of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, but that's like a whole other story.

So, what we measure is not quite everything. And the primacy that we have given economic growth in our society, in our politics, in our construction of what is possible is also something that is much more recent and perhaps much more tenuous even than we might expect it to be. But, of course, you know, surely, we can just green growth our way out of the problems that we're having.

Isn't it possible that we could just use some of the tools of growth and like technology, for example, to try and get past some of these ecological and societal problems that we're facing? Of course, I'm being the devil's advocate here. Could you tell us a little bit, Tommy, about why that's not possible?

Tommy Wiedmann: Yes, technology is certainly an important aspect, and we need technology to help us on the way, like I mentioned, renewables already. But the problem is that if you operate in a growth paradigm in an economy where the only goal is growth and profits, then you're always playing this catch-up game and you're just not fast enough with implementing this.

It's a bit like walking down an elevator that's going upwards. There is this coupling, there is this rebound effect and we're just not catching up fast enough. Circular economy is another example where people think, okay, yes, that's a good thing.

We want to use waste streams. We want to, you know, not always extract new materials, but keep them in circulation. And again, that's a good idea and that's a technology that we also need.

We do need these useful technologies, but we need to use them in the right context. All of this is not working well in a growth economy because you can't circle, in that case, your way out of growth. You will always have to catch up.

So, the most efficient way of bringing down greenhouse gas emissions is in fact consuming and producing less. So, that's really the main point of degrowth. And of course, that can be helped with technology, but we need to also accelerate this. We need to also bring down that level of economic growth. We need to remove that incentive or that pressure to constantly grow. And we can extend that to what it means for households and corporations and so on.

Jess Scully: And the framework that economic growth is the only good, the only thing to be measured. But just to pick up on one point and then to come to you, Sabrina, it's not just growth, not just curbing consumption by everyone around the world. There's a fairness dimension to why we can't just expect green growth to get us out of this mess.

Maybe, Sabrina, I could come to you on this point.

Sabrina Chakori: Yeah, I think that Tommy mentioned some aspects of degrowth, but degrowth is not a concept based simply on resource reduction and energy. It emphasises that transition should be equitable processes. 

And people sometimes freak out about degrowth, it's so radical. But all what the literature on degrowth says is we need democratic processes to downscale the economic metabolism, to downscale those activities that have a social and ecological cost so that we can free up resources and labour and resources for those more socially needed activities. That's all what degrowth is about.

And then how we get there, that's another thing. But also, another difference with green growth, except that the coupling trend shows that the coupling is absolute, the coupling is not happening, is also that degrowth invites us to engage with social aspects. And for example, the relationship between Global North countries and Global South countries, there continues to be a net appropriation of labour resources from Global South countries.

So, this economic system can continue just because we continue to exploit the environment and cheap labour elsewhere. So degrowth calls into play these other aspects that probably green growth and eco-modernist technocentric solutions sometimes forget about it. Yes, we might need better technologies, and we can agree on that, but how do we produce them and how much of that is equally important?

Jess Scully: And if we were to take a solely green growth sort of approach, a lot of not just the labour, but the materials, the minerals, like the rare earth minerals in particular, for example, that are at the foundation of decarbonising our energy system, a lot of that comes from the developing world or from the Global South, where the conditions of ownership, the conditions of relationship between businesses and people and regulation of environment, for example, might continue to lead to really negative outcomes.

Sabrina Chakori: Yes, and we talk about commodity frontiers, right? Because we need to fuel this growth engine, we always need more and more resources from the peripheries. And so, when we get into new mining sites and so on, we incur into all kinds of social aspects that can be problematic, such as land grabbing or community displacement. And because there's not enough to this economic growth, social imperative, then we will continue to exploit and damage these communities at the forefront of resource extractions.

Jess Scully: Thank you. Now, I have to tell you, we have already got 31 audience questions, and they are really good. So, I'm going to have to really just tear this up, essentially, because we have so much to talk about.

Bronwen, is there anything you want to add to this?

Bronwen Graham: Oh, just maybe to just sort of, it's slightly taking a step back, but to say that I think what degrowth is asking us to consider a different kind of question, which we sidestep all the time, even to some extent with what, well, it's coming up with what Sabrina says, you know, if you're thinking about the inequity of how the benefits of growth are allocated between North and South, then you're starting to bring up questions of justice and fairness and so on. But the basic question of what is an economy for, that's actually what degrowth asks very directly. And we've almost forgotten how to ask it.

And Richard Dennis actually wrote a really, from the Australia Institute, a great little short book called Dead Right, just before the last election, which is worth a read. I feel like…

Jess Scully: It's a quarterly essay. It was a quarterly essay.

Bronwen Graham: That's right.

And in it, he's pointing out how we don't ask this question anymore. And it makes a really interesting practical suggestion, which is to retool the Productivity Commission, which is quite a unique institution. Not many countries have something quite like our Productivity Commission.

And I've been quite proud of it nationally for the really, you know, deep evidence-based works it's done on productivity, but to retool it to become the National Interest Commission. And we then have a much more inclusive and democratically involved conversation about the national interest but backed up with the kind of data and good evidence that the Productivity Commission has historically produced. I just really like that idea.  And I think that that's partly what degrowth is asking us to do. But as Sabrina says, it's not just a national question. It's a global question with North-South justice issues as well.

Jess Scully: Your point, Bronwen, reminds me of my favourite media headline from just after the pandemic, which is ‘Economy to Rebound, but Jobs and Wages Not’.

Laughter

Jess Scully: What? What is an economy then? Who is it for? What's its purpose? What's its intention? So, these are the kinds of meta questions that we don't have, even on a national level, or we don't ask, let alone at a supranational level. So, what we're talking about really is having a mindset and a frame for thinking about how we organise our society, our economy, our relations with each other in a way that moves beyond growth.

So, in a post-growth mindset. And there are loads of different, it's not just a degrowth party, there are a ton of different ways of doing this. There's doughnut economics is one way of thinking about this, participatory economics, non-profit business models, a solid-state economy, half earth socialism. But degrowth is in amongst them and degrowth is something that's unique and it has a series of principles at its core. So, what we might do now, now that we've been talking about growth for a while, let's define degrowth.

And Bronwen, maybe I'll start with you and we'll work the other way.

Bronwen Graham: Well, I mean, I don't have the answer. What is the economy for? But I suppose there's a negative and a positive side for me in terms of what it's about.

And the negative side is, it's a reaction to the negative fact that as I think Kate Raworth said, she's the doughnut economics author, you know, the death of the living planet is not an economic externality. So, there's a sort of, there's a, degrowth is about that reduction in the use of resources, both on the production and the consumption side for the purpose of actually preserving the thing that is most foundational to our collective lives together. And that, in a way, could be negative in the sense that there's a lot of doom and gloom.

In fact, I think when we proposed this panel, the initial reaction was, that's very doom and gloom topic.

Laughter

Bronwen Graham: But I'm delighted to see, I don't think this entire room is full of doomsters. Have you heard that phrase? I went to a doomster dinner just last week.

Laughter

I could tell you more about that, but I really don't feel that it's doom and gloom.

I think this opens up the opportunity to recraft and reassemble the way that our economy works in order to prioritize these values. There's a book called Vocabulary for a New Era, Degrowth, is the title, but it explicitly says, we're not going to define degrowth. This is a dictionary that gives you an entry point into multiple words.

And you can, these four-page essays about all these multiple words, you can carve your way amongst them and find your own conception of what it might be to live in a world of degrowth without necessarily defining it. But just to tell you some of the words that are in there, they include autonomy, simplicity, care, commons, conviviality. I think, happiness.

I've got some thoughts about happiness later, but for me, this is the definition of what the institutional reassembling of the economy demanded by degrowth opens up as possibilities.

Jess Scully: Beautiful. Sabrina.

Sabrina Chakori: And yeah, it's true that maybe there's a question about that already. There are many different jargons used around well-being economy, circular economy. It's like, why are we here talking about degrowth? But yeah, we said that degrowth is really brief and I'm not making justice to the literature here, but these equitable downscaling of the economic metabolism to improve social and ecological wellbeing.

But what I find powerful in degrowth as a social movement and as a field of study is that in the name, it includes the system that it wants to change. And that's very powerful because if we criticize the system in place without repoliticizing the social trajectory that we're in and without offering alternatives, then to me, sometimes these other terminology, they result as a weak tag of a new economic system. So degrowth, it's really contested often because it has front and centre the word growth.

And I think that's what distinguishes this area from other types of new economic systems.

Jess Scully:  Thank you. Tommy.

Tommy Wiedmann: Yeah, there are many different definitions of degrowth around. There's a technical definition and we've touched already on the reduction of energy and material flows in developed countries. But there's also this social aspect, which is an aspect of social wellbeing, which is really important.

