On twitter we spend time in silly debates: is degrowth impoverishment, negative GDP, lockdown misery bla bla. But in our normal lives we are producing some pretty k.a. research. Here are 22 papers by researchers from the (broader) degrowth community published just the last year!
I give these in no particular order. And they range from the most quantitative to the most ethnographic or the most philosophical (disclaimer: I am in involved in 4). These are papers that I happened to read. I am sure I miss many more - please add at the end of the thread!
I wont summarise the papers. Take a look at the abstracts. And if you don't have access to the full paper, email the first author for a copy. In the degrowth community we are happy to share our research. So, here we go, let's start the countdown! 22 papers to go :)
2. Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchangehttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800920300938
3. Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdownhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519620301960
4. Shifting economic activity to services has limited potential to reduce global environmental impacts due to the household consumption of labourhttps://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab7f63
5. The dangers of decouplinghttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1758-5899.12791
14.Decolonizing degrowth in the post-development convergence: Questions, experiences, and proposals from two Indigenous territories journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
These were only papers published after 2019! For a review of the degrowth literature before, check our 2018 "Research on Degrowth" annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.114…
For the older French literature on degrowth, a good review in English is found in a 2008 paper by Valerie Fournier "Escaping from the economy: the politics of degrowth' emerald.com/insight/conten… / End of Thread - feel free to add other recent papers below.
Our new review paper @TheLancet Planetary Health assesses the literature on #PostGrowth - its claims, evidence, models and open questions. (Thread) sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
#PostGrowth refers to societies that do not pursue GDP growth as an objective, and which are able to meet human needs in an equitable way without growth while staying within their fair share of planetary boundaries.
The concept of #PostGrowth encompasses #DoughnutEconomics, #SteadyStateEconomics, & #Degrowth. While the first two work within capitalism, degrowth calls for a transformation of the economic system to reduce ecological impact & inequality.
Weird method. Say I want to write a review on the state of economics. I choose all articles with the word 'economics' in the title, and then - surprise surprise - I find most of them are reviews. What an indictment of the state of economics: 'they are only writing reviews'!
Ok, maybe 'degrowth studies' (sic) are not the equivalent of economics, but of 'the economy'. So I do a lit review of articles with the word 'economy' in the title, and - surprise surprise - I find that most of them are crappy pieces on the circular or the sustainable 'economy'.
Say you had to write a literature review on the state of 'climate models'. Would you only review articles with the word 'climate model' in the title, or would you go after finding actual articles with climate models?
Alert! I am back on twitter for an hour (wait, did its name change?) and before it gets me depressed I want to share the news of our new paper on the perceptions of degrowth among Euro-parliamentarians. /THREAD
The research was part of @r_mastini's PhD on the Green New Deal and degrowth, and was based on interviews with 41 Members of the European Parliament.
We used Q methodology, which allows yielding representative clusters of viewpoints/opinions among a small and not necessarily representative sample of respondents. The sample must be diverse and cover all possible viewpoints on the topic at stake. Unconvinced? Read our methods :)
The media report these days on a new study that supposedly shows that, after all, not only money buys happiness, but that there is no limit on how much happiness money can buy. But is this so? /Thread. washingtonpost.com/business/2023/…
Context: the study is an ‘adversarial collaboration’ between, on the one hand, Kanheman&Deaton, who had found that happiness increases with income but flattens somewhere between $60,000 and $90,000, and on the other, Killingsworth who found a linear relation with no satiation./2
The new collaborative study is based on Killingsworth’s better data (33,391 US adults prompted on their smartphones to report their current happiness, three times per day for several weeks). pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… /3
Why ‘real-existing degrowth’? Because ‘one cannot fight for something that one does not know’.
The degrowth literature up to now has focussed mostly on the ‘big picture’. Carbon budgets, decoupling assessments, and new policy ideas. Good. But unless people can ‘see degrowth’, our analysis will end up merely academic and utopian (in the bad sense of both terms :)).
"A discourse analysis of yellow-vest resistance against carbon taxes" - our new paper is available open access! sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Here is a taste of what you will find there:
This is one of the first rigorous, and peer-reviewed studies of the Yellow Vests movement and their stance on climate change and carbon taxes. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the Yellow Vests, but few rigorous studies. /2
For this study, we interviewed 33 protesters. You may think this is a small sample from which we cannot generalize. But the discourse analysis method we used, Q, works with small respondent samples and elicits common discourses by a systematic approach (check methods section!) /3