The Midwife of Change: Degrowth, Green Growth, and the COVID recovery

The COVID-19 pandemic, which started to spread around December 2019, has been one of the most significant and disruptive events of recent human history (GOV, 2020). The spread of the virus globally has had profound impacts on the functioning of global systems, societies and the normal habits of humanity, with attempts to slow the spread resulting in global policies which limited human interaction, travel and the functioning of economic mechanisms. While being a global health crisis, the pandemic has exhibited far more than this and has served to provide insights into the social, economic and environmental state of the planet. Due to its disruptions to the traditional hegemonic systems of the world, it has been able to provide both the discursive space and experimental policy platform through which alternative socio-economic theories have been able to gain ground. Such alternative theories to the status quo have been presented as solutions and conducive to fostering a paradigm which will placate the growing climate crisis and planetary degradation, which is one of the underlying lenses of crisis that is referred to in this paper.

The theories in question differ fundamentally in their approach to the climate crisis, with degrowth scholars approaching the issue as a systemic one which must tackle social, economic, and democratic issues in order to produce transformative change of excessive consumption and production habits which are the driving force of climate change, in their opinion. Importantly, degrowth views the forces of the status quo as being problematic, namely neoliberalism and globalisation which facilitate the environment for dangerous and unlimited levels of economic growth at the expense of the environment. The problem lies, for this movement, in the culture of growthism which they suggest is incompatible with a healthy planet. Contrastingly, green growth offers a technocratic solution to the climate crisis by offering investment in green technology and jobs to produce a continually growing economy that is decoupled from producing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this capacity, future growth is a solution to the climate crisis, not the cause.

What progress is made will indicate how likely lessons are to be learned from 2008, how resilient existing systems are to shock and likelihood to rebound, what policies are really possible, and how open society is to systemic change. This research is significant in that it brings together multiple lenses of crisis to analyse how the socio-economic alternatives achieve progress in the wake of a global health crisis. The pandemic acts as a microcosmic version of the development of climate change, showing us which sort of changes are possible, how willing people are to change, and how strong the status quo is, which in turn illuminates the progress made and space available for alternative solutions to climate change.

Author: Harry Bradley

Publisher: Independently Published

Publication Date: Feb 02, 2023

Number of Pages: 48 pages

Binding: Paperback or Softback

ISBN-10: NA

ISBN-13: 9798375877877