Degrowth is also a movement. There's also an idea of bringing a new thinking to the area. So, the key issues here, I think, is that it's deliberate, that it's also democratically managed.

It's not imposed from top down. It's not something that elites come up with and then advertise. So, every people pick it up. 

And there's also this element of caring. So, for me, the idea of degrowth has a strong element of caring, caring for people. So that includes social wellbeing and caring for the planet, caring for planetary wellbeing, for the environment as well.

So, these things come together. There's many more names of different concepts. Wellbeing economy is another one which sometimes is seen a bit of an umbrella term.

And it has been put forward as a term that may be more acceptable to people. But I agree with Sabrina that degrowth calls it by the name. It actually says what it wants to do.

But really important, what Bronwen also mentioned, collaboration, conviviality, community. So, there's a really strong element of that social caring, social provisioning. And that is different to what we currently have, where the only paradigm is just grow for the sake of growing.

Jess Scully: One of my favorite phrases that I've read about recently about degrowth is that it's fewer transactions and more relations. So, there's something more human and warm and interconnected about the framework that degrowth offers us. It's not about our interaction being a monetized transaction as the way that we engage, but it's about what we build together and different models of ownership and different models of management.

Did you want to add?

Tommy Wiedmann: So endless studies show that what people really value in life is a meaning and a purpose and relationships. And both of these things you can't buy with money, really. And they are central to the degrowth idea.

The idea that community comes together and works something out together could be, as a simple example, could be a renewable energy project in a community that's already happening. And that is something that gives people meaning and purpose. It doesn't need to involve profits and it gives them relationships.

And so that's really a positive aspect.

Jess Scully: I love this idea that it's a dictionary rather than a definition, because I have pages here of definitions. There's so many definitions because, you know, we're having a one hour event about something that is as big as reimagining or transforming the economy and the societal relationships that attach to it. I mean, it's an extraordinarily deep and rich set of concepts, so this is just hopefully a beginning of an introduction to this idea.

But this idea of it being transformative, that it's about redistribution and regenerative relationships with the earth and with agriculture, and that it is about helping us sort of escape from the economy as the only framework that we have for relating to the planet or to each other, as well as some really significant, drastic shifts away from the kinds of consumption that we measure and value and perhaps prioritise.

And I think we are now up to 52 questions, and I've already seen that there's a couple in there that are about population growth, that are about overpopulation and that sort of frame. So, I think I want to nip that in the bud before we go any further. There’s this idea that some people have, I've read it in every comments page of every newspaper, that if we just had fewer people in this country, on the planet, wherever, that we wouldn't have an ecological crisis, that we wouldn't have an economic crisis.

How does degrowth address the tension of where consumption is happening and who is consuming, and the fairness and the idea of where populations are and how population growth comes into the picture? Does anyone want to dive into this topic? Nobody wants to dive into this topic. Sabrina?

Sabrina Chakori: I'm not an expert in immigration policies or anything like that, but I do think that sometimes when we start talking about degrowth or de-scaling resources, yes, the conversation shifts pretty rapidly towards a population discussion, and then the next step is how we're going to control our borders kind of discussion. And I think, again, bringing up the conversation to that level of rethinking global interaction, we do know that when economies have enough resources to develop healthcare systems, to develop education and so on, actually population stagnates.

There are studies that show that some countries are way more populated than others because the current system needs cheap labour. And again, I'm not an expert, but if we look at debt, there are some degrowth scholars that put forward the idea, what if we cancel the debt to so many of global South countries, would that free them up from this transactional commodity market with the global North? And so sometimes instead of just talking about borders or migration or domestic problems, most people around the world, the papers I read, do not want to leave their lands. They live because they're faced with extreme poverty and so on.

So, what if we decouple their well-being from our greed? And again, UN documents, as well as other literature, talks about climate apartheid, saying that those who contributed the most to greenhouse gases emission, et cetera, are also those who have enough resources to insulate themselves from the effects. And those who haven't contributed to this poly and perma crisis, they're the ones taking the cost. So, I think, again, degrowth wants to go beyond borders, beyond like this reductivist, you know, cheap policy discussion to rethink that economic relationship that then translates in other policies.

Jess Scully: Absolutely. And the fundamental relationship there, that climate apartheid that you are talking about, which is perpetuating basically colonial relations between nations, but also creating more instability and more chaos. And so degrowth is a radical reframing in order to address the fundamental crisis of what creates scarcity, what creates conflict and what creates need and disproportionate of resources. And Tommy?

Tommy Wiedmann: Yeah, just a couple of points on population. I mean, it's not wrong to say that there is environmental impact from population growth. Everyone needs to eat. Everyone needs some form of shelter. So yes, of course, there is some impact. But there's a couple of important points to put this into relation.

Population growth is a driver of greenhouse gas emissions globally, but it's a relatively weak driver compared to economic growth. Economic growth is twice as strong as a driver of greenhouse gas emissions. So, affluence and economic growth is still the number one issue that we need to address.

And then it's also very important when we talk about population to talk about equality. There's an immense inequality when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. There are statistics from Oxfam, a good source for this, 10 percent of the highest income earners in the world create half of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the world, whereas the bottom 50 percent of people, the poorest 50 percent, they only create 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

And you can even make this more extreme. The richest person in the world or the richest people, one percent in the world, they have a carbon footprint which is 1000 times or more higher than the lowest, the bottom ones. So, you can easily have 1000 poor people having the same footprint or a smaller footprint than a rich person.

So, there is extreme inequality and we need to, when we want to address climate change and other environmental impacts, for example, we need to think about this. Also, there was an interesting study just recently that looked at what would it take to provide everyone with what's called decent living standards. So, this is basically you satisfy all your basic needs, you don't go hungry, you have shelter, you have energy, you have what you need and a little bit more, decent living.

And if everyone had that level, so that would be very equal, of course, which is a hypothetical world, but we would only need 30 percent of the current resources and energy, 30 percent, and we would be able to provide that decent living standard. That's how extreme we have overshot.

Sabrina Chakori: And I think that I can't remember all the data they used to model that, but for example, a decent house was defined as 60 square meters. So, you know, like which is probably an average apartment in Europe, at least, not in Australia.

Tommy Wiedmann: That’s tiny here.

Sabrina Chakori: But yeah. So, yeah.

Jess Scully: I think these are really critical points because there is an element of, you know, significant element of privilege when we think Australians, all of us are in that top 10 percent of the richest people in the world, just by default, that's where we are. And we are responsible for, we're part of the group that's responsible for 50 percent of emissions.

So, the idea of saying, oh, no, it's too much, it's overpopulation in Australia or we don't have a responsibility to radically rethinking about, you know, our role in this crisis, I think is a really lazy way out. And that's why it's important that we're having a conversation like this.

But enough about the negative. What would it actually look like? What would it actually feel like to live in a degrowth system, to live in an economy and in a society where the values of degrowth are centred? And how is it different from something like a recession, for example? So, if I can come, I might start with you, Bronwen, and can you give us a sense of what would living in degrowth look like and what kind of structural changes are required to get us there?

Bronwen Graham: I mean, the recession question feels slightly like a technical economic question, but I feel like a recession is, it's the assumption again, the recession is when growth stalls under a system which needs growth to continue to work. But the point of degrowth is to redesign that so that we're not dependent on growth in the same way. So, it's almost like the terminology only makes sense in a growth-centred world.

What would it look like? Well, I've got a few thoughts. One was, I said earlier, I wanted to say something about happiness and the idea of what an economy is for. I was thinking about the fact that the US Declaration of Independence has this phrase, you know, we're doing this all for the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And that's something that's sort of rung around. I mean, in some ways, it's the sort of grand assumption under the growth economies that we're all, you know, in an individualistic world where we want to give predominance to people's choice to pursue their own versions of what a good life is and to do that with liberty and pursue that happiness. That's what we would say it's for.

What it's become is more what Richard Dennis points out, which is jobs and growth. But then what actually what we pursue is much more mundane in the sense of cost, comfort and convenience is almost what drives so much of the business models and even the comparative advantage of one over another. So, coming backwards at it, if a degrowth world looked like a really different model, for example, of legal ownership of corporations, what would be the kind of competition between those corporations that would occur if they weren't owned on the profit maximization for shareholder model? I don't actually know the answer to that question, although one of the, there's a woman called, I can't remember her name, but there's a documentary which is worth watching called Outgrow the System, which goes through seven different models, degrowth being one of them of reassembling the economy in a different way.

And Jennifer Hinton, and she's a Swedish based academic who talks about actually running the whole economy on a non-profit basis, not on a charitable basis, but not necessarily centring profit maximization for shareholders as what is in effect often the legal duty of a corporation, even if it's not directly expressed as profit maximization. There are other, many other ways of looking at this through the lens of social enterprise, through what the US has come up with, benefit corporations, and it can get pretty technical and legal, but it's really about retooling the legal obligations of putting shareholder profit growth at the centre of the corporation, which then reflects onto the broader question of economic growth. And one of the examples that she uses in a talk as a network of very successful organizations, which exists all over the world as a viable business model, but without having profit at its centre, is the YHA, the Youth Hostel Association.

And I thought that was actually quite an interesting, it seems to me to resonate with degrowth visions in the way that it's everywhere, it can actually be adapted in different ways wherever you are. It's aimed at community and conviviality and a kind of connection to the place where you are, but it's also a business model. It's a viable economic model for many people to model and for many others to travel around and see that.

And so that also gets away from this idea that we're kind of retreating back to some kind of either stone age, localized bubble.

Tommy Wiedmann laughs

So, I like that example.

Jess Scully: And there are so many examples of what people call the democratic economy or a stakeholder rather than shareholder capitalism.

So, this idea of a business or an organization that's designed to support and value the contribution and value the quality of the place and the materials, for example, that contribute to it and the people who make those items. So, there's a lot of cooperatives and history of those kinds of business models that already show us, and many of them have been successful and longstanding. Sabrina.

Sabrina Chakori: Yeah, I mean, that question, I will respond first to the difference with recessions, right? And it's completely different. I don't know, I don't even understand why often people associate that because degrowth is, as we said, planned and a democratic process as much as we can implement that. Recessions are not planned, usually are in reaction to shocks, and they're surely not democratically processed.

Degrowth aims at ecological well-being, so downscaling, again, the economic activities of our current society. Recession sometimes has to do that. But again, as a reaction, the goal is not to create ecological well-being.

Recession surely doesn't have as an objective to reduce inequality. Actually, during recession, often we see the opposite effect. It might even widen that gap in there because with austerity measures, etc., usually healthcare and other social public services are undermined.

So, actually, it's almost the opposite of degrowth. In terms of what we could do about it, and a bit more the positive side, I think they're like big macro changes that are going to require a lot of effort as well as very simple ones. So, I think, for example, at national level and global level, we should rethink the system of national accounts and, you know, moving beyond GDP, de-emphasizing really the need of that indicator as a policy objective and introducing other different indicators and re-examining the political economy of these indicators as well.

But there are also really more simple steps that sometimes, you know, I was like, oh, we haven't done this. Like, for example, I was reading and I have here the reference, just reforming the advertisement industry. It seems so simple.

And there was like the UN Secretary General in June was calling for countries to ban advertisement from fossil fuel. Is that that difficult at this, you know, in 2024? And there's another special rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Council in the field of cultural rights. And this report points out, yes, freedom of expression is important. So, from businesses and individuals, but they engage with the freedom of reception. And they write in this UN report that states should protect people from undue level of commercial advertising and marketing while increasing the space for not-for-profit expression.

So, you know, I think aren't we even able to rethink, you know, marketing and advertisement, at least in our public space? Aren't we that courageous to even just, you know, so these are small steps, but just last point connecting to what we just heard about not-for-profit business models.

In my CSIRO research, I'm exploring post-growth food enterprises and they operate differently. And I won't go into the details, but something that really astonished me during this research project is the in-food systems. And there's another CSIRO report that says that in-food system in Australia, there's a chronic labour shortage across the supply chain.

In addition to the average age of farmers is 57 years old. So, we're going to even run out of, you know, farmers. And what is really interesting is on one side in the mainstream food system, we have these labour shortages.

If we look at post-growth food systems, which is where I work in, most people are actually almost volunteers. So that then makes us understand that people, it's not that they don't want to engage with the food system. They just don't want to engage with the financial extractive of mainstream food systems.

You know, people are there willing to put energy and efforts and love and passion, but a different condition. And I think that difference of two different systems that co-exist right now, because it is important to show that in Australia, we have alternatives. They're just not visible and we can't seem to unlock enough fertile ground for these different activities from two libraries to, you know, community gardens and so on to actually thrive.

So, I think that is in my field of, you know, I think that's where I am with my research. How can we unlock the potential of what already exists?

Jess Scully: It's extraordinary because we have got this relational economy that we're not even measuring. So, of course, we don't know that it's there. Of course, we might think that it's a fantastical because we don't know, we're not looking for it.

Now, I'm going to come to you for your questions in about three minutes, but I'm just going to go to Tommy now.

