The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism: A Feminist Degrowth for Unsettling Transition
Publisher: Pluto Press
Author(s): Bengi Akbulut
Date: 2024
Topics: Cooperation, Economic Recovery, Gender
Transition is indeed the buzzword of our time. While far from being uncontested, the term has also increasingly and visibly been appropriated by corporations, nation-states and international organizations of the status quo. Transition is now being invoked in ways that risk perpetuating global environmental injustices and neocolonial dynamics of resource appropriation, and open novel fields of capital accumulation while shifting the socio-ecological burden of transition to the Global South (and/or the South within the North). The danger that lies with such uses and circulation of the term, however, is not limited to the practices justified by the vaguer and tamer message it carries. The hegemonic buzzing of transition, so to speak, also crowds out historical and contemporary worldviews, struggles and proposals that emerged, flourished and have been practised, both in the Global South and North. One such proposal is degrowth. ‘The global equilibrium’, wrote André Gorz in 1972, ‘for which no-growth – or even degrowth – of material production is a necessary condition, is it compatible with the survival of the (capitalist) system?’1 Since this first use of the term, ‘degrowth’ – or in its French original décroissance – has become a forceful conceptual framework and a political mobiliser for imagining and enacting alternative ways of articulating society, economy and Nature. The notion has since entered academic literature, vocabularies of social move- ments and public debate (even in the European Parliament). The academic literature on degrowth, in particular, has reached an impressive volume and scope, ranging from issues of infrastructural adjustment and reorganisation of work to the design of monetary systems and a new architecture of public finance. This chapter situates degrowth as a counterhegemonic proposal that unsettles and goes beyond dominant understandings of transition. Emphasising an understanding of degrowth as one of recentring and reorienting the economy (rather than merely a matter of biophysical downscaling), the chapter delineates three axes that are fundamental for this potential: (a) foregrounding a broader conception of what constitutes work; (b) justice, in particular regarding historical and ongoing injustices between the Global North and South; and (c) autonomy and democracy as organising principles of a degrowth economy.