omniharmonicDegrowth
Degrowth is a planned, democratic reduction of material and energy throughput in wealthy economies to bring them back within planetary boundaries, while simultaneously improving quality of life and redistributing resources globally. It is not recession — the involuntary contraction of economic activity — but a deliberate reorientation of economic purpose away from the imperative of perpetual growth toward sufficiency, equity, and ecological restoration.
The degrowth critique begins with a biophysical reality: infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, and the claim that “green growth” can decouple GDP from resource use has not been supported by evidence at the global scale. Wealthy nations consume far beyond their ecological share. Degrowth argues that these nations must reduce material throughput — consuming less energy, fewer raw materials, less land — while redirecting freed resources toward meeting unmet needs both domestically and in the Global South. This requires shorter working weeks, universal basic services, caps on wealth accumulation, and a cultural shift away from consumerism as the primary source of meaning.
Degrowth connects to doughnut-economics as a strategy for returning within the ecological ceiling, and to the well-being-economy through its insistence that well-being and GDP are not the same thing. It shares terrain with regenerative-economics in its vision of economies that restore rather than deplete, though regenerative economics tends to emphasize qualitative transformation while degrowth emphasizes quantitative reduction. The concept challenges accelerationism by questioning whether technological acceleration alone can solve ecological overshoot without reducing aggregate throughput.