Economy without Growth

Again I am returning home from a conference, this time hosted by the German Association for Ecological Economics (Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie VÖÖ) in Freiburg. The general theme was dedicated to an economy without growth (Wirtschaft ohne Wachstum). The conference was organized as an extended workshop, with an input keynote by Peter Finke and Niko Paech, a World Café do gather comments on the input, and an Open Space with six corners with different topics. I co-hosted a corner with Susanne Hartard on Innovation and Business.

Some interesting ideas emerged out of this. First, a no-growth rhetoric conjures the image of a static and very dull economy, a place where not much happens. But what about human creativity and entrepreneurial spirit? How can we imagine to reach such an economy, such a society without the creative destruction of old habits, old ways of production and consumption? Growth and degrowth will both be necessary to master this great transition: unsustainable businesses need to degrow while other need to flourish and grow – until a certain point and then remain their size but renew their ideas and what they are doing. The term “steady-state economy” might be just as bad as degrowth or no-growth in communicating what is meant by it. What is meant is a steady dance of growth and degrowth, of innovation and exnovation, of creating the new and destroying the old. The steady-dance economy is much more playful, yet at the same time capturing the positive aspects of a degrowth economy in the sustainability society. As John Stuart Mill said, the stationary state is far from being the end of things but the beginning of the flourishment of humanity’s full potential.

Apart from these more semantic ideas and issues, I came to a conclusion, that already lingers with me some time and that is to develop a degrowth theory bottom-up. In order to build some theoretical ideas and concepts about the degrowth economy, we should not make the same mistake as the neoclassic and try to build theory without reference to the real world. The conceptualization of a degrowth economy needs to look into the field because it is already happening. There are degrowth economies all around, with social enterprises, with SMEs, with local currencies and so on. By carefully looking at them, we might be able to capture some of the features of the degrowth economy that can help us in developing policy suggestions how to reach it on a larger scale. The growth economy was there before we had an economic theory for growth. Maybe here it will just be the same.

So what will be needed as the next steps is to gather degrowth practitioners (also they might not call themselves that way) and good degrowth practice — both succesful and failed degrowth practice. I am thinking about a mini workshop on that, maybe in the first half of the next year. Anyone willing to join?

Keep you updated…