Encountering degrowth

Abstract

Degrowth theory and movements aim to find ways of living well while downscaling the economy, heal the many metabolic rifts that threaten global ecologies with capitalist exploitation of the earth, and end injustice and violence. While degrowth transformations may not ever be wholly achievable, we nevertheless propose that degrowth exists as lived experiences and practices. These practices take territorial expression and can be understood through ethnographic encounters. We consider geographies that involve people living well with less; downscaling and decarbonizing the economy; and seeking to undoing inequalities and injustices. We argue that all of these degrowth phenomena are necessarily expressed in and through territories. To show how these degrowth ideas, practices, and processes take territorial expression, we ground our analysis in ethnographic encounters with individuals living in the Southern Italy uplands, the Greek island of Ikaria, and the plantation-lands of Sumatra, Indonesia. Ethnographies of encounter allow us to perceive the world in ways not previously considered, giving insight into languages and understandings of lived degrowth experience and politics. Our approach allows us to nuance and ground degrowth political economic theorizing while addressing relational questions of cultural, political, and environmental change. We find learning from kindred territorialized practices of degrowth to be a way to understand degrowth as it is lived and experienced. We describe and analyze degrowth territorializing processes and practices that contribute to spaces co-constituted through broader political economies of capitalist territorialization and depeasantization, material conditions of land, and contextualized degrowth epistemologies. We conclude with a consideration of our ethnographic encounters as points of overlap and departure for understanding lived experiences of degrowth from disparate, “out of the way” places of the world from the uplands and islands, from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia.