Ecological Economics 157 (2019) 246–252

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Ecological Economics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon

Analysis

What About the Global South? Towards a Feminist Decolonial Degrowth T

Approach
⁎
Corinna Denglera, , Lisa Marie Seebacherb
a
Feminist Economics at the University of Vechta, Germany
b
Centre for Social Innovation, Vienna, Austria

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Degrowth calls for a profound socio-ecological transformation towards a socially just and environmentally sound
Degrowth society. So far, the global dimensions of such a transformation in the Global North have arguably not received
Decoloniality the required attention. This article critically reflects on the requirements of a degrowth approach that promotes
Postcolonial Theory global intragenerational justice without falling into the trap of reproducing (neo-)colonial continuities. Our
Feminist Standpoint Theory
account of social justice is inherently tied to questions of gender justice. A postcolonial reading of feminist
Post-Development
standpoint theory provides the theoretical framework for the discussion. In responding to two main points of
Environmental Justice
criticism raised by feminist scholars from the Global South, it is argued that degrowth activism and scholarship
has to reflect on its coloniality and necessarily needs to seek alliances with social movements from around the
world on equal footing. Acknowledging that this task is far from easy, some cornerstones of a feminist decolonial
degrowth approach are outlined.

1. Introduction
“Succinctly stated, those engaged in transition activism and theo-
rizing in the North rarely delve into those from the South; con-
versely, those in the South tend to dismiss too easily northern pro-
posals or to consider them inapplicable to their contexts. There has
been little concerted effort at bringing these two sets of discourses
and strategies into a dialogue that would be mutually enriching.”
(Escobar, 2015: 452)
“Cultural borders are easily crossed from the superficial cultural
relativism of metropolitan countries, whereas, going the other way,
the so-called peripheral countries encounter bureaucratic and po-
liced frontiers.”
(Spivak, 2008: 33)
Arturo Escobar and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delineate the cen-
tral dilemma of this article, namely – from the vantage point of de-
growth – reflecting on the desirability of building alliances on the one
hand and the difficulty of doing so on the other. Degrowth, an academic
discourse that has gained momentum in Europe over the last decade, is
not to be misunderstood as a purely economic concept that simply aims
at reversing economic growth within a growth paradigm (a recession).
Rather, degrowth entails a transformation towards a more socially just
and environmentally sound society. As ‘concrete utopia’ in terms of
Ernst Bloch (1959), it gives hope and a pathway to follow, yet many
questions remain to be answered. One aspect, which so far has been
undertheorized in the degrowth discourse, is the global dimension of a
degrowth transformation in the Global North.1 Will degrowth in the
Global North have negative short-term impacts on the Global South,
e.g. people losing their jobs in all sorts of export industries? Is it not
rather privileged to claim that these are bad jobs anyway and to opt for
the long-term vision of socio-ecological justice, when the lived realities
of people are shaped by struggles for survival? Are we once again
‘setting the global agenda’, thereby reproducing long-standing asym-
metries?
This article aims at provoking a debate about global perspectives

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: corinna.dengler@uni-vechta.de (C. Dengler), seebacher@zsi.at (L.M. Seebacher).
1
As the editors of this special issue point out in the introduction, a class-based approach is more adequate for degrowth analyses, as the degrowth critique applies to
‘global middle and upper classes’ regardless of their geographical location (Akbulut et al., this issue). We clearly acknowledge the conceptual limits of ‘Global South’
and ‘Global North’. The distinction falls short in capturing heterogeneity within countries and regions and reproduces otherness, subjectivities and hierarchies
(Escobar, 2012 [1995]: 9). To analyse global injustices and structures of oppression, however, it is necessary to address asymmetric power structures arising from the
uneven integration of societies into the global capitalist world system. We have chosen the concepts of ‘Global North’ (‘Western’ is used as congruent adjective) and
‘Global South’, notwithstanding our feminist reluctance to reproduce dichotomies. Please read them as analytical categories, rather than exact depictions of reality.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.11.019
Received 27 February 2018; Received in revised form 1 August 2018; Accepted 26 November 2018
Available online 07 December 2018
0921-8009/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
C. Dengler, L.M. Seebacher
and (de)coloniality in the degrowth discourse. In the context of this
paper, decoloniality is defined along the Argentinean feminist scholar
Maria Lugones (2010: 747) as opportunity to go beyond the (post-
colonial) analysis of racialized, capitalist and gendered structural in-
justices, i.e. the coloniality of the status quo and to foster decoloniality
in theory and practice.2 By responding to two major criticisms, in this
article we critically examine whether there is a ‘coloniality of de-
growth’, and further outline cornerstones of a (more) decolonial and
feminist degrowth approach.3
Neither the feminist nor the decolonial dimension is a complete
blank in current degrowth literature. The relevance of a feminist de-
growth approach has been acknowledged by many. The formation of
the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) at the 2016 degrowth
conference in Budapest and first contributions elaborating on the topic
(e.g. Akbulut, 2017; Dengler and Strunk, 2018) give hope that feminist
reasoning is yet to gain significance in the discourse. As far as decolo-
niality is concerned, degrowth claims to have the ‘decolonization of the
social imaginary’ (Latouche, 2003) at its very core. Notwithstanding
these ambitions, arguably none of these two dimensions is yet an in-
tegral part of degrowth reasoning. In this article, we argue for a com-
bined consideration of feminist and decolonial lines of thought, posing
the following question: How does degrowth need to be pursued to
promote intragenerational socio-ecological justice without falling into
the trap of reproducing (neo-)colonial continuities? By elaborating on
this question, this article discusses two of this special issue's theses,
namely thesis III, degrowth's underlying notion of both deontological
and consequential justice and thesis IV, the potential (and necessity) of
cross-fertilization between the more theoretical degrowth discourse and
the broad, popular basis of Environmental Justice (EJ) movements
(Akbulut et al., this issue).
The contribution starts by briefly introducing a postcolonial reading
of feminist standpoint theory as theoretical lens and conceptualizes our
understanding of ‘degrowth’. We then discuss two criticisms brought up
by renowned Global South scholars at the workshop on ‘Sustainability,
Ecology, and Care’ in Berlin in January 2017.4 In reference to the
possibility of degrowth in the Global North being a pathway towards a
more socially just system on a global scale, degrowth was accused of (1)
lacking awareness of negative short-term impacts on the Global South
and (2) (re-)setting the global agenda in a neocolonial manner. Al-
though we do agree to a certain point with the first criticism, we argue
with regard to the second one that degrowth is not to be misunderstood
as proposal from the Global North imposed on the Global South, but
rather a Northern supplement to Southern concepts, movements and
lines of thought. It is therefore imperative for degrowth to seek alli-
ances with these Southern ‘fellow travelers’ (Escobar, 2015).
However, and this is crucial, in building North-South bridges, there
is the danger of falling into what Nikita Dhawan (2013: 139) calls
“coercive cosmopolitanism and impossible solidarities.” We agree with
her claim that “though we might be facing the same storm, we are not
all in the same boat” (ibid.: 145). Acknowledging the different boats we
are sitting in and also the different waves hitting us has been a major
accomplishment of feminist theorizing since the 1980s. We cannot
overemphasize the importance of dismantling false and exclusive
2
Albeit acknowledging that some scholars draw different distinctions be-
tween ‘postcolonial’ and ‘decolonial’ (e.g. geographical ones), we use the term
decolonial in this very sense throughout the paper. While strongly drawing
from postcolonial feminism, we use decolonial in its reference to deconstruct
and overcome current injustices. (Mignolo, 2007: 452).
3
The use of the term ‘decolonial’ in the context of a predominantly Western
discourse is not meant to diminish the manifest implications of colonialism
and/or the powerful dynamics of decolonial liberation movements. Its use
within the degrowth discourse already hints at the core of this paper, namely
that degrowth needs to become more aware of ‘colonial continuities’.
4
We especially would like to thank Bina Agarwal for her valuable, critical
comments.
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Ecological Economics 157 (2019) 246–252
(mostly Eurocentric) universalisms. However, in the face of the ecolo-
gical crisis, we are quite literally facing the same storm. This urgency
should motivate us to search common ground for acting in concert,
notwithstanding the different boats we are sitting in. In our view, de-
growth activism and scholarship offers a good starting point for finding
this common ground if, as a proposal from the Global North, it seeks
alliances with EJ movements and, more broadly, voices from the Global
South on equal footing. A feminist decolonial degrowth approach is
needed to avoid the unintended reproduction of patriarchal and colo-
nial continuities.
2. Theoretical Lens: A Postcolonial Reading of Feminist
Standpoint Theory
To conceptualize degrowth and tackle our research question, it is
necessary to first critically reflect on our own situatedness. Building on
Nancy Hartsock (1983) and more specifically on Donna Haraway
(1988), feminist standpoint theory implies that knowledge is always
situated, as our materially grounded and socio-culturally formed
standpoint within a particular society influences what we can know
about our world (epistemology). Those that are benefiting from a
system are less likely to see its injustices. In line with this, a postcolonial
reading of standpoint theory requires a particularly careful considera-
tion of historical and colonial contexts that formed different material
bases and hierarchically structured living realities (Anderson, 2002:
11).
The way we do research is framed by our standpoint of being fe-
male-assigned, white, middle class scholars from the Global North. In
tackling an issue of global significance, namely ways to deal with the
ecological crisis by which every inhabitant of the earth is affected (al-
beit in different ways), we can only try to overcome our situatedness
and partiality by including heterogeneous voices and perspectives from
other lived realities both in the Global South and the Global North alike.
This task becomes even more important as we strive for a decolonial
understanding of degrowth from within a deeply (neo-)colonial setting,
namely Western academia.
3. Degrowth and Its Claim for Consequential and Deontological
Justice
Since the publication of the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to
Growth, planetary boundaries and the untenable nature of resource-
intensive lifestyles in capitalist centers and their proliferations around
the world have increasingly received attention. Concepts such as ‘sus-
tainable development’ and the ‘green economy’ were meant to reconcile
economic, social and ecological aspects without fundamentally chal-
lenging the capitalist growth paradigm. Degrowth activism and scho-
larship takes the ecological untenability of the Western ‘imperial mode
of living’ (Brand and Wissen, 2013) as its starting point.5 It opposes the
belief in ‘green growth’ and ecological modernization as panacea for
environmental challenges. Rather, it sees the current socio-ecological
crisis as closely entangled with Western modernity and its growth-fe-
tishism being taken as universally valid model of civilization (Gills,
2010). Degrowth seeks solutions to this crisis in a fundamentally dif-
ferent way than green growth: Instead of maintaining the status quo, it
seeks alternatives to this model.
There is a broad variety of different degrowth positions ranging
from a mere GDP-critique to more openly anti-capitalist approaches.
Matthias Schmelzer (2015: 118) has identified five sub-currents within
5
By using the singular form (imperial mode of living), we do not want to
suggest that there is only one way of living a resource-intensive lifestyle. While
accepting a plethora of different realizations, we focus on their commonalities,
namely being resource-intensive and externalizing the corresponding environ-
mental harms to other social groups and/or world regions.
C. Dengler, L.M. Seebacher
the degrowth discourse, namely a conservative, a social-reformist, a
sufficiency-oriented, an anti-capitalist and a feminist strand. In this
distinction, the analytical nature of which hardly holds in reality, we
conceptualize our understanding of degrowth as both: inherently fem-
inist and anti-capitalist, with elements of the sufficiency-oriented strand
and social-reformist policy proposals like the reduction of wage work.
In contrast, we clearly oppose the small, but not negligible conservative
strand. This approach exhibits a patriarchal and nationalist under-
standing of the aspired relocalizations, which does not aim at an
emancipatory transformation, but rather opens the leeway for right
wing populism.
The goal of degrowth is socio-ecological global justice both on
consequential and deontological grounds (thesis III proposed in the
introduction to this special issue). While consequential justice judges
actions by their consequence (e.g. equality of genders), deontological
justice is understood as judging the actions by themselves (e.g. being
feminist) (Akbulut et al., this issue). In consequential dimensions, de-
growth focuses on intra- and intergenerational distributive justice. The
intergenerational dimension refers to the generations that follow,
which, owing to our generation's unsustainable production and con-
sumption patterns, climate change and environmental degradation,
may find harder conditions to sustain their livelihoods (Gardiner, 2006:
398). The intragenerational dimension relates to all our earth's current
inhabitants, structural inequalities within societies as well as the un-
equal distribution of environmental goods and bads between different
regions in the world and hence to ‘environmental colonialism’ (Agarwal
and Narain, 1991).
It is important to acknowledge that intragenerational environmental
distributive injustices exhibit a social dimension – it is not the elites
who are exposed to the consequences of environmental degradation or
scarce resources, it is the already discriminated against, the financially
deprived, who are hit the first and the hardest both in the Global South
and the Global North alike (Harvey, 2003). These injustices are deeply
gendered and subaltern women in the Global South, are based on dif-
ferent attributed statuses, responsibilities and access to resources par-
ticularly exposed to environmental bads (Agarwal, 1992; Spivak, 1988).
Although alleviating environmental injustice lies at the core of de-
growth, it is crucial to scrutinize the process of how to achieve this
outcome. What Wainwright and Mann (2013) call a ‘climate leviathan’,
an enlightened eco-dictator so to say, might be able and/or more (time-
) efficient to push for an ecologically sound system. This forced top-
down approach, however, fundamentally contradicts degrowth's
guiding principles on deontological grounds and must thus be regarded
bad independently from its outcome.
What, then, are degrowth's central deontological justice concerns?
By bringing up deeply normative questions such as ‘What is the good
life?’, degrowth addresses all of us as active, society-shaping citizens,
rather than consumers, and puts guiding principles such as autonomy
and participatory, collective bottom-up decision-making processes at its
very core. In a degrowth society, diminished throughput is not sup-
posed to come with joyless renunciation and a decrease of our quality of
life. In contrast, the essence of what this quality of life might lie in
needs to be collectively re-evaluated with an emphasis on ‘conviviality’
(Illich, 1973), on ‘being’ rather than ‘having’ (Fromm, 2008 [1976])
and a radical scrutiny of whether what we now think of as indis-
pensable actually contributes to our well-being. Hence, in its growth
critique and its claim for deontological justice, degrowth fundamentally
challenges the predominant growth-based thinking of Western moder-
nity and opens conceptual space for new narratives. As pointed out
earlier, we do believe that on deontological grounds, the degrowth
discourse necessarily needs to take feminist and postcolonial theories
into account to a greater extent – not as add-ons, but as integral parts of
its reasoning.
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Ecological Economics 157 (2019) 246–252
4. The Coloniality of Degrowth
Degrowth is framed by researchers from the Global North as a
proposal for the Global North and it has gained momentum first and
foremost in the European context. When it comes to (economic growth
in) the Global South, degrowth scholars do not have a common posi-
tion. Some degrowth proponents arguing for a dematerialization
strategy in the Global North do so by suggesting this would enable
countries of the Global South to grow (e.g. Martínez-Alier, 2012: 66).
The more common approach in the degrowth discourse is that degrowth
in the Global North is “liberat[ing] conceptual space for countries there
to find their own trajectories of what they define as the good life”
(Kallis et al., 2015: 5). Both positions hold, however, that the idea is
precisely not to impose Northern idea(l)s to the Global South. The
postcolonial researchers Agarwal and Narain's (1991) claim that instead
of telling the South what to do by “preaching a patronizing and highly
partisan one worldism” (ibid.: 2), the Global North – from a decolonial
perspective – “must first set their own house in order” (ibid.: 16). De-
growth, in our perspective, precisely aims to focus on what needs to be
done in the Global North.
In our globalized and entangled world, however, small actions in
one place bear influences far beyond national boundaries. There has
been quite some effort in recent months to take global dimensions into
account to a greater extent. Various discussions at the 2016 degrowth
conference in Budapest stressed their importance. In September 2018,
for the first time a degrowth conference took place in the Southern
hemisphere (Mexico). The forthcoming Post-Development Dictionary
edited by degrowth scholars from around the world is a ray of hope
(Demaria and Kothari, 2017). Additionally, there is a growing number
of considerations of degrowth in non-European contexts, such as Cuba
(Borowy, 2013), China (Xue et al., 2012), Turkey (Akbulut and
Adaman, 2013), Brazil (DeVore, 2017), Peru (Hollender, 2015), the
Maldives (Hirsch, 2017), Madagascar (Gezon, 2017), India (Gerber and
Raina, 2018) Bhutan (Verma, 2017), and more broadly Sub-Saharan
Africa (Qafa, 2017). Some of them tap the potential of degrowth for
these contexts, others identify post-growth tendencies in the status quo.
In this special issues' introduction, Akbulut and colleagues claim
that the degrowth perspective calls for acknowledging the historical
inequalities between the Global North and the Global South. We think
that this holds on a theoretical level, where – as we have discussed in
the previous section – the alleviation of intragenerational environ-
mental injustices lies at the core of degrowth. However, Fees et al.
(2016) accurately criticize the lack of discussions on possible effects of
the actual implementation of a degrowth society in the Global North on
the Global South as well as Southern perspectives in the degrowth
discourse in general. Similarly, various authors hold that global inter-
connections and their actual manifestations remain insufficiently con-
sidered (e.g. Bendix, 2017: 2; Kothari et al., 2014; Löw, 2015; Muraca,
2015: 24).
When discussing the manuscript of the article The Monetized
Economy Versus Care and the Environment: Degrowth Perspectives on
Reconciling an Antagonism (Dengler and Strunk, 2018) at the afore-
mentioned workshop on ‘Sustainability, Ecology, and Care’ with fem-
inist economists from around the world, two main arguments against
degrowth were brought up:
1. In a global, capitalist system, degrowth in the Global North ne-
cessarily affects the Global South and might lead to adverse effects.
The 1993 US Child Labor Boycott in Bangladesh was used by the
critics to illustrate the case.
2. Degrowth reproduces longstanding (neo-)colonial asymmetries by
(once again!) setting the agenda on what ought to be done to solve
problems of global relevance in the Global North. This happens
without negotiating the aspired transformation on equal footing
with the Global South, which is thereby (once again!) rendered
dependent on Western benevolence.
C. Dengler, L.M. Seebacher
This section aims at retracing and rebutting these arguments. We
discuss the potential ‘(neo-)coloniality of degrowth’ and why we still
believe that degrowth, as idea originally stemming from the Global
South (Latouche, 2009: 56), can indeed promote intragenerational
socio-ecological justice, i.e. consequential justice, without falling into
the trap of reproducing (neo-)colonial continuities at a deontological
level.
4.1. Possible Adverse (Short-term) Effects on the Global South
Colonialism and Northern expansionary politics set the basis for
today's hierarchically structured global system, in which territorial
imperialism has largely been replaced with policies of economic re-
structuring under the guise of ‘sustainable development’ (Spivak, 2008:
134). It is in this very notion that the first argument brought up against
degrowth needs to be considered. In voicing this criticism, workshop
participants from India linked the claim of degrowth being ignorant to
lived realities in the Global South with the case of the 1993 US Child
Labor Boycott in Bangladesh. The boycott was settled in the context of
the forced institutionalization of Western ideas of childhood on a global
scale. In the specific case of Bangladesh, with mass production of gar-
ment for Western consumers as dominant ‘development model’, the
threat of a US and possibly yet to be extended European consumer
boycott in 1993 had substantial consequences (Brooks, 2005: 130). An
estimated number of 55,000 children lost their job, most of them ended
up in the informal sector, having worse working conditions and less
payment than those children still working in the garment industry
(White, 1996: 6). The example of the 1993 US Child Labor Boycott
shows how ‘well-intended’ Global North agendas might have adverse,
unintended effects in the Global South. It is this very core that owes a
thorough consideration of the argument.
The boycott is settled in the arena of hierarchically structured
neocolonial economic systems. In its long-term vision, degrowth pre-
cisely aims at changing these patterns of unequal exchange. We agree
that more often than not the lived realities of the subaltern groups in
the Global South do not allow waiting for a radical transformation. A
reduction of the demand for natural resources and goods produced by
low-wage labor is a likely economic consequence of a degrowth trans-
formation (Kallis, 2011: 874) that will probably have unintended ad-
verse effects on the Global South.6 These potential effects are currently
not adequately addressed in much of degrowth literature.7 Albeit ad-
mitting that degrowth must take possible short-term effects and neo-
colonial dependencies into account, we argue that comparing a de-
growth transformation in the Global North to the 1993 US Child Labor
Boycott is a weak analogy. A degrowth transformation would be a
gradual, bottom-up process rather than a radical, top-down rupture
provoked by the Global North and is thus very different from banning
imports of a product in compliance with ILO conventions overnight
(Muraca, 2015: 23).
4.2. The Issue of Degrowth Being a Concept Proposed by the Global North
The second argument brought up against degrowth claims that de-
growth reproduces longstanding (neo-)colonial asymmetries by setting
the agenda on what ought to be done to solve problems of global re-
levance. According to this criticism, the Global North (once again!)
6
However, it is also possible that degrowth transformation in the North may
have little adverse effect on exporting countries in the South due to the growth
of South-South trade, fuelled by middle- and upper-class consumption styles
(and population growth) in the South.
7
A noteworthy exception is related to political ecology case studies, such as
Joan Martínez-Alier's (2002: 79–99) comprehensive account on the con-
sequences of decreasing demand and interventions (incl. boycotts) of the Global
North on the people in the Global South in the case of shrimp production and
mangrove forest conservation.
249
Ecological Economics 157 (2019) 246–252
establishes norms, limits and strategies by opting for a degrowth
transformation. Thereby, it re-enacts its colonial role as “guarantor of
the exercise of justice” (Dhawan, 2012: 266) and continued bearer of
the global “‘white man's burden’, namely the responsibility and ob-
ligation of the Europeans to ‘save’ and ‘enlighten’ the rest of the world”
(ibid.). In this section, we argue that degrowth must not be misunder-
stood as a blueprint for a global transformation proposed by the Global
North and imposed on the Global South, but rather as a Northern
supplement to Southern ideas and movements, which already exist.
While central degrowth ideals are well present in discourses of
Southern movements, different framings hinder these conceptions from
being picked up by one another (Rodriguez-Labajos, this issue; Vega
Ugalde, 2015; Xue et al., 2012). Whereas in the Global North economic
growth is generally portrayed as a goal in itself, in the Global South it is
commonly seen as an ‘intermediary step’ to achieve progress and de-
velopment with both of these concepts being defined by Western
modernity (Mohanty, 2003: 30). Hence, when discussing the idea of
degrowth in the context of the Global South we must not only question
the intermediary step (economic growth) but should rather focus on its
goal, namely development. Already the first international degrowth
conference held in Paris in 2008 regarded post-development a likely
Southern alliance for degrowth scholarship and activism (Gerber and
Raina, 2018: 354).
There are numerous concepts and movements in the Global South,
which embrace post-development agendas and thus share mutual goals
with the degrowth movement. In opposition to a fossil-based economy
that produces for the sake of capitalist accumulation, drives climate
change and accelerates social inequalities at a local and global level,
movements and concepts such as radical ecological democracy in India,
post-extractivism and buen vivir in Latin America, and ubuntu in South
Africa provide ground to act in concert.
Serge Latouche (2009: 56), one of the pioneers of the degrowth
discourse, pushes the argument of degrowth not resetting the global
agenda in a colonial manner even further when arguing that post-de-
velopment thinking is the core intellectual stream that has informed
degrowth in the first place (see also: Muraca, 2013: 150). He empha-
sizes that the idea of degrowth in fact originates in the Global South,
thereby mainly referring to La pauvreté, richesse des peuples written by
Albert Tévoédjrè, a Beninese scholar and politician, in 1978. This
publication portrays a profound socio-ecological transformation and
includes core elements of degrowth such as the call for rethinking the
economy based on “anti-consumption and collective wealth”
(Tévoédjrè, 1979 [1978]: 55), that stops to produce for the sake of
production (ibid.: 83) and builds on a changed value system (ibid.:
54–58). Similarly, Gerber and Raina (2018) identify various Indian
philosophies, such as for example The Regional Balance of Man by
Radhakamal Mukerjee and its early ecological critique of the West's
‘imperial model of living’ (Mukerjee, 1930: 459) as deep conceptual
roots of degrowth thinking.
