Navigating the politics of Degrowth policy activism

In the current political climate, it’s tempting to be a nay-saying degrowth activist. Indeed, political energy increasingly organizes around resentment and refusal. Perhaps wealth consolidation and the outsized political influence it gives to the wealthiest individuals have exacerbated feelings of alienation, rootlessness, and estrangement. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, mass protests increased by an annual average of 11.5 percent from 2009 to 2019, globally. Data from the 2020 Global Peace Index shows that civil unrest has doubled over the last decade. The number of protests and riots roughly doubled between 2011 and 2018, while the number of strikes quadrupled. While resentment might have become the emotional currency of activism, it is less a response to ideology than a reflection on a deeper disaffection with the modern institutions which once promised stability and progress.

Amidst this civil unrest sits the U.S. degrowth movement.

The Blue Hue of Degrowth

From July 26 to July 29, the Chicago-based Degrowth Institute (DGI) hosted DeSchool 2025, an in-person gathering of around 100 activists, academics, and advocates. Co-founder John Mulrow’s stated goal for the conference was to connect and strengthen the U.S. degrowth movement. While DGI encourages an evolving definition, they tentatively define degrowth as “an intentional downscaling of the global economy for the purpose of achieving ecological sustainability and social justice.”

Downscaling. Sustainability. Social Justice.

These words are provocative. Indeed, they suit their intended purpose: to effectively create tensions in public discourse. Social justice, for example, has become a popular mantra of the activist arm of the postcolonial academic discipline. The phrase channels deep moral emotion directed towards individuals and institutions with considerable control over means of oppression. It arouses resentment towards structures passed down from the period of European imperialism.

In this vein, the exploitation of raw materials from the Global South was a common theme at DeSchool 2025. It was introduced by keynote speaker Emilia Reyes, who presented on “the responsibility of the North in the North in tackling the largest challenges of our times.” Following the presentation, resource extraction from the Global South became a common talking point at the conference. This issue was leveraged against arguments for steady-state models that neglect material sourcing, and focus solely on output measurements.

And yet, the U.S. degrowth movement promises more than “down with the man” narratives. It might offer fertile ground reminiscent of pre-bifurcated environmental activism, reuniting the political right with pro-environmental policy. DGI’s intentional downscaling, for instance, resonates with anti-globalization sentiments, including concern over corporate-led Western cultural imperialism and its potential eradication of local traditions and languages. Downscaling, when coupled with sustainability, is in the proximity of permaculture, homesteading, and other lifestyles romanticized in right-leaning “trad” culture. If the U.S. degrowth movement can pull from a robust value set, appealing to the moral intuition behind both left- and right-leaning narratives, it might deliver on its promise of political efficacy. To do so, it might be advantageous to couple downscaling, sustainability, and social justice with values often characteristic of the right moral intuition, including individual agency, autonomy, self-reliance, and a reverence for the production of relational goods. Such a strategy might not only lessen the risk of alienating their ideological near-dwellers on the right, but might also establish a tone which avoids demonizing them.

The Purple Hue of Effective Green Policy Activism

Writing policy is one thing. Advocacy is another. Yet another is advocacy strategy. Indeed, degrowth policy advocates would be negligent to ignore the politics of policy-making. Poor navigation of the political climate could be fatal for a piece of degrowth policy. However, if degrowth activists can leverage affirmative messaging, they might do more than navigate a polarized political climate. They might leverage their policy to nurture bipartisanship.

Before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and before climate change activists began employing impassioned, morally-driven rhetoric, E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful called for a spiritual renewal which might appeal to those who have been alienated by nay-saying activism. Indeed, its program for addressing ecological degradation has, to this day, resisted appropriation by political advocates of giantism on both sides of the aisle. Today, Schumacher’s appeals are kin not only to degrowth, but also to labor reform and civic nationalism. The British economist was channeling Western metaphysics when he announced a “becoming existence.”

For Schumacher, a small, beautiful economy is characterized by work that “gives a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties” and “enables man to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task.” Schumacher was not thinking of “common tasks” simply as common exercises: picking apples from the same tree or turning the same screws on the assembly line. Rather, we might imagine a common task as that which contributes to the joint economy of the community.

Schumacher acknowledged that for such a communal existence, “there is need for a ‘cultural structure’ just as there is need for an ‘economic structure.’” “Each region, ideally speaking, requires some sort of inner cohesion,” with a capital city serving as a center. His program for regionalization was equally a bio-regionalization. The metropolitan center would not serve the international identity, but would instead be a canvas for the cultural-economic bioregion.

In our current political climate, activism which neglects urban or rural demographics might obstruct the progress of degrowth policy. Indeed, when environmental policy is leveraged for political positioning between “red states” and “blue states,” degrowth policy might provide an alternative legislative vehicle. It might offer a reimagining of the U.S. map and its state jurisdictions as an ecology-based project network, grounded in environmental stewardship. To do so, degrowth policy might leverage existing state and federal infrastructure. Indeed, the federal government is already operating environmental projects defined by watersheds. The United States Army Corps of Engineers owns and operates 75 hydroelectric plants—24 percent of U.S. hydropower capacity. The Corps also restores approximately 38,700 acres of wetlands annually and is the nation’s principal provider of outdoor recreation.

Degrowth activists who channel the yay-saying spirit of the Army Corps’ civil engineering projects might speak to those who value the preservation of our national heritage. Indeed, coupling degrowth with national service also resonates Pete Butigeig’s call for National Service during his 2020 presidential campaign and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Federal Arts Program, the aesthetics of which celebrated labor, regionalism, ecology, and a sense of nation. Such activism might reach those who revere the production of relational goods, including trust, respect, authority, and a sense of mutual thriving and flourishing. I have seen a spirit for environmentalism among the right. However, I also assume it will continue to find its own unique expression in a polarized political climate, or we can leverage degrowth to nurture conversations and build effective bipartisan policy.

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Photo: Klara Kulikova on Unsplash

— Justin Carmien, degrowth activist and author of How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity —

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