Can we live within environmental limits and still reduce poverty? Degrowth or decoupling?

A debate curated by Simon Maxwell Economic growth has resulted in a twin crisis of climate change and environmental breakdown, while millions still live in poverty, a third crisis. Is it possible to resolve all three, or are there trade-offs? Can the crises be tackled by environmental and social policies within the logic of the existing economic system, or is a new paradigm required that rejects GDP growth as an objective? This debate brings together two discussants in three rounds of conversation, to propose, test, and challenge each other’s ideas. The protagonists are: Jason Hickel is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science Steffen et al., 2015), while risks of tipping points and feedback loops are of increasing concern (Lenton et al., 2019; Steffen et al., 2018). Contrary to what is implied by the general narrative of the Anthropocene, the crisis is not being caused by human beings as such, but rather by an economic system that is organized around, and dependent on, ever-increasing levels of commodity production and consumption, which we gloss as “growth.” The relationship between economic growth and ecological breakdown is well established in the empirical record. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth is tightly coupled to resource use (Wiedmann, 2015; see also Figure 1), which is in turn tightly coupled to ecological damage and biodiversity loss (Steinmann et al., 2017). Global economic growth has caused resource use to rise dramatically over the past half century, reaching 100 billion metric tons per year as of 2020—roughly double what industrial ecologists consider to be the maximum sustainable boundary level (Bringezu, 2015). This has happened despite strong improvements in material efficiency and a dramatic shift toward services over the past several decades. Source: World Bank and United Nations International Resource Panel (UN IRP) (n.d.) Crucially, this overshoot is being driven almost entirely by high-income countries. High-income countries consume on average 28 metric tons of resources per person per year (Figure 2); four times the sustainable per capita level and, as we will see below, significantly in excess of what is required for human well-being. The vast majority of low- and middle-income countries, by contrast, remain well within sustainable levels. Moreover, the excesses of rich countries are maintained by a large net appropriation of resources from the Global South (Dorninger et al., 2021). This means that the ecological impact of consumption in the core is in large part offshored to the periphery. The same is true when it comes to emissions: the Global North is responsible for 92% of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (Hickel, 2020b), while the impacts of climate change disproportionately affect the Global South. If we are not attentive to the colonial dimensions of the ecological crisis, we are missing the point. Material Footprint of Nations (tons per capita) Notes: The horizontal black line indicates the sustainable per capita threshold in 2008 (Bringezu, 2015) Source: UN IRP (n.d.) In light of this data, the dominant response by economists and policy-makers has been to say we should continue to press on the accelerator of growth but seek to make it “green.” Unfortunately, this narrative has little empirical grounding. permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible … because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits … It is therefore misleading to develop growth-oriented policy around the expectation that decoupling is possible. What about emissions? Unlike with resource use, absolute decoupling of GDP from emissions can be achieved by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, and this is already happening in some countries. But it is unlikely that decarbonization can be accomplished fast enough to stay under 1.5 °C or 2 °C if high-income economies continue to grow at usual rates. The problem is that more growth means more energy demand, and rising energy demand will make it more challenging to decarbonize the economy in the short time we have left (Hickel Schröder direct air capture, for its part, would require up to 70% of today’s total global energy output (Realmonte et al., 2019). But the main problem is that if negative emissions schemes fail, we will be locked into a hothouse trajectory from which it would be impossible to escape (Fuss et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2016; van Vuuren et al., 2017). As for energy decoupling, the rates assumed in high-productivity scenarios are not supported by the empirical literature (Haberl et al., 2020), and existing scholarship indicates they are unlikely to be achieved in a growth-oriented economy, even under optimistic assumptions (Brockway et al., 2021; Ward et al., 2016). In short, the data we have is clear that growth makes it significantly more difficult for us to achieve our ecological objectives. In light of this evidence, ecological economists call for a fundamentally different approach. High-income nations do not need further growth, and indeed should abandon growthism and reorganize the economy instead around provisioning for human needs and well-being, reducing inequality and guaranteeing universal access to public goods and services. Post-growth policies make it possible to achieve strong social outcomes without growth (Jackson, 2017), and would liberate societies to scale down unnecessary forms of production and consumption, as proposed by degrowth scholarship (Demaria et al., 2013; Kallis et al., 2018). Degrowth is a planned reduction of aggregate resource and energy use in high-income nations designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way. This approach is powerful when it comes to climate mitigation, because the less energy we use the easier it is to transition to renewables (e.g., Keyßer Kuhnhenn et al., 2020), and it has the added benefit of reducing damages associated with resource use. What does this look like in practice? Instead of assuming that all sectors of the economy should grow, all the time, we should decide what sectors we need to scale up (sectors with clear social and ecological value, like renewable energy, public services, public transportation, etc.), and what industries are ecologically destructive and socially less necessary, and therefore need to shrink: fossil fuels, sport utility vehicles (SUVs), fast fashion, advertising, planned obsolescence, McMansions,22 Large houses built for upper middle classes in the suburbs and exurbs of US cities (McMansion, 2021). industrial beef, personal vehicles, private jets, food waste, cruise ships, the military–industrial complex, etc. Most people would regard this as sensible, except for one sticking point: what about the impact on employment? Post-growth and degrowth scholarship demonstrates that full employment can be maintained by shortening the working week. As our economy requires less labour, we can distribute necessary work more evenly, while enjoying more free time for care and conviviality. To ensure that all have access to good livelihoods, we can distribute national income more fairly, with living wages and progressive taxation. A more egalitarian distribution of income and wealth would allow us to