Despite the remarkable contribution of various Australian scholars to degrowth scholarly work this century, a formal Australian degrowth movement only emerged with the launch of Degrowth Network Australia (DNA) in February 2023. DNA has inspired various urban and regional groups and Australian media interest, especially given that the controversial and often misrepresented term is becoming visible within publications and research activities of the European Union and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Routledge Handbook of Degrowth published mid- 2025 contains 35 chapters by 56 international contributors. At around 550 pages it is expensive to purchase as a hardback, but the whole collection was released open access simultaneously – and a more affordable paperback will follow in mid-2026. This means it is readily available for use in university courses, for degrowth and degrowth-interested practitioners, for reading and activist groups, for researchers, policy makers and anyone else interested in this relatively novel movement.
I edited this collection with its editorial adviser, Vincent Liegey, with whom I have collaborated for several years. For instance, we co-authored the popular book Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (2020). Liegey has been a key figure in the French degrowth movement even after settling in Budapest 20 years ago. There he co-founded and remains highly active in the 10-year-old degrowth cooperative Cargonomia, which integrates numerous practical, economic and political degrowth activities. They include promoting bike use, bike and cargo bike hiring, and repairing; community supported agriculture with small farming sites on the rural outskirts of Budapest servicing households in the city, and providing opportunities for adults and students to learn food-growing skills; hosting university interns and degrowth workshops; lecturing at universities; and offering a degrowth political hub and social centre in Budapest.
The Routledge Handbook of Degrowth has four parts. The first provides chapters on the economic, ecological and political contexts for the emergence of degrowth as a movement, namely various ecological challenges beyond global heating (Éric Pineault), socio-economic inequities riddling all societies (Timothée Parrique), and a twenty first-century turn to horizontalist organising within a plethora of social and environmental movements (Marina Sitrin).
The second, and most original part in terms of other degrowth collections, presents the history of degrowth both as a concept and movement in a sample of countries and regions. The first chapter in this part focuses on France where the degrowth movement originated as décroissance in 2022. Jarrige and Liegey outline its historical roots, including in much earlier tendencies towards simple living and anti-modernisation in the nineteenth-century, and challenges to growth and capitalist societies in the 1960s and 1970s. They highlight the cultural and anthropological ‘degrowth à la française’ – associated in part with the anti-utilitarian movements in the social sciences in Western Europe – as distinct from economistic reductions of the term ‘degrowth’, say in ecological economics. There is a remarkable variety within the chapters on Italy (Krähmer et al.), Germany (Schmelzer and Muraca), Catalonia (Nogué-Algueró and D’Alisa), Czechia (Ferenčuhová et al.) and Greece (Tsagkari et al.). They offer English-language reliant readers a glimpse of the degrowth discourses in other languages and cultures. Moreover, generic and regional chapters focus on interpretative challenges associated within Anglophile contexts, (Nick Fitzpatrick) with advice from Latin America (David Barkin) and Africa (Roland Ngam).
The third part presents ‘concepts in action’, melding the theoretical with active practices. Degrowth has its own lexicon, using terms such as ‘conviviality’ as spelled out by Vetter and Fersterer in both its social and technological dimensions, ‘frugal abundance’ (Plomteux), and ‘collective provisioning’ within ‘holistic care economies’ (Pungas and Gebauer). Significant degrowth approaches to familiar fields include the ‘degrowth doughnut’ (Domazet), degrowth and ‘work’ (Houtbeckers), ‘commoning’ (Vetter and Fersterer), ‘autonomy’ (Spash), ‘defashioning’ (Niessen), ‘healthcare’ (Hensher and Aillon), a pedagogy for degrowth (Prádanos) and prefigurative experiences vis-à-vis academic theory (Lazányi et al.).
The fourth part offers a range of approaches and strategies for transformation. Prominent founder of degrowth, Serge Latouche offers a review of the movement’s achievements and challenges in it’s first two decades, while two young climate and degrowth activists, Anuna de Wever and Lena Hartog, stridently call for ‘a future characterised by radical abundance, diversity, celebration, self-determination and freedom from dependency on capitalist growth’. The value-oriented, affective and visionary importance of utopian thinking for degrowth is strongly argued by Alexandra Köves.
Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, outlines how and why poverty cannot be eliminated except through degrowth. This line is buttressed by Brand and Wissen who contrast the current ‘imperial mode of living’ to a future ‘solidary mode of living’. Commoning is identified as the ideal organisational form for degrowth futures (Robra et al.) and Savini suggests degrowth strategies for urban settlements to make a degrowth turn.
Two gender-oriented chapters offer strategies to enact, on one hand, decolonial ecofeminist degrowth futures (Paulson et al.) and, on the other hand, a release from gender binaries altogether from the perspective of masculinities (Bob Pease). Paul Stubbs encourages degrowth to explicitly support a re-igniting of the Non-Aligned Movement. Finally, Gareth Dale traces the ideas and ideologies of ecosocialism in contrast to both other socialist thinking and degrowth.
Beyond these four discrete, even if interconnected parts, several key themes emerge in the collection (Nelson and Liegey). The practical bent has already been mentioned. Another theme is an emphasis on recuperating ‘degrowth’ within the original meaning and sense of degrowth à la française. The collection centres particularly on the role, significance and character of degrowth as a movement. As in many contemporary movements, there is an internal struggle between those bent on policies and activities reliant on the state and market, and radical, horizontalist and postcapitalist politics centred on localised and prefigurative grassroots practices. Moreover, the environment within which degrowth has emerged has become more hostile to democratic opening and, indeed, more threateningly authoritarian and militaristic, especially in the last couple of years.
As such, degrowth is just one movement in movement(s), which faces massive challenges in the current conjuncture. I would like to think that key principles and trajectories of degrowth address and/or conform to these strategic concerns of Silvia Federici (2025):
[We] need really movements that are acting on several fronts. That are acting on the fronts of communal organization of social reproduction and the creation of new forms of solidarity, the creation of new forms of commoning of reproductive work that enable people to gain the strength, more strength, to confront the State. And, at the same time, the creation of international networks whereby we can join our efforts with those across the world that are now being … [made] the object of this incredible violence that is now unfolding across the world.
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