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Memo: “Degrowth needs more strategic planning.” – Dr. Federico Savini

From “Degrowth, legitimacy, and the foundational economy,” a Response to Yvonne Rydin common published in Planning Theory (2024)

If we accept the scientific evidence that decoupling is not occurring at the speed and scale required to meet critical climate and ecological targets, then we need to talk about lowering the amount of production and consumption. The degrowth proposition clearly sees this as a major socio-political challenge, rather than a technological one. Reduction is understood as a pathway to equality because it primarily targets unnecessary sectors as a way of creating space and freeing up resources for increasing the provision of essential services. Obviously, this proposition requires a definition of essential needs, which must be met to address poverty, as well as a definition of those unnecessary activities that can be downscaled. (2024, 2)

The key point is the need for a collected, mature understanding of what is regionally scalable and moves towards localized needs.

The direction we have been heading is the so-called “green revolution” that fails to meet the very goals it claims to address.

The success of green/smart/circular urban economies is built on cheap labour and the cheapness of the planetary mines where lithium, cobalt, e-waste, and so forth are extracted (Arboleda, 2020). The green, the electric, the smart, and the renewable are still exclusive goods when dependent on profit-generating economies. (2024, 2)

Individuals will be required to change culture, not on a large viral scale, but from one neighborhood to the next. One city block to the next. Just a few neighborhoods at a time and the basic and simple understanding of degrowth and degrowth practices will multiply.

Planners therefore need to engage with grassroots organisations, NGOs, not-for-profit groups, voluntary organisations, civic society, cooperatives, activist administrators, unions and socio-ecological movements that advocate for socioecological justice and, in so doing, perform satiation against the never ending pressure to expand consumption and production. In other words, planners’ definition of essential needs must be informed by the experience of those whose needs are not satisfied and by those who deliberately try to fulfil them. (2024, 4)

This rippling through communities can, indeed, continue to thrive under what we still understand as a monetary economy.

However, profit can certainly be a tool to maintain a degrowth economy if it is coupled with the notion of satiation. So, yes, we can have farmers selling their produce in a degrowth economy and drawing a profit from this to sustain themselves and their co-workers. What we cannot have is a big agribusiness whose key concern is to compete with other agro-industrial groups and maximise shareholder value, which will destroy soil health. (2024, 4)