Tommy Wiedmann: Yeah, it's a good question to ask. What would degrowth look in practice? And I think many people might think, you know, degrowth is hardship, it's sacrifice. And there's a bit of truth in that because, yes, there are some forms of private luxury or overconsumption or extravagance that are not compatible with degrowth. But on the other hand, there's also much that can be gained.

So, you also might have then the freedom to say, no, no, maybe I don't need this latest clothing or gadget or thank you very much. I'm doing just fine with what I already have. There's the idea under degrowth that there could be a work time reduction.

So, if we are thinking generally of reducing the activities in an economy, consuming less, producing less, then one idea is just to work less. And if you don't like the work anyway, you know, that's maybe not a bad idea to work less. It would mean under degrowth, and everyone likes, most people like the idea, under degrowth, it would also mean a reduced income.

And immediately people think, oh, well, how could that work? I have to pay my bills, especially now under the cost-of-living crisis, a reduced income is out of the question. But think back 20 years ago, on average, incomes were much lower. There was not cost of living crisis.

And we were okay, because we also spent less. So, if we can find a mechanism to reduce spending, that you don't have to pay high bills, then this can work. And one idea, there's many policy proposals under degrowth, but one idea is that of universal basic services.

So basically, public provisioning through the government to provide services for less money or for free, public housing, public transport, public education, public health care, even public energy and water services. For example, that's something that happens in the United Kingdom now, they're going back to renationalizing these services, because it didn't work in the privatization, it didn't work well. The fundamental idea is to reduce the pressure to have high incomes.

And if that's possible, if that can be achieved, then yes, there can be a reduction in work time with incomes. And that frees up more time for the things we discussed before, relationships and meaning in life.

Jess Scully: I feel like we need a whole separate session on universal basic services versus universal basic income, because there is a grudge match battle waiting to happen here.

Because the thing I love about universal basic services is that it is about this idea of private sufficiency and public luxury. It's about this idea that imagine we had such wonderful, glorious resources that we could share as our Commonwealth, and that we could steward in common, that we could enjoy together, we wouldn't all need our individual store of some of these things that can be shared together. And which takes me to the first question from the 70 that we now have.

What are the key legal and political pressure points and levers that we need to use to bring the degrowth economy into being? Do you feel like you could start with this one, Bronwen?

Bronwen Graham: Well, I guess I mentioned the legal ownership of corporations issue. I mean, I think that one of the potential leverage points, and there's a lot of debate about it, is giving explicit rights to nature or pricing nature specifically. So, the debates about natural capital being factored into the financial system, or there's nature’s on the board of several companies now, started with a natural soap company in the UK.

So, you can put nature on the board, and we know that New Zealand has recognised the environmental personhood of rivers. So actually factoring the value of nature into our current legal system, particularly in the way it articulates with the financial system. And that is heavily debated because there's concern that that would actually dilute the intrinsic value of nature.

Jess Scully: But it's a very important frame, and I should note as well that First Nations people have led the battle for the recognition of the rights of nature in places like Bolivia and in New Zealand and in other places in the world.

Bronwen Graham: And here as well. Dr Ann Polina in the Fitzroy River from Western Australia is doing some fantastic work across law and public health on those areas.

Jess Scully: So, I think recognising the rights of nature, Sabrina?

Sabrina Chakori: Sorry, but just it's important, I definitely agree, but the problem where we are at, at the moment is that there's political capture. So, the precondition for all these changes is goodwill and politician and political system working for people. But one of the IPCC reports emphasises there's political capture, that some groups with vested interests are doing everything they can to keep the status quo.

So, I think one lever for me would be social movements are the way to go. And again, unfortunately, another UN report that looked at democratic systems and democratic freedom in just in Europe, it shows that European countries at least are being undermined in their activist rights and so on. So, I think that we really have to revitalise the base to overcome the political capture.

Jess Scully: Well, that very neatly answers the other question, how do we get world leaders to embrace degrowth? I mean, world leaders have never embraced anything willingly. I think the history of any progress is the result of social movements. There's absolutely no question about that.

And so, if we want change, particularly transformative change, we actually need to connect radical movements and radical ideas. And then for more of us to even think that such things are even in the realm of possibility and also within the realm of preferability, because I think we're also kind of caught in this moment where we think, well, that's impossible, because this is also one of the questions that we have here. Well, that's impossible.

How could we even contemplate something like that? Yeah, but the path that we're on right now, we know leads to inevitable, very negative outcomes. Tommy?

Tommy Wiedmann: Good question. Yeah. Would the prime minister next year stand there before the elections and say, oh, I'm going to do a degrowth economy? No, he won't. He can't, because he wouldn't be elected. But there are little hints here and there that the system has some cracks.

And actually, the current government has introduced the well-being indicators. There are 51 well-being indicators. You can look it up on the government website that show different things apart from GDP.

GDP, gross domestic product, is irrelevant. Let's just forget about it. But they are actually looking at other things, and people can go there.

So, there's a little bit going in that direction. And internationally, especially in Europe, maybe not surprising, we do see some momentum. Last year, there was a big conference in the European Parliament with 2,000 people on site and 5,000 people online talking about beyond growth. So, it's being discussed. It's not that it's mainstream. As a party, currently, you can't vote for it. But if you frame it as a well-being idea, then there are ways to bring that into the discussion, and maybe at some point into mainstream.

Jess Scully: Everything has to begin with this conversation. Can I come to you, please?

Audience Question 1: Hello, everyone. Well, you actually largely answered my question, because it was the one about how do we get there, particularly when green growth seems already pretty politically unpalatable, and the vested interests of fossil fuels are still winning. But besides that question, I also wanted to point out that, yes, the GDP is a pretty recent idea, but growth is completely intrinsic to capitalism. So, if we want to stop growth, we need to stop capitalism, which makes it even more unpalatable.  

So again, how do we get there politically?

Sabrina Chakori: Can I just not to lower down Tommy's enthusiasm about change? Change is happening. But something about what happened in Canada, and I was reading just a paper about it, is that we're always keen to add innovation, let it be new indicator, technological, social. But for example, in my research, I'm getting really excited about studying exnovation. How can we plan the phase out of things? And that's where contestation comes in. Because in the Canadian case, they were showing that they went through the well-being indicator thing. But that's fine until we talk about de-emphasizing GDP.

And that's threatening the thing. And about growth and capitalism, another body of literature, especially coming out from the Netherlands, pushes on the idea that we need to unlearn. And indeed, the growth during capitalist system is untangled in all aspects of our life, from mortgages to how we go around.

So, I think another lever is, where can we unlearn? Where can we undo? And when we have those conversations, then we have to acknowledge that transition will not have win-win outcomes for everyone. Not all the interests. Some interests of some companies, actors, will not be prioritized in a new society.

And that's where we can have the juicy discussion, which are the difficult ones, which are more difficult to have than adding new things to the system.

Jess Scully: Now we have one minute for your question.

Audience Question 2: Okay, thank you. I'll keep it brief.

I'd like to discuss the issue of authority in this discussion, because we really do need expertise and moral authority to tell people that this is the model that we want to aim forward. So, for instance, like a voice of a parental figure telling a child that, yeah, you cannot have this cheeseburger, right?

And I think that the movement is really lacking this sort of authoritative voice. And I feel like in this current age with the rise of conspiracy theory, you have a parental figure going the opposite direction, telling people that, hey, there are people out there who are stealing your enjoyment, in terms of the foreign immigrant other. And if we do not have this counter-hegemonic authoritative voice, then we're going to give the eco-fascism that voice.

Jess Scully: That's a really important point. And I suppose it's challenging when you have this diverse, disparate, pluralistic movement like degrowth is to say there's one authority figure. But the thing that's wonderful about degrowth, and this is how we're going to wrap up, is that there's such an abundant, growing, diverse network and so many conversations going on about it.

We're at that diversity stage, I think, of the growth of degrowth. If I could come to each of you and if there was one resource, one network, one thing that everyone here could take to the next step on their knowledge journey about degrowth, what would you recommend? And I'll start with you, Bronwen.

Bronwen Graham: I wanted to recommend a book which actually was written by Catherine Trebek with Jeremy Williams. And she has been behind the Wellbeing Economy Movement, which some might say is not going far enough. But this book is a really beautiful called The Economics of Arrival. And then the subtitle is Ideas for a Grown-Up Economy, which I think frames it in an interesting way.

And she talks in the opening chapter about how if you were in a plane that took off and just kept on going and going and going up and up and up, nobody would be too happy. And it's just about also the process of nature maturing, getting to a point where you've arrived, you've grown up to a point where you've arrived at something where we need a new paradigm, and we will have it forced upon us if not. And there's many very accessible ideas, very clear language, and it's a great read.

Jess Scully: I love that. Imagine if our economy actually stopped growing and grew up.

Bronwen Graham: Also, I was dying to do podcasts, but I thought, no, we need to slow down and read books.

Jess Scully laughs

Jess Scully: Sabrina?

Sabrina Chakori: I think that if anyone here in the room would pick any First Nation, you know, poem, literature event, we have a lot to learn from First Nation people in this country. And I think that degrowth shouldn't, you know, repeat the problems of other movements where the struggle of First Nation people are overshadowed by new Global North ideas. So, and degrowth seems very aware of not overshadowing Global South and First Nation struggles.

So, I think if you engage from the Uluru Statement, from the heart to any First Nation author, I think that would be already a big step forward for everyone. Thank you. Tommy?

Tommy Wiedmann: Yeah, everyone here in the room has already done the first step. You have come here, thank you very much, to learn more. And I think that's what I would recommend, just to be interested and learn more about the topic. Personally, I have learned a lot from podcasts.

I still like reading a book, absolutely. But when you do chores or gardening, it's really good to listen to podcasts. And yeah, just mention very quickly, there are quite a few, but The Great Simplification by Nate Higgins is a really good international one, very deep, bit long, but good.  And there's one specific to Australia, Post Growth Australia podcast, PGAP.

Jess Scully: So, I’ve been listening to PGAP all week while I’ve been doing the washing up. Highly recommend, also a book called The Future is Degrowth by Matthias Schmelzer, and there’s a network called Sufficiency Lab, which was recommended by Dr David Ness. And then there’s a great book which we, many of us are into which is called, Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is an excellent piece of cli-fi.

So, thank you for all of your wonderful questions, I tried to incorporate as many as I could into the flow of the conversation, but there were just too many. Obviously, we need another event like this! Thank you all so much for coming, and please thank our speakers.

Applause

Centre for Ideas: Thanks for listening. For more information visit unswcentreforideas.com, and don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Speakers
Sabrina Chakori

Sabrina Chakori

Sabrina is a researcher, educator and multi-award social entrepreneur committed to building a socially just and ecologically sustainable society. She is a postdoctoral researcher at CSIRO, and in her research, she explores innovation and exnovation dynamics in postgrowth food systems transitions. Adopting a cross-scale perspective, she analyses how beyond-GDP frameworks could unlock the potential of postgrowth enterprises.  

She has been working for a more sustainable society for more than 15 years, leading numerous collaborations in various countries, including an initiative with Queensland’s Environment Minister to introduce the law banning single-use plastic bags. To translate her circular economy knowledge and vision into practice, in 2017, she founded the Brisbane Tool Library, a circular organisation that encourages people to borrow tools, camping gear and other equipment to reduce productivism and consumerism. Sabrina is also the co-founder and editor of the Degrowth Journal, a journal that embraces slow science and advances a decommodification of knowledge. 

Bronwen Morgan

Bronwen Morgan

Bronwen Morgan is Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney in the Faculty of Law & Justice, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and a prior Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She is a socio-legal scholar with a longstanding interest in regulation and governance, changes in state formation and the increasing economisation of political discourse and practices. She co-leads the New Economy Network of Australia, Regen Sydney and the Collaborative Research Network on Utopian Legality, Prefigurative Politics and Radical Governance under the umbrella of the Law and Society Association. She is a co-editor in chief of the interdisciplinary journal Global Social Challenges

Jess Scully

Jess Scully

Jess Scully is an author, city-maker and advocate for an expanded civic imagination as a foundation for a fair and sustainable future. Jess has served as Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney and worked as a festival director, policy advisor, curator, strategist, and presenter. Jess is a World Bank consultant on sustainable urbanism and a Senior Associate at the Sydney Policy Lab. Jess has consulted for some of Australia’s most innovative companies and organisations, and for the largest multilateral financier of climate action in developing countries. Her first book is Glimpses of Utopia: Real Ideas for a Fairer World.

Tommy Wiedmann

Tommy Wiedmann

Tommy Wiedmann is Professor of sustainability research and is leading the Sustainability Assessment Program at UNSW Sydney. Tommy has long-standing expertise in integrated, quantitative sustainability assessment and modelling, industrial ecology and environmental footprint analysis. He is leading the development and application of the Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab), a collaborative research platform for environmentally extended multi-region input-output analysis. His recent research is focusing on sustainable transformations towards post-growth economies. Tommy is a Lead Author of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2012, he received the Thomson Reuters Citation Award in Australia and has been listed as Highly Cited Researcher annually since 2015. 

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