5. Towards a Feminist Decolonial Degrowth Approach
In the beginning of this article, two quotes by Arturo Escobar and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak were used to illustrate both the desirability
and the difficulty of building bridges between social movements in the
Global South and the Global North. Postcolonial feminist studies teach
us that coalition building is far from easy and more often than not both
top-down and bottom-up coalitions are shaped by patronizing attitudes
and more broadly speaking: Northern domination (Wood, 2005: 98).
We argue that an inherently feminist and decolonial degrowth ap-
proach, which is sensitive to patriarchal gender relations, colonial
continuities and economic structures that enable and (re-)produce these
relations and continuities, can contribute to the endeavor of building
North-South bridges at equal footing. It is the task of this section to
unfold some preliminary ideas of how a feminist decolonial degrowth
approach could proceed.
C. Dengler, L.M. Seebacher
5.1. Care and Commons - A Topic-centered Decolonization of Degrowth
Perspectives?
A first attempt to integrate a feminist decolonial perspective might
focus on specific topics to be picked up. Let us consider the topic of care
work. Both in the Global North and the Global South most of the so-
cially vital work happens on the margins of wage labor and is mainly
carried out by women: raising children, carrying out household chores,
caring for elderly family members. All of these ‘reproductive activities’
are taken as a matter of course rather than proper work, even though
feminist economists have pointed out for a long time that our whole
social system is built on them. With more and more women in the
Global North entering the wage labor market from the 1970s onwards,
the outsourcing of care work to private providers has provoked an
unequal integration of Global South care-givers into global care chains,
which must be regarded as (neo-)colonial continuity (Ehrenreich and
Hochschild, 2004; Kittay, 2014).
While degrowth explicitly acknowledges that the Global North's
imperial mode of living is based on the precondition of externalizing
the bad consequences of its doing so, a specific focus on women's roles
in these externalization processes as cheap and exploited ‘outside’, i.e.
what Rosa Luxemburg (2003 [1913]: 397) calls the “non-capitalist
milieu […] indispensable for accumulation”, is rare. When elaborating
on questions such as How can care be organized in a degrowth society?
(Dengler and Lang, in press), we must be aware that a degrowth
transformation can disrupt gender injustices and colonial continuities.
However, this will most probably not happen automatically or as un-
intended side-effect. Even in progressive projects, which resonate with
degrowth idea(l)s, gendered roles in care-giving remain alarmingly
persistent. Consider, for example, Buurtzorg – a Dutch neighborhood
model of care built on principles of autonomy, time-sovereignty and
trust: By reclaiming care from market logics it mirrors degrowth ten-
dencies and might even be considered as a step towards ‘care as com-
mons’ (Akbulut, 2017) or a ‘commonization of care’ (Dengler and Lang,
in press). Notwithstanding this economic reorganization, in March
2016, 97% of Buurtzorg's 10.000 employees were women. In a socially
just degrowth society, the realm of reproduction must not be feminized,
racialized or devalued. A feminist decolonial degrowth approach is
needed to avoid the unintended reproduction of patriarchal and colo-
nial continuities from the very start.
Albeit topics which directly relate to feminist and postcolonial
studies being important research agendas for a feminist decolonial de-
growth approach, it is of uttermost importance not to limit feminist
decolonial reasoning to mere features of content. Both androcentrism
and colonial continuities are cross-cutting themes that – in one way or
another – impact most of the research we do. Hence, we must develop a
deep awareness and permanent (self-)reflexivity that allow us to em-
brace a feminist decolonial agenda even if no specific focus on women
is exposed and the topic under investigation is located in Global North
contexts. This hints at a more fundamental, so to say meta-theoretical,
foundation of a feminist decolonial degrowth approach, which is ela-
borated in the next section.
5.2. Metatheoretical Foundation of a Feminist Decolonial Degrowth
Approach
Metatheoretical assumptions are rarely made explicit. In order to
link different lines of reasoning, we feel the need to pinpoint underlying
elements of their alignment at the level of what exists (ontology), what
can be known (epistemology), and how research is to be done (meth-
odology).
A decolonial feminist degrowth approach must strive for integrative
and relational ontologies of societal embeddedness in nature. While
decidedly acknowledging the ontological status of a natural world that
is shaped by natural phenomena such as the Entropy Law (Georgescu-
Roegen, 1971) and planetary boundaries, a feminist decolonial
250
Ecological Economics 157 (2019) 246–252
degrowth approach is – on epistemological grounds – sensitive to
context-specific historical processes and social power differentials. It
comprehends social reality as constructed, knowledge about social
reality as intrinsically value-laden and shaped by socio-cultural pre-
suppositions. Thus, while agreeing with Arturo Escobar (2015: 460)
that “[e]nvironmental conflicts are often ontological struggles”, a
feminist decolonial degrowth approach must be critically aware of
putatively ‘natural’ (in fact: socially constructed, but embodied) social
categories that shape capitalist society-nature relationships. The current
mode of placing humans above nature by deploying the famous nature/
culture divide was a by-product of colonialism that lies at the core of
exploitative society-nature relationships and reproduces gender in-
equalities (Lugones, 2010: 743; Ribeiro and Wrenfelt, 1995: 169).
Feminist standpoint theory and postcolonial theories teach us to be
alert whenever it comes to the use of dichotomies, since social worlds
are not organized in the form of unambiguous bipolar opposites and
linearities (Du Bois, 1983: 110f). Accordingly, in a feminist decolonial
degrowth approach we need to de-ontologize predominant dichoto-
mies, such as men/women, culture/nature, Global North/Global South,
fact/value and science/activism.
On epistemological grounds, a feminist decolonial degrowth ap-
proach has to challenge institutionalized epistemic frontiers. We should
be critically aware that the very institution of academia is socially se-
lective and hence an entry point of marginalization. As Rene Suša
(2016: 198) points out, the colonial continuity stems from Global North
based structures which were violently universalized throughout Wes-
tern colonialism. Chandra Talpada Mohanty (2003) warns us that also
liberal feminist reasoning falls more often than not prey to the “global
hegemony of Western scholarship” (ibid.: 23), thereby reproducing
neocolonial continuities such as the reproduction of the ‘Third World
Women’ as voice- and powerless victim to external circumstances. A
postcolonial reading of feminist standpoint theory requires to break
with these generalizations and to scrutinize the social and historical
situatedness of dominant discourses (Anderson, 2002: 9; Gödl, 2016:
185). For example, the ‘asymmetric possibility to ignore’ research from
the Global South in the Global North is a condition which does not hold
vice versa, and thus must be regarded a colonial continuity (Castro
Varela and Dhawan, 2009: 14f). An epistemological decolonization
goes hand in hand with unlearning dominant epistemologies – so to say:
the way we were taught to do science. Hence, when deploying a fem-
inist decolonial degrowth approach, it is of the uttermost importance
not to reproduce the marginalization of (not only dominant, but also
subaltern, e.g. indigenous) Southern voices in Northern discourses,
thereby (re-)producing what Spivak (1988: 280f) calls ‘epistemic vio-
lence’. Rather, we should visibilize existing knowledge and strive for
what Catherine Walsh (2012) calls ‘epistemic interculturality’. This
requires an ongoing “articulation of knowledges that takes the inter-
cultural co-construction of diverse epistemologies” (ibid.: 17) into ac-
count and links well to the ongoing discussions on ‘the pluriverse’ in the
degrowth discourse.
At a methodological level, in order to allow for epistemic inter-
culturality, we have to favor methodologies that disrupt the fact/value,
theory/practice and science/activism dichotomies. In line with thesis IV
of this special issue, EJ movements of the South can be formative in
their orientation at concrete action and collaboration with directly af-
fected groups (Gabriel and Bond, this issue). Again, an intersectional
power-sensitive perspective is required to decidedly not pre-impose
ready-made solutions on different contexts, but rather to include the
communities concerned in a participatory manner at equal footing
(Seebacher, 2016: 29). In line with this, a feminist decolonial degrowth
approach should take into account non-academic platforms of collective
knowledge and, more generally, opt for a de-professionalization and re-
politicization of topics that ultimately affect all of us (Velicu, this issue).
By embracing non-academic platforms of collective knowledge and
first-hand experiences of the manifest struggles of EJ movements
around the world, the gap between academia and activism can be
C. Dengler, L.M. Seebacher
partially bridged (Acosta, 2013: 81; Escobar, 2015: 457; Walsh, 2012:
21).8
5.3. Building Bridges - On Decolonial and Feminist Grounds
What implications do arise for the way we build alliances from what
has been said? We have argued that a critical and proactive reflection of
our social position and privilege as researchers is a prerequisite for
building North-South bridges at equal footing. Surely, reflecting on our
own partiality and situatedness does not prevent us from falling into
(neo)colonial traps that seem inevitable when aiming at preserving the
capacity to act in concert (Dhawan, 2013: 161). We agree with Andrew
Sayer (2009: 768) that an increasing timidity to make normative claims
also bears the danger that critical social science is downsized “to little
more than skepticism coupled with a concern to be reflexive”. More-
over, and we are quoting this from a talk given by Nikita Dhawan, every
researcher faces this epistemological contradiction, because all of us –
scholars from the Global North and the Global South – have ‘content-
contaminated agency’. Along these lines, we argue that although we
must acknowledge the permanent and insurmountable contradictions of
representation, degrowth activism and scholarship must not concede
defeat but needs to – in a very self-reflexive mode that does not curtail
our agency against systemic injustices – take up the challenge of
building these bridges.
The facilitation of these interlinkages needs to happen on the
ground of the outlined considerations of both deontological and con-
sequential inter- and intragenerational justice. On consequential
grounds, degrowth aspires a socially just and environmentally sound
‘good life for all’. We argue that on deontological grounds, degrowth
activism and scholarship should be more explicit in framing feminism,
decoloniality and anti-capitalism as its guiding principles. With regard
to decoloniality, degrowth needs to become more concrete when it
comes to what the aspired ‘decolonization of the social imaginary’ ac-
tually means. It can reverse colonial logics by decidedly acknowledging
that there is much to learn from the Global South, for example with
regard to (more) sustainable livelihoods and a community organization
of care. However, neither indigenous societies, nor EJ movements from
the Global South are egalitarian or immune to androcentrism per de-
finition, which is why they must not be blindly romanticized (Perkins,
this issue; Vega Ugalde, 2015: 93). In its critique of development,
postcolonial feminisms can (and should!) be important ‘fellow travelers’
of degrowth (Escobar, 2015; Löw, 2015). Opposition to Eurocentrism
and neoliberal hegemonies, their insights on exploitative gendered di-
visions of labor used by transnational capital relations and their focus
on specific fights against globalization at a local level, render post-
colonial feminist theories a crucially important ally for degrowth's as-
pired transformations (ibid.; Mohanty, 2003). Moreover, openly anti-
capitalist EJ struggles in the Global South can be role models for a
feminist decolonial degrowth approach (Rodriguez-Labajos, this issue).
Hence, we argue that instead of focusing on the specific wording,
shared values and deontological foundations can act as important
building stone of common action against the colonial continuity of the
growth-progress-development triad that reproduces inter- and in-
tragenerational injustices at multiple levels in the Global South and the
Global North alike.
6. Conclusion
In this article we have posed the question: How does degrowth need
to be pursued to promote intragenerational socio-ecological justice
8 Akbulut, B., Demaria, F., Gerber, J.-F., Martínez-Alier, J., 2018. Five Theses on the
It exceeds the scope of this paper to go deeper into methodological con-
siderations. The book Decolonizing Methodologies – Research and Indigenous
Peoples edited by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2013) is recommended for a compre-
hensive account of this matter.
251
Ecological Economics 157 (2019) 246–252
without falling into the trap of reproducing (neo-)colonial continuities?
Albeit there is not (and cannot be) an ultimate answer to this question,
we have argued that an integral consideration of feminist and post-
colonial lines of thought can greatly contribute to making degrowth
(more) decolonial. Our endeavor to sketch out a feminist decolonial
degrowth approach has taken its starting point in two criticisms raised
against the degrowth discourse. The first one accuses degrowth of not
taking into account the potentially negative short-term consequences of
a degrowth transformation in the Global North on the Global South.
While the specific example deployed (the 1993 US Child Labor Boycott)
was argued being a weak analogy, the underlying criticism is valid in its
core. Degrowth scholars need to include this global dimension in their
perspectives to a greater extent. The second criticism problematizes
degrowth as concept proposed by the Global North being imposed on
the Global South. We embrace degrowth as Northern supplement to
existing Southern concepts (e.g. buen vivir, ubuntu, radical ecological
democracy), transformative movements (e.g. environmental justice
movements, transition movements) and lines of thought (e.g. post-de-
velopment, postcolonial feminisms).
We have argued that a feminist decolonial degrowth approach needs
to go beyond specific research agendas (e.g. the question of who cares
in a degrowth society) and elaborate on an inherently feminist and
decolonial metatheoretical foundation. Such a framework exhibits in-
tegrative and relational ontologies of societal embeddedness in nature
and de-ontologizes false dichotomies. On epistemological grounds, it is
sensitive to context specificities and decidedly acknowledges its own
partiality and situatedness. It tries to counteract the arising blind spots
by striving for ‘epistemic interculturality’ on a methodological level.
A feminist decolonial degrowth approach, which is sensitive to pa-
triarchal gender relations, colonial continuities and economic structures
that enable and (re-)produce these relations, can contribute to the en-
deavor of building North-South bridges at equal footing. Despite the
persisting and undeniably important differences between degrowth
movements and EJ movements and more generally movements of the
South and movements of the North, we are still facing the same op-
ponent, namely a fossil-based economy that produces for the sake of the
capitalist regime, increases inequalities at both a local and global scale
and drives climate change. To pick up on our earlier metaphor bor-
rowed from Nikita Dhawan, we are sitting in different boats, these boats
are hit by different waves, but on the basis of our shared resistance, we
might be able to fight the common storm that all of us are quite literally
facing.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Lara Betlehem, Svenja Dirschbacher, Henrik
Feindt, Ann-Christin Kleinert, Ulrike Knobloch, Emanuele Leonardi,
Nina Schneider and Hildegard Theobald, as well as the guest editors of
this special issue, and our internal and (anonymous) external reviewers,
for providing us with valuable feedback and support.
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