The Global South in the Global North

Odette Brady: I read an article recently where the author – a defender of economic growth – said that adopting a degrowth model would mean “abandoning 800 million people to extreme poverty”. Of course, this is plainly incorrect. He had to be talking about people who live mostly in the global south, and within the degrowth movement it’s understood that a degrowth future doesn’t mean abandoning growth in countries where there is still extreme poverty. Do you agree?

Vlad Bunea: Yes, I agree. This is why I go back to definitions. I understand degrowth as ‘an expansion of social agency and wellbeing for all humans, within the limits of Earth, through a selective reduction of production and consumption to lighten ecological footprint, planned democratically in the spirit of social justice’. Selective is a key word. There is much more degrowth needed in the Global North than in the Global South. For example, fossil fuels would have to be phased out everywhere, but energy consumption overall would need to increase on average in the Global South, and decrease in the Global North.

OB: Do you think that people who identify with the degrowth movement understand this? That the actions needed in the north and south are not the same? Outside the movement it seems poorly understood.

VB: People who have read at least one book on degrowth are likely to understand the distinction. The general public, however, may still confuse degrowth with austerity, poverty, Luddites, or a full return to an analog era. We can use softer words, such as sufficiency or wellbeing to describe the attribues of a post-capitalist economy, but if we don’t aim high and degrow our current system, it won’t end well for life on Earth. Do you think degrowth is on the right track with its “marketing”?

OB: I think one of the best qualitites of degrowth is that it’s not prescriptive. The ways of degrowing are wide and varied and there is no single great revolution where an angry mob storm the buildings of justice with their own flags. It’s a huge strengththat there is no need for people to buy into an entire ideology at that cost of their other beliefs for it to happen.

But that nebulous quality comes with frustrations too - and one of those is the difficulty of “marketing”.

Within the movement, I get the impression that there are folks who want degrowth to be about a very specific agenda, and one of those agendas is the Global South vs. Global North divide. Of course, when you understand climate justice and the conditions of people who are at the hot, sharp face of capitalism and climate breakdown, the urgency is brutal. But look at the world we live in. Injustice is everywhere and so far, it hasn’t moved enough people in the global north to act.

VB: The average person in the GN could not care less about the GS because of proximity bias: our attention is limited to our immediate cultural and social surroudings. However, when supply chains between GS and GN start to break, the average citizen in the GN may start to really care about GS. When Ibrahim Traoré, the President of Burkina Faso, ended military ties with former colonizer France, he sent a signal that the South holds the power of their own emancipation. I wish to see the chains of exploitation and neocolonialism break at their source. Degrowth is an emancipatory agenda for both the South and the North.

OB: I totally agree about proximity bias. Over centuries, the number of people on the radar of an average citizen anywhere has gone from the people in the immediate vicinity of a town or settlement (low hundreds maximum) to now, after decades of globalisation, the entire world. Our fates are all intertwined and regular people are aware – or have access to information – of the conditions of billiions of people. And their own (our own!) decisions affect those fates. It’s changed quickly, and I wonder if our brains are wired to cope.

It sounds like your opinion of the people in the Global North is quite low, as if they should know better. Would you say that’s true?

VB: I am only painfully aware of the wide canvas of cognitive biases. There are evolutionary explainations for why our brains use these mental shortcuts to carve out reality. These biases often put us in mental darkness, make us ignore billions of other humans, make us gullible and irrational. At the same time, humans hold the key to their own emancipation. There is a South within the North (the poor working class), but there is also a North within the South (the rich elites). Biases are everywhere. We overcome them with truth and science. Do you have hope we can do it?

OB: I don’t know about that. I don’t know whether science holds a key to making people firstly aware, and secondly sufficiently bothered that their own actions are contributing to the ill-fates of others. It’s a nice idea but data alone can’t do the work. It will also take diplomacy, education and having sense of security to put people in a position to engage with this reality.

My bigger concern is that, in this state of emergency, is knowing about the fates of those in poverty – in the north yes, but mostly in the south where climate destruction is dismantling both the physical and the political – enough to force action by those that need to take it?

VB: Simply just knowing, may not be enough for eveyone. If knowing does not translate into empathy, or at least some emotional resonance, it remains just pieces of information.

OB: We should remember that for many people who are technically in the global ‘rich’ cohort, life doesn’t feel easy, it feels like a treadmill. There is still deep insecurity and preacrity, even if by comparison lives are more luxurious. Images and stories of people suffering become ‘too much’ and people switch off entirely. It takes a very specific type of mindset to admit to any kind of culpability and then act. Guilt is a terrible motivator. Look at our own exploration of the MeToo movement. When men were called out, lots of them nuzzled further into the manosphere, not in the direction of change.

How do you envision a science and truth-led solution?

VB: I think science is a requirement for a cultural awakening. However, science cannot lead. Science, at best, informs. What can happen, could happen, and perhaps should happen, is to use what science provides and spotlight the many vices of the elites that they pass off to us as virtues: wealth accumulaiton, luxury consumption for status, hollow fame, delusions of meritocracy etc. When we expose elite virutes for what they really are, vices of a decadent capitalist age, we might trigger the proper emotional and cultural response that might just topple the status quo. The opposite may also be valid: convert some alleged vices into virtues. Take idleness, for example. Some of it, may actually be good for us.

Photo by Max Böhme