Jennifer Wilkins: making the case for degrowth

Of Interest

With economic growth no longer producing benefits seen in the past such as raising living standards for the middle class, and human activity having exceeded some planetary boundaries, it's time to embrace degrowth, argues Jennifer Wilkins.

Wilkins is a researcher and advocate on sustainability in business with a focus on degrowth. In a new episode of interest.co.nz's Of Interest podcast, she discusses the degrowth movement.

"Degrowth is normally described or defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption. Other people add in other parts of that definition, which is about reorganising the market for a new role in provisioning. So I think about degrowth as being a transition. Starting from the economy that we have now, which is very much about trickle down wealth and extracting from nature, to a future economy which is more about universal wellbeing in an economy within ecology and nature. And degrowth is really the transition from one to the other," Wilkins says.

"So I don't think about it as being a very rapid change or a very smooth change. I think about it as being a hybrid of emergence and receding ideas, quite a lot of tension and a lot of mutation in the economy. So it's quite a complex thing, degrowth."

She traces degrowth's origins to the 1970s, and Romanian mathematician, statistician, economist and author of The Entropy Law, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, "the father of ecological economics."

The push for net zero greenhouse gas emissions is needed but not enough, Wilkins says. With a degrowth economy requiring more of a collective than individual approach, Wilkins says "the jury's out on the role of capitalism." And does advocating for a reduction in production and consumption mean people would be expected to accept a lower standard of living?

"I think degrowth is definitely looking to raise standards of living for the majority of people around the world. I think standards of living are actually decreasing at the moment. I think around the world, middle class lifestyles are decreasing in quality. And so there's this myth, if you like, that raising growth improves wellbeing. But the evidence shows that there's actually a bliss point. Economic growth improves wellbeing up to a certain GDP per capita, and beyond that, it either doesn't make a difference and/or eventually it begins to reduce wellbeing," says Wilkins.

"The bliss point is actually quite a lot lower than New Zealand's GDP per capita. So we have theoretically enough wealth already. We just need to redistribute it. I think people who are very well off will not see a reduction in their wellbeing or their living standards through a redistribution, but I think people who are less well off will see a great improvement in their wellbeing through a redistribution."

Wilkins believes degrowth will become public policy, saying politicians who want to run on a degrowth platform have lots of positive things they can say.

"It's about redefining what we see as value. I mean, at the moment we think about wealth as value and prosperity, but prosperity is really about things like having more leisure time, having a healthier natural environment around us, having more community health and more community cohesion, having more access to services and assets, and having an increase in our democratic participation. And those are all things that degrowth wishes to grow," Wilkins says.

"I think it [degrowth] will become public policy. I think parties will run on it as a platform. It's hard to say when that would happen, but I think in the not too distant future. And I think the thing is that growth as an idea is so embedded as a common sense that it never has to explain itself. And so there's a bit of an unfair playing field in terms of degrowth will have to explain itself to become credible. Whereas growth gets a free pass."

"Growth is not producing the effects that we have experienced in the past, like the raising the living standards of the middle class. That ship has sailed. We're in a different world now. There isn't room for growth to create those kinds of benefits anymore. We need to create benefits in a different way. So growth will fail to evidence itself as a wellbeing, a process for wellbeing in future. And there'll be a confluence of factors. There'll be, you know, this failure of neoliberalism, which I think we're already experiencing," says Wilkins.

There's more from Wilkins in the podcast itself, including what degrowth would mean for individuals, businesses and communities, and what it would mean for agriculture, manufacturing and tourism.

*You can find all episodes of the Of Interest podcast here.