improve people’s lives without having to plunder the planet for more. Of course, scaling down unnecessary commodity production is likely to lead to a reduction in aggregate GDP. This might sound troubling, because people commonly assume that GDP growth is required for social progress. But after a certain threshold, which high-income nations have long surpassed, the correlation between GDP and social indicators breaks down. For instance, Spain significantly outperforms the United States in social indicators (including a life expectancy that is five years longer), despite having 55% less GDP per capita. Portugal outperforms the US with 65% less. There are dozens of similar examples (Hickel, 2020a). GDP is not a proxy for human well-being, or social value, and was never intended to be (e.g., Stiglitz et al., 2010); rather, it is a measure of the total market price of commodity production. Unsurprisingly, there is no causal relationship between aggregate commodity production and social outcomes. What actually matters for human well-being is people’s access to the resources they need to live long, healthy lives: universal healthcare and education, affordable housing, public transport, nutritious food, and so on. Societies that focus on these things are able to achieve high levels of human well-being with modest GDP. Here is the good news: recent research demonstrates empirically that we could deliver good lives for all, including high-quality universal public healthcare, education, transport, etc. with 80% less energy and resources than high-income countries presently use (Lettenmeier et al., 2014; Millward-Hopkins et al., 2020). In other words, if we organize our economies around livelihoods and provisioning for human needs, rather than around elite consumption and capital accumulation, we would be able to bring resource use back within planetary boundaries and achieve a rapid transition to renewables, fast enough to stay under 1.5 °C. Degrowth scholarship poses a challenge to prevailing narratives of international development. According to the dominant discourse, poor countries are regarded as the “problem,” while rich countries are held up as models. This story is problematic for several reasons. First, the level of resource and energy use that characterizes rich nations is not universalizable. If tomorrow the whole world consumed at this level, global resource and energy use would triple. This is not compatible with a habitable planet. Today’s rich nations do not constitute a model for development; on the contrary, they are the problem. Excess throughput in rich nations actively harms developing countries. Climate change alone is already driving food insecurity, conflict, and mass displacement in several regions, including Central America, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Human development is impossible in a collapsing biosphere. But there is another dimension to this problem. I mentioned above that growth in the Global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources from the South. The figures are staggering: 10.1 billion metric tons of embodied raw materials, 800 million hectares of embodied land, energy equivalent to 3.7 billion barrels of oil, and 379 billion hours of embodied human labour—per year (Dorninger et al., 2021). Rich countries leverage their economic and geopolitical power to appropriate vast quantities of resources and labour from the Global South to service consumerism and elite accumulation: resources that could otherwise be mobilized around meeting local human needs (Hickel, Sullivan et al., 2021). The demand for degrowth in the Global North is about more than just ecology, then. It is rooted in anti-colonial principles. Degrowth scholars align with social movements calling for an end to the imperial patterns of appropriation that underpin growth in the Global North, in order to release the Global South from the grip of extractivism and a future of climate breakdown. Degrowth is, in other words, a demand for decolonization (Hickel, 2021). Global South countries should be free to organize their resources and labour around meeting human needs rather than around servicing growth in the Global North. Dependency theorists have long pointed out that “catch-up” development is impossible within a system predicated on polarized accumulation, where growth in the core depends on exploitation in the periphery. This claim is underscored by the data on ecological breakdown and resource imperialism. The alternative is to call for a trajectory of radical convergence: throughput should decline in the Global North to get back within planetary boundaries, while it should increase in the Global South to meet human needs, converging at a level that is consistent with ecological stability and universal human welfare. This is the only tenable approach to development in the 21st century (Ajl, 2021). This requires a significant shift in development strategy. Over the past four decades, economic policy in the Global South has been organized around extraction, exports, and the interests of foreign financiers, while structural adjustment programmes imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have deregulated markets, depressed wages, and cut social spending. This approach has failed to deliver meaningful development (Hickel, 2018). Instead, the goal should be to focus on improving social outcomes directly: better healthcare, education, livelihoods, food, transportation, etc. This requires building sovereign economic capacity focused on provisioning domestic needs, which in turn requires having the freedom to use protective tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, nationalization, social spending, and progressive fiscal and monetary policy. This approach to development has a long history in the Global South. It was championed by anti-colonial leaders including Franz Fanon, Gandhi, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende, Julius Nyerere, Thomas Sankara, and dozens of others who sought economic sovereignty and global justice, before their vision was dismantled by the Washington Consensus. Theirs are the insights that should guide development in the 21st century. Not so long ago in Europe, many children worked in factories. Their lives were harsh: they worked in often terrible conditions, could not go to school, and often ended up physically broken before reaching adulthood. When pressure grew to ban child labour and make school mandatory, many thought it a bad idea: without child labour, total labour supply would drop, industrial production would decline, and the drop in income for poor families would increase poverty (Gubin, 2002). But many countries made school mandatory anyway. After a transition period, healthier, happier, better-educated children grew into adults who could contribute much more to societies and economies than their exhausted, physically broken predecessors. In the end, there was no trade-off between educating children and growing income: we could increase consumption and have healthier, happier children.33 Economists will notice that many schools across the world offer free lunches. Echoing those critics of mandatory education, today we hear the same objections to environmental policies, that protecting the environment will inevitably reduce income. 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