Degrowth by law? A critical realist approach to law in transformation

Abstract

Degrowth scholarship has long been mainly focused on prefigurative politics and alternative projects originating from the grassroots. Only recently, there is a growing interest in the role of the state and its institutions for bringing about social-ecological transformation. The judicial terrain, however, is still widely neglected in the degrowth literature despite an empirical increase in legal struggles on the part of civil society organizations, NGOs, and social movements. In this paper, I will explore the role of the law in transformative processes from a critical realist perspective. At the heart of the theoretical debate is the question of whether law is a suitable mechanism for changing the fundamental structures of a capitalist society, or whether it is part of that structure and therefore needs to be transformed itself. Building on a doctrinal, a visionary, and a critical perspective on legal transformations, I lay out a critical realist approach to law in